Sear

Chef George Brown created this height-of-summer dish at the 2006 Workshop. He prepared the scallops in our wood-burning oven, but searing them in a hot skillet works as well. The creamed corn is thickened only by the corn’s natural starch, released when the kernels are grated. The chef’s idea of adding Chardonnay is a good one, as it helps to balance the corn’s sweetness.

When he attended the 1997 Workshop, Florida chef Pascal Oudin coated California salmon with a pecan crust, seared it, and paired it with a carrot emulsion. Brian has adapted the recipe to catfish, to give the dish some Floridian style, and replaced the crust with a toasted pecan garnish to make less work for home cooks. Serve with sautéed spinach or other wilted greens. On another occasion, prepare the silky carrot emulsion for grilled halibut or sea bass.

At the 1992 Workshop, Chef Jim Mills accompanied rabbit with New Orleans–style “dirty rice,” a pilaf flavored with onion, celery, and chopped chicken livers. Brian makes the dish with Wehani rice, a nutty brown rice of basmati ancestry, created and grown exclusively by California’s Lundberg Family Farms. Serve with Braised Chicken with Cipolline Onions and Carrots (opposite page; recipe on page 141) or a simple roast chicken, or as a main course with vegetable sides and a salad.

Tuna is most often cooked to medium-rare to prevent it from drying out. If you prefer, cook one or two minutes longer after turning, or until opaque throughout.

To get the perfect sear, make sure to heat the skillet well before adding the shell steaks, and wait until they release easily from the bottom of the skillet before flipping them.

WITH A MEATY TEXTURE AND MILD FLAVOR, swordfish pairs flawlessly with bold ingredients. The caper-onion sauce, with bracing white wine and lemon, brings big flavor to the fish. If you can’t find swordfish, substitute another meaty fish, such as mahi-mahi.

THE MILD-FLAVORED PICKAPEPPA is my favorite brand of steak sauce. Made from a centuries-old recipe in Jamaica, Pickapeppa is completely natural and has just the right balance of smoky, sweet, and spicy flavors. It is particularly delicious when served with meaty scallops. Serve the scallops hot as a passed hors d’oeuvre or chilled as a light summer appetizer.

WHY IT’S LIGHT This low-calorie Tex-Mex meal uses top round steak, a very lean cut of beef; you can also use other lean cuts such as eye of round or top sirloin. Corn tortillas have fewer calories and more nutrients than flour tortillas.

GOOD TO KNOW To impart more flavor and moistness, cook the salmon fillets with the skin intact. The skin will cook to a delightful crisp, but you can remove it before serving if desired.

The idea for this dish comes from a chef at culinary school who liked to bread salmon with shredded russet potatoes. Sweet potatoes add a whole new dimension to this delicate crust—a perfect counterpoint for the smoky sauce.

Avocado gives this dairy-free soup its creamy texture. For a super-sophisticated presentation, serve it in chilled martini glasses and garnish each one with a drizzle of Mexican crema or crème fraîche. If you prefer a soup with a thinner consistency, add water until it’s exactly the way you like it.

When you see how easy it is to make this salsa from scratch, you will never want to buy a jar again. And forget bagged chips! It takes almost no effort to make your own at home. In my version of this classic recipe, the cheese is seared (asado) rather than deep-fried, resulting in a lighter alternative that really brings out the sweet flavor of the panela cheese. If you don’t want to go out of your way to purchase the panela cheese, substitute a moist mozzarella.

These are simpler than traditional scallion pancakes, which are made from a breadlike dough, and they taste more like scallions, because the “liquid” is scallion puree. The flavor is great, the preparation time is cut to about twenty minutes, and the texture is that of a vegetable fritter.

This Thick Beet Pancake cooked slowly on both sides until the beet sugars caramelize, sports a crunchy, sweet crust that, I swear, is reminiscent of crème brûlée. It must be cooked in a nonstick skillet, preferably a twelve-inch one (if you have only a ten-inch skillet, use only one and a half pounds of beets and the same quantity of the other ingredients), over moderate heat: too-high heat and too-quick cooking will burn the sugary exterior of the pancake while leaving the inside raw. Remember that beets bleed, so it is wise to peel them over the sink and wash the grater or food processor as soon as you’re done with it.

Although I was told this dish—beautifully browned sausages nestled on a bed of grapes in varying stages of doneness, some lightly browned, some collapsed, some whole and nearly raw—is Umbrian in origin, it seems as if many workers of the land who produced sausages and picked grapes would have created this, even if by accident, no matter where they lived. It is an often overlooked recipe in cookbooks, perhaps because there’s almost nothing to it. In any case, the wonderful marriage is incredibly easy to produce and easily worked into anyone’s repertoire. With good bread and a salad, you’ve got a great weeknight meal in about half an hour.

Miso is a superb thickener, adding a rich, creamy consistency when whisked into a small amount of liquid. With that in mind, it’s the work of a moment to turn the pan juices remaining after searing a piece of meat into a great sauce. My choice here is pork for meat and red wine for liquid; the combination resulting from these three ingredients completely belies the amount of energy put into the dish. Red miso (which is in fact brown) adds terrific color to the sauce and has the strongest flavor of all the misos; it’s also the easiest to find. Miso must be handled gently, because high heat practically destroys its flavor; so be sure to keep the heat low when you stir it in. For the pork, I prefer a bone-in chop, preferably from the rib end of the loin; it’s a little bit fattier than other chops, and these days pork is so lean that the extra fat is a benefit rather than a detriment.

Chimichurri is a simple Argentinean steak sauce made almost entirely from parsley, with huge amounts of chopped garlic and red pepper. In spirit, it’s not unlike pesto, but because everything is hand-chopped rather than ground or mashed, it has a bit more chew to it. And its powerful ingredients set it apart, making it the perfect complement for mild-tasting but meaty tenderloin.

Like Oven-“Grilled” Steaks, this is a great way of cooking steaks indoors without sacrificing a good crust or setting off the smoke detector: sear the steak quickly, then remove it from the pan before building a quick sauce in which you can finish cooking the meat. This is such a good technique, with so many options, that you’re sometimes likely to eschew the grill just to do it this way. Use fairly thin steaks for this recipe. Judging the doneness of thicker ones can be tricky, and inevitably the sauce evaporates before the meat is cooked through. The ideal setup for four people is four small, boneless steaks, cut from the top blade, sirloin, or rib. But two larger steaks will work nearly as well, as long as they’re thin. And though it isn’t necessary to use butter in this preparation, a small amount—there is little more than a teaspoon per person in the recipe—adds not only creaminess but also flavor.

Here’s how to keep a skinless, boneless chicken breast moist while giving it a crust, without using a lot of fat. This technique relies on two properties of the chicken breast that make it more like fish than like other meat: it cooks quickly, and it contains a fair amount of moisture. This enables you to start cooking the breasts with just a bit of fat over fairly high heat to begin browning, then lower the heat and cover the pan, which not only allows the meat to steam in its own juices but maintains the nicely browned exterior (on one side anyway). If you use mass produced commercial chicken, the results will be somewhat cottony. Free-range or kosher chickens are usually considerably better.

Here’s a method that takes less than an hour and results in a crisp bird from which nearly all of the fat has been rendered. It’s accomplished by the simple procedure of cutting up the duck, then cooking it, covered, on top of the stove. Served hot or at room temperature, the bird is crisp, tender, and far more flavorful than any chicken.