Good morning. Julia Moskin wrote a long and captivating history of ranch dressing for The Times this week, and in it she made a fascinating point about the difference between what I’ll call farmers’-market cooking and the kind most of us need to practice more regularly, for reasons of geography or thrift.
“Any home cook can make a lovely, full-flavored ranch dressing using real garlic, freshly ground black pepper and bright green herbs,” Julia wrote. “But the particular flavor of traditional ranch can only be achieved with the dry versions of all those aromatics: garlic and onion powder, dried herbs, powdered pepper and buttermilk.”
This made me think about my recipe for Mississippi Roast (above), which I adapted from the one Robin Chapman came up with around the turn of the century, and which became a huge viral hit in the years that followed. I made mine with a kind of homemade, fresh-stuff ranch in the braising liquid, because I thought the dried version Ms. Chapman called for too salty. But now I’m wondering if there isn’t a middle ground, using Julia’s recipe for classic ranch dressing. To the test kitchen!
Of course Julia also provides a recipe for a ranch with fresh herbs, and it’s absolutely delicious. In fact, I might use the classic version to make the Mississippi Roast, then pile the shredded meat on a Kaiser roll and drizzle it with the fresh-herb ranch as a kind of condiment, then eat that Dagwood while watching the Jets play the Browns in Cleveland, on Thursday night. Could I do that alongside Julia’s recipe for double ranch mozzarella sticks? A boy can dream.
Tonight I’ll cook without a recipe, though, in keeping with our midweek practice of doing so. It’s an exercise in improvisation, a chance to riff off a theme. I’ll keep it light, because of the feast coming tomorrow: a simple teriyaki salmon, served on mixed greens.
The prompt: Buy salmon fillets. Heat your oven to 400 or so, and make a sauce of soy sauce cut with mirin, or with a little water and brown sugar, along with a healthy scattering of minced garlic and ginger. It should be salty-sweet. Then put your salmon fillets on a lightly oiled foil-lined baking sheet, paint them with the sauce and roast them in the top of the oven for around 10 to 12 minutes, painting them again with the teriyaki sauce at least once along the way. Slide the finished salmon onto piles of mixed greens, drizzle with remaining sauce and serve, perhaps with rice on the side.
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Now, it’s a few country miles from applesauce and fried artichokes, but if you haven’t read Caity Weaver’s profile of the great Maya Rudolph in The New York Times Magazine, you ought to, because it’s a master class in a very difficult form. Plus, what artwork!
