good morning You can spend your entire adult life doing something absolutely right and never quite feel like you’ve mastered the task. This is especially true in cooking. For example, how many hard boiled eggs have you done in the last 10 years? Now, be honest: how many of them have you been proud of – perfect bags of yellow and silk, just laid white?
Is this hollandaise will it be as cloud-like and perfect as the previous time? How does your fresh yogurt taste when you compare it to the batch that made everyone swoon in March? you can do pizza dough twice a month for a year and you’ll still be nervous every time you pull a sourdough round out of the fridge. Put some beef ribs in the smoker and tell me you won’t say a little prayer to the barbecue gods.
We are not restaurants here. We are ambitious home cooks with many responsibilities that impact the pursuit of perfection. We need hacks, tips, advice, techniques that deliver consistent success. And hello, Julia Moskin delivered one of those this week as part of her reporting on the Roscioli family, which is bringing an outpost of Roscioli, its famous restaurant in Rome, to SoHo in Manhattan.
In the course of her work, Julia secured the family’s recipe for cacio e pepe (above). Cacio e pepe is a fantastic dish, but it can also be scary: the sauce too bland, or not emulsified enough. The Rosciolis avoids both issues with a pre-made “cream” of cheeses, black pepper and water, which adds very little time to the preparation and as much as guarantees the consistent success of the dish.
wednesday
A lot of people talk about that beautiful omelet Sydney made for Nat at “The Bear,” with bursino, chives and crumbled ridge fries. i like Ferran Adrià’s little potato omelette almost the same – a Spanish tortilla, really. Try that.
Thursday
Eric Kim with an easy weeknight favorite: gochujang buttered noodles. A big punch of garlic resonates in the heat of the gochujang, which is mellowed with honey and sherry vinegar and made silky with butter. It’s a perfect sauce.
friday
And then you can enter the weekend with carne asadaGenevieve Ko’s adaptation of a recipe by Estaban Castillo de Chicano Eats. That’s great taste.
There are thousands more recipes to cook this week waiting for you New York Times Cooking, at least if you have a subscription. Subscriptions make this whole enterprise possible. If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll consider subscribing today. thank you
Management: You can contact me at foodeditor@nytimes.com if you’d like to debunk me or offer my colleagues praise. I cannot answer every letter. But I read them all.
Now, it’s some considerable distance from anything to do with goats or Sancerre, but I liked Laura Trethewey in buried history of the Florida coastin Hakai Magazine.
Here is Daniel Mendelsohn on the life and career and importance of the editor Robert Gottliebin The New York Review of Books.
Did you miss Celia McGee in Rose Styron in The Times, back in June? I did! If you did too, it’s well worth a read.
Finally, summer music from Fireboy DML: “Yawa.” Enjoy your cacio e pepe! I’ll be back on Friday.