Food

One Pot, One Meal: Curating a Special Set of Simple Recipes


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Here is a truth that the editors of NYT Cooking have observed over and over: Most days, people want something simple. They don’t want dinner to be a major production that ends with a sink full of dishes.

There is a time for ambitious recipes that call for transferring food from skillet to baking dish to oven alongside careful auxiliary work on sides and sauces. But too often, said Sam Sifton, The Times’s Food editor and the founding editor of NYT Cooking, the feeling in the face of such a recipe is, “It’s Tuesday night: Like, what are you doing dude?”

So the Cooking team has curated a special digital and print package of 24 recipes — a small cookbook — cooked in one pot, pan, skillet, or baking dish. The promise is simple: a delicious dish, often a full meal, without much cleanup. Online, they’re even sorted by protein, along with stand-alone categories for vegetarian dishes and those with pasta. Not all the recipes are ideal for a weeknight, but even if they take a few hours to cook, they don’t necessarily demand hours of attention.

The Cooking team has seen seemingly limitless enthusiasm for “one-pot” recipes (online collections, guides, newsletters on the topic). It comes as no surprise to Margaux Laskey, an editor on the desk with two school-aged children.

“Maybe I need a bowl to mix something, or maybe I need a blender,” she said. “But I don’t need four different pots and pans to put something together that’s, most often, a complete meal that has a vegetable, a grain, a protein in it.”

Ms. Laskey has put together one-pot recipe collections for NYT Cooking in the past (“Because the Dishwasher Is You,” for instance), and they have always been popular. For this special digital offering and its print counterpart, which is a special section of today’s paper, she began pulling recipes from the nearly 20,000 on the site.

Then she, along with Emily Weinstein, editor of NYT Cooking, and Krysten Chambrot, an editor on the Food desk, narrowed down the list. They looked for a wide variety of one-pot recipes that rated highly among readers.

One goal: “Just trying to maintain a balance of what people want to eat without giving them, like, 7,000 chicken recipes,” Ms. Chambrot said.

Some of the recipes offer opportunities for customization, and readers are invited to add a starch or vegetable to the side.

‘We don’t care how you cook, just cook,” Ms. Chambrot said.

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Credit…Cover photograph by David Malosh for The New York Times; Food stylist: Simon Andrews

That echoes the “unfussy” way of cooking and developing recipes practiced by Alison Roman.

“I think, What’s the best and fastest way to do this?” said Ms. Roman, a Times food columnist and cookbook writer who has four recipes in the section — including a spiced chickpea stew with coconut and turmeric that garnered so much adoration when it was first released that it has become known simply as #TheStew.

For example, she could have asked readers at home to give the chicken a sear when making her olive oil-roasted chicken with caramelized carrots, a kind of weeknight chicken confit included in the collection. But that would mean transferring the chicken from the baking dish where it cooks in a bath of olive oil among carrots, lemon slices, garlic and oregano and adding another pan to the production.

“I know that there’s a higher chance of people actually cooking the thing if there’s one less step,” she said. So she left the searing optional.

One-vessel cooking bestows other advantages beyond cutting down on dishes. Not the least among them: That vessel provides a setting for ingredients to mix and mingle.

“It’s a shorthand way of layering flavors,” said Melissa Clark, a Times Food reporter.

Six of the recipes in the package are hers, including a cheesy baked pasta with sausage and ricotta that she developed specifically for it. She added that when you’re cooking everything in one pot, it’s not just the cleanup that’s streamlined, but the preparation, too.

“It’s not delayed gratification,” she said. “It’s sort of immediate gratification. This is easier to put into the pot, and then it’s going to be easier when I take it out.”

But it does not seem right, editors said, to talk about one-pot cooking as a trend, though there is overlap with the appeal of Instant Pots and slow cookers.

Mr. Sifton, the Food editor, said these recipes fit better in a tradition that dates back to “when you took a pot or a pan and put it over your fire and then put the animal you threw a rock at in there with some herbs.”

“This has been going on for a while.”


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