Mark Bittman

Super Bowl Special: Mark Bittman’s Old Oven-Grilled Rib Recipe

by

How_to_Cook_Everything

Long before I had kids, I was looking for a good football-watching party dish, so tried my hand at Mark Bittman’s “oven-grilled” ribs. I was going to take them to my brother’s apartment for some big playoff game (I don’t remember which one) but I came down with a wicked case of pink eye and stayed home.

Santa Maria and I had a whole tray of ribs to ourselves, and we went wild over them. They’re easy to love—simple to prepare and more tasty than you have any right to expect. I haven’t made them since, though. I thought my life was too complicated with a job and two kids, but I recently learned that’s not a good excuse.

My friend Jon Michaud, the head librarian at The New Yorker and a regular contributor to newyorker.com, makes them repeatedly. He lives in Maplewood, New Jersey, with his wife and two children. The son of a pastry chef, he cooks most of the meals his family eats. Jon is also a novelist, and his first book, “When Tito Loved Clara,” will be published by Algonquin Books in March. Here is his story about making the ribs.

This February will mark the tenth year in a row that I’ll make spareribs for the Super Bowl. I first made them for a party at my sister’s house in Bethesda Maryland. My wife, Z, and I–newlyweds–had just moved to the D.C. area after our September wedding. (Yes, that’s September, 2001.)

We lived in a small two-bedroom apartment in Alexandria, Virginia, and my wife was in the earliest stages of pregnancy with our first son—so early that we weren’t telling anyone about it. Not having lived with a pregnant woman before, I didn’t realize how heightened her sense of smell could be. If I had known, I might have chosen to make something less odiferous than ribs—perhaps untoasted bread with butter.

At Christmas that year, I’d received the original edition of Mark Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything” (the one with the yellow cover), and I intended to put it to use. Not having access to a barbecue grill, I opted for Bittman’s “oven-grilled ribs” made two ways: a slab of dry ribs with “Chris’s great rub”* and a slab of wet ribs using Bittman’s home-made barbecue sauce.

Before I’d even finished cooking the sauce, my wife fled the living room that adjoined our kitchen and took refuge in our bedroom. “What the hell is that smell?” she said, slamming the door behind her. For the next three hours, as the ribs cooked, our apartment filled with the thick, saliva-inducing scent of barbecue sauce, pork fat, paprika, cumin, and chili powder.

It was too cold to open the windows and my wife buried her head under a pillow. She hadn’t had morning sickness yet, but it seemed likely to arrive at any moment. “God, how much longer is this going to take?” she asked. When I told her there was two hours still to go, she said, “I’m going out for a walk,” and disappeared. Meanwhile, I didn’t want to go anywhere. If those ribs tasted half as good as they smelled, they were going to be a treat.

When they were done, we loaded the two trays into the trunk of our car for the half-hour drive to Bethesda. No sooner were we on the George Washington Parkway than Z looked at me, like the heroine of a horror movie, and said, “I can smell them! It’s coming in through the trunk!” I pushed down on the accelerator and hoped the cops were all busy watching the pre-game show.

The ribs were a huge hit, and even as my family members were eating them they were asking me, “You’re going to make these again, right? Maybe next week?” I nodded, because that’s what every cook wants to hear—when can I have more of this? I decided that a tradition had been born. Even my wife tried them and admitted they weren’t bad.

Over the years, I’ve made those Bittman ribs in any number of ways—on a gas grill; on a charcoal grill; with cayenne or cinnamon added to the rub; with baby back ribs, and even with beef ribs. Some years they’ve come out crispier and some year they’ve come out wetter. It doesn’t matter: there are never any leftovers.

Last February, I got a call from my sister in Bethesda, who was hosting a party for the Saints/Colts Super Bowl. She wanted to make the ribs. I had given her the revised edition of “How To Cook Everything” (the one with the red cover) for Christmas that year, and I directed her to the index. “It’s not there!” she said. “That’s not possible,” I said. “That’s my favorite recipe in that book.” I told her to look again, in the chapter on meat. She did: no oven grilled ribs. No rub. (There’s the rub!)

I took down my copy and transcribed the recipe into an email and sent it to her. At the bottom of the e-mail, I wrote: DO NOT COOK IN THE PRESENCE OF PREGNANT WOMEN.

 

Mark Bittman’s Oven “Grilled” Ribs with Chris’s Great Rub

 

  • ½ teaspoon salt
  • 1 tablespoon sugar
  • ½ tablespoon ground cumin
  • ½ tablespoon freshly ground pepper
  • ½ tablesppon chili powder
  • 1 tablesppon paprika
  • About four pounds spareribs

 

Pre-heat the oven to 300 degrees F. Mix the salt and all the spices together and rub them well into the ribs and pace in a roasting pan in one layer. Bake, pouring off accumulated fat every thirty minutes or so, for about two hours, or until the ribs are cooked. (If you’re in a hurry, cover the roasting pan with aluminum foil. When you’re ready to eat, roast the ribs at 500 degrees F for about ten minutes, or run them under the broiler, watching carefully, until nicely browned.

 

*Chris Schlesinger, co-author, with John Willoughby, of “The Thrill of the Grill.”

My First Time Baking: A Recipe for Pear Upside-Down Cake

by

Pear_upside_down_cake
I don’t have many memories of my mother baking, which is not to say she didn’t do it ever. Though as Santa Maria says, who could blame her if she didn’t—she had five kids to care for.  I recall her making Christmas cookies with my sisters, and she successfully passed the female baking baton off to them. I owe most of my memories of baked goods, including snickerdoodles, butterscotch brownies, and lemon-meringue pie, to my sisters.

 

My mother stuck to making Irish soda bread, and someday I’ll share the recipe (as soon as I get her permission). She makes a new world version with less butter, and no caraway seeds (she was the eldest daughter in a family with five daughters and one son, my delightful uncle John. As a boy, John didn’t like caraway seeds so no one else got to eat them either).

One thing I do remember my mother making is pineapple upside-down cake, which was a syrupy and sweet dentist’s nightmare. If I close my eyes, I can still see the caramelized yellow cubes of fruit and taste the brown gooey bits of sugar. I loved it.

On Wednesday last week, Mark Bittman wrote in the New York Times about a variation on the pineapple upside-down cake, using maple syrup and pears instead of plain sugar and the Hawaiian fruit. I love pears and I was enticed to consider making it.

Santa Maria is correct in thinking that my mom was too busy to bake when I was young. Her mom, Jane, is a relentless baker even at eight-six years old—she has pies and cookies in the freezer every time we go to visit—but she only had two children. My mother was busy making school lunches, breakfasts, and dinners seven days a week. Seven days a week! We hardly ever ate out, and I’ve never once had a frozen dinner. She did an astonishing job.

I’m tired from cooking for just two kids, and I serve them frozen fish sticks three times a week. I basically want for my children what I had growing up—home-cooked meals and a balanced diet.

 

On his video about making the cake, Bittman talks about how little patience he has for the details of baking. Santa Maria is not known for her patience, but she is a seasoned baker with very particular tastes. She took one look at his recipe and made a few adjustments. I defer to her in all dessert-related matters, and, the truth is, I didn’t feel confident. I was happy to have her guidance. (She threw out the maple syrup, which she said she didn’t like the taste of in baked goods, and she twiddled with a few of the other proportions. She typically reduces the amount of sugar by at least a third.)

Cooking is easy for me because I’ve mastered a few basic techniques and I stick to them. I can take on new recipes fairly confident about how they’ll turn out because I’ll pick ones that build on these basic skills. Baking is another question. I’ve never been interested in doing it because I’ve been preoccupied with my needs and not my desires. I need to eat, and I need to eat well. Not too much sugar, and more daily calories than a high school football lineman would consume in a day. That takes a lot of work.

But as I’ve gotten better at managing the day-to-day cooking (and as my metabolism has slowed a bit), I’m starting to think about my desires. A slice of cake after dinner sounded mighty good.

 

I enlisted the help of Nina and Pinta, although once my eldest heard that there were pears in the cake, she said that she would only help make it if she didn’t have to eat it. She hates fruit that much. She is a fruitophobe.

I got the process underway by gathering all the ingredients. I put the kids in the kitchen with the laptop and let them watch Bittman’s video over and over. Pinta kept saying “upside-down cake.”

Soon, it was time to cream the butter and the sugar. I squatted on the floor of our kitchen with Nina at my side. I had the mixer going in my right hand.  A stick of butter stood rigid across the bottle of the steel mixing bowl. Sugar was sprinkled about. The blades of the mixer dug into the butter, and started throwing off curled clumps. The more I pushed into the butter, the more the hand mixer protested. Nina was crouched next to me. She thought it looked like popcorn. She liked the way the curled bits of butter were jumping all over. I was concerned they’d jump out of the bowl. It felt like a humbling process, but that’s just because I hadn’t done it before, and I wasn’t confident that I was doing it correctly. It certainly didn’t look like I was doing it right.

Santa Maria said that she would have let the butter soften up. I wish she had told me that earlier, I thought. Pinta had been playing with the stick of butter and I took it away from her because she was softening it up. I could have let her play to her heart’s content.

Santa Maria taught me about combining the dry ingredients with the wet ones, and soon enough we had a cake. She adores a pear tart dessert at our favorite local restaurant, Al di La. It has chocolate in it, so, at the last minute, she stuck some pieces of dark chocolate in one corner of the batter.

Nina asked if the work was done, and then said she was going to lie down (she’d been running a fever all day). I started to make dinner—our seafood feast.

After the cake was in the oven, the kitchen started to smell very nice. It smelled like a cake was baking. Is there a kinder, more nurturing scent out there? 

 

We all loved the caramelized pears on top, but Santa Maria thought the chocolate was too bitter. Next time she would make it with semi-sweet chocolate. Nina didn’t eat any because she was too sick. Pinta had so much that her stomach ached. I downed two pieces and enjoyed every bite. Then I got a headache from the sugar.

Later that night I had to barricade Santa Maria from the kitchen because she was sneaking leftovers. She’s powerless over sweets and I knew drastic action needed to be taken. I quickly called up a dear friend who lives nearby to offer her some (she said that we were laughing so much on the phone that she thought there was alcohol in the cake) and then I left some more on the doorstep of our downstairs neighbors. They texted me the next day to say they found it upon coming home after a few drinks and that it was a pleasant surprise. They said they loved the Guinea Pig role.  

Not a bad outcome for my first cake, though to give credit where credit is due, it was a success because of Santa Maria, who helped to make it, like all the good and sweet things in my life, possible.

 

Adapted from Mark Bittman, whose original recipe is here.

 

 

Santa Maria’s Pear Upside-Down Cake

 

  • 11 Tablespoons butter
  • ¼ Cup packed brown sugar
  • 3 pears, peeled, cored, and thinly sliced
  • 2/3 cups granulated sugar
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 ½ cups flour
  • 1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
  • ¼ teaspoon salt
  • ½ cup milk
  • optional: 1/3 cup (2 oz.) semi-sweet chocolate pieces (broken from a bar into whatever size you prefer)

 

Heat oven to 350 degrees.

 

Melt three tablespoons butter in a small pan over medium heat.

Add brown sugar and cook, stirring, until sugar dissolves.

Bring to a boil and cook for two minutes.

Remove from heat and pour the mixture into a 9 ½ -inch baking pan.

Arrange the pear slices in the sugar mixture as you see fit.

In a mixing bowl, beat the remaining butter (one stick) and the sugar with a mixer until it is light and fluffy.

Add the vanilla and eggs and mix until smooth.

 

In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, and salt.

Combine the wet (butter) and dry (flour) mixtures in three batches with the milk. And mix until barely combined. Do not over mix. Lumps are okay.

Carefully spread the cake batter on top of the pears using a spatula.

Bake in oven about 45 minutes, until top is golden. A thin sharp knife stuck in the cake should come out clean.

Let the cake sit for five minutes.

Run a knife around the edge of the cake pan.

Put a plate on top of the cake and carefully flip it so the plate is on the bottom and the pan is on top.

Serve warm or at room temperature.

 

Note: Fold chocolate pieces into the batter before baking for a slightly richer cake.