Good morning. Zaynab Issa brought us a great new recipe for what she calls smashed beef kebab with cucumber yogurt (above) that I think you ought to make tonight.
It’s a freestyle mash-up of two classic Persian recipes: the grilled kebabs known as koobideh and mast-o khiar, yogurt mixed with cucumbers. Except there are no kebabs. You just crumble fatty, well-spiced ground beef into a pan, sear it hard on one side, then toast walnuts and raisins in the beef fat and serve everything over the tangy yogurt with a drizzle of pomegranate molasses and a bunch of chopped mint. Maybe with rice or a warm pita? In the kitchen, at least, this weekend’s going to be grand.
Featured Recipe
Smashed Beef Kebab With Cucumber Yogurt
I’m a lucky cat. I don’t just get great recipes from colleagues. Sometimes, I get food from friends. On summer afternoons, I might hear a honk out front and there’s Bruno in his truck coming home from fishing with a big fist of bluefin tuna he thinks I might like. He’s right, and we have poke for dinner, or a big mess of chirashi. In the fall and winter, it might be game: mule deer or a brace of pheasants from friends who know I like this kind of food.
This past weekend, my buddy Noah was in town with his mom, visiting from their home in Park City, Utah. As a house gift, he brought me a hunk of an elk he’d shot during this fall’s hunting season. (He’s 12!) I thought for a moment I’d make a Mississippi Roast out of it, as I sometimes do with venison. But this meat was so lean and fine-grained and beautiful that I didn’t want to risk drying it out. So I took a page from the playbook of the great game cook Hank Shaw and gave it a reverse sear.
It was bonkers good. I didn’t really follow a recipe. Instead: a night of marination in soy sauce, maple syrup, salt, pepper and garlic, then a pat dry, a slather of mayonnaise and an hour and a half in a 200-degree oven, until the roast’s internal temperature was around 110 degrees. I took it out, cranked the oven and then finished the meat at 550 degrees for 10 minutes or so, which gave it a beautiful crust and an internal temperature of 125. This was roast beef for the gods, only it wasn’t beef and I served it to mortals, who laughed at its delicacy, its deliciousness.
No elk in your freezer? Try the reverse sear on a steak, as Steven Raichlen does, or on a roast of pork. You’ll see.
Alternatively, don’t cook meat at all. I like seared tofu with kimchi on the weekend, and vegan dan dan noodles with eggplant, too. These miso leeks with white beans are a perfect winter dinner to eat while “The Agency” plays out on a screen in front of you. Or maybe sweet potato-garlic soup with chile oil? That’d be excellent, too.
If none of those appeal, go browse the digital aisles of New York Times Cooking and see what you find. You need a subscription to do that, of course. Subscriptions support our work and allow it to continue. If you haven’t already, would you please consider subscribing today? Thanks.
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Now, it’s nothing to do with langoustines or mushrooms, but I’ve jumped into James S.A. Corey’s new space opera, “The Mercy of Gods.” If you enjoyed “The Expanse,” you may wish to join me.
Sadie Stein, in The New York Times Book Review, makes a powerful case for reading Gay Talese’s latest, “A Town Without Time.”
Yes, “On Call” is a procedural and a rote one at that, but Troian Bellisario is just terrific as the Long Beach Police Department training officer Traci Harmon. So: Worth watching.
Finally, here’s new Perfume Genius: “It’s a Mirror.” “Can I move on without knowing specifics?” Enjoy that, and I’ll see you on Sunday.
