Jim Lahey has a thing for charred flavors. His pizzas bake up with crisp leopard spotted crusts giving them a hint of smoke and a lot of crunch. He's employed the same high-heat technique for his Cauliflower Pie from My Pizza, a Béchamel-sauced pizza topped with roasted florets, mozzarella, green olives, chile flakes, and garlic. More
Our love for Jim Lahey's Pizza Bianca is no secret. Remember when Ed declared that a whole Pizza Bianca was the ultimate dinner party bring-along? Well, lucky for us and all fans of Pizza Bianca, Lahey has adapted it for My Pizza, and even better, it's another fantastic and dead simple No-Knead recipe. More
Aside from being one of the loveliest pizzas on the menu at Jim Lahey's pizzeria, Co., it's also the most spring appropriate. Beginning with Lahey's signature No-Knead Pizza Dough, this pie gets topped off with finely grated Parmesan, nutty Saint-Nectaire cheese, and a tangle of thinly shaved asparagus stalks. Sounds pretty good, right? Just wait, it's about to get even better. More
In My Pizza, Jim Lahey has included recipes for many of the fabulous non-pizza menu items at his New York pizzeria Co., including this fascinating Radicchio Salad. It's a salad full of bitter, earthy flavors interspersed with creamy-pungent bites of Taleggio and bursts of sweet-sour balsamic vinegar. We're not quite sure how Lahey decided that radicchio, shiitakes, and Taleggio work on the same plate, but we're pretty pleased that he's passed along this unexpectedly but really quite wonderful combo to us. More
So when it comes to sauce making, Jim Lahey keeps it simple, as in really simple. His Basic Tomato Sauce is nothing more than tomatoes crushed and blended with a bit of salt and olive oil. No cooking, no herbs, no garlic, just tomatoes. He gives two options for tomatoes: canned or fresh. We'd go with a good can of San Marzanos until July rolls around since they're the ones that are going to pack the sweetest, tomato-iest punch. More
Jim Lahey made no-knead bread famous, and now he's back with an equally revolutionary concept, No-Knead Pizza Dough. Last week Kenji visited Lahey at his home to get the inside scoop on this groundbreaking technique (watch the video here) and this week we're baking our way through Lahey's latest cookbook, My Pizza. Enter to win a copy here. More
I've never seen what I consider to be a really satisfactory explanation of the science behind the No-Knead Bread recipe, so I'm gonna try and fill that hole here. And what cool science it is. In 2006, Mark Bittman introduced the world to a recipe from Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery, which had a whole bunch of home cooks opening up their Dutch ovens and exclaiming oh my goodness—I can't believe I just did that! It certainly had me thinking that. Even more interesting to me than that it works is how it works, because by understanding the how, we can then modify the recipe to fit many different baking situations, even improving its flavor. More
Without all of that time-consuming and arm-tiring kneading, bread baking becomes instantly accessible to the home baker, and Jim Lahey's fool-proof no-knead method creates a loaf that could stand up to any pricier, artisanal version. Each day this week we'll feature a recipe from Lahey's book My Bread. Enter to win a copy here. More
"You could give me dog-shit wheat, and I could still make it taste great." —Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery [Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt] Just as tomatoes have spent the last few hundred years getting the flavor slowly sucked out of them, in favor of more convenient attributes like uniformity in size and color and resistance to the rigors of transcontinental shipping, wheat has undergone a similar process. Unlike tomatoes, which, discounting any Native American influence, have been bred for a mere few hundred years, wheat, a staple grain since the earliest civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, has had a 10,000-year breeding program. Modern wheat is designed for high yields, and to produce flours with consistently high protein contents. In the meantime,... More
