Cooking
Including a caramelized onion tahchin that’s “wonderfully comforting and absolutely crucial.”
If you’re going to trust anyone about whether or not a dish is truly delicious, you can trust a New York Times Cooking recipe tester. These very thorough professionals work through every recipe to make sure each one is clear, delivers as promised and, of course, tastes wonderful. So when a recipe earns rave reviews from them — cooks who work on hundreds of recipes each year — you know it’s really, really good.
We’ve put together a collection of 22 new Thanksgiving recipes that our testers especially loved, including Andy Baraghani’s caramelized onion, cranberry and rosemary tahchin. “The cranberries and caramelized onion with the rosemary provide this perfectly autumnal flavor profile that is just wonderfully comforting and absolutely crucial,” said Ben Weiner, a recipe tester. I need no encouragement to eat rice with any meal — especially if that rice is golden with egg yolks and saffron, and boasts a deeply crispy crust — so this is a shoo-in Thanksgiving dish for me.
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Caramelized Onion, Cranberry and Rosemary Tahchin
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I’ve bookmarked three more recipes from that collection: Yossy Arefi’s herby cottage cheese dip, which boosts that unsung dairy with browned onions, tender herbs and a good dose of lemon. And I’d eat Vivian Chan-Tam’s jewel-toned roasted beets with hazelnuts and honey as a vegetarian main (with plenty of bread for sweeping up that sumac-spiked labneh); same goes for Nargisse Benkabbou’s ras el hanout roasted vegetables (though here I’d add a fried or soft-boiled egg).
22 Thanksgiving Dishes Our Recipe Testers Loved This Year
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Or maybe you’d like a lasagna? This recipe from Regina Schrambling is basically the standard-bearer, but we have two new lasagnas that take its basic formula — bedsheets of noodles, plus creamy cheese, a savory filling and a burnished top — and add in delightful flavors. For his nam prik ong lasagna, the chef Justin Pichetrungsi uses soy sauce, shrimp paste, fermented soybean paste, miso, Maggi and sambal in his meat sauce layer for real umami oomph and spicy kick. Then there’s Khushbu Shah’s saag lasagna — lasaagna, naturally — that’s built on a creamy saag base made with warm spices, spinach, cilantro and optional dried fenugreek leaves.
Lastly, Vallery Lomas’s sour cream Bundt cake is exactly the sort of dense but tender cake I want waiting for me on the kitchen counter, ready for breakfast, a snacktime swipe or on my cutest plate with some cranberry sauce for dessert. Said Sheela Prakash, another one of our recipe testers: “The aroma that came from making this batter brought me straight back to the days I’d help my mom prepare boxed cake mixes as a kid (and I mean this in a very good, nostalgic way).”