Side dish
Spanakorizo (Spinach and Rice Cooked in the Spinach Water)
A Greek rice dish in which the spinach is wilted first and its own liquid cooks the rice. Dill goes in by the handful, the olive oil is not rationed, and the lemon is squeezed over after the heat is off. The liquid is not poured in and measured; it comes out of the vegetable, so the rice goes in after you can see how much there is. Eaten warm or at room temperature, with feta alongside.
Pa amb Tomàquet (Bread Rubbed with Tomato)
Bread toasted, then a halved ripe tomato rubbed over it until only the skin is left in your hand, finished with olive oil and salt — the everyday bread of Catalonia. The tomato is never sliced or chopped: the rough face of the crust does the grating. With no knife in it there is no dice to sit and shed water, which is the question its neighbours all answer some other way.
Nanbanzuke (Fried Fish Steeped in Hot Vinegar Marinade)
Small fish given a thin dusting of starch, fried, and then dropped straight into a hot sweet-sour marinade with onion, carrot and pepper — a Japanese side dish kept in the fridge. Where the rest of the fried repertoire works to keep a crust dry, this one is built to soak it: the channels that make a fried starch shell porous are the mechanism here rather than the problem. It is left for hours and is better the next day.
Goma-ae (Spinach Dressed in Ground Toasted Sesame)
A Japanese side of blanched spinach dressed in toasted sesame ground coarse, with nothing but soy and sugar added. The fat arrives inside a ground solid rather than as an oil, which is why the greens have to be wrung out harder than usual before they are dressed.
Carciofi alla Romana (Braised Roman Artichokes)
Artichokes pared back to the tender heart, set stem up in a pan with oil and water and cooked under a lid — the Roman spring side dish. It is a subtraction rather than an addition: more than half of each artichoke is thrown away and what is left is the part you can eat. Trimming takes minutes and every cut face starts browning while you work, which is why the bowl of lemon water is a working condition here rather than a finishing touch.
Mushy Peas (Marrowfat Peas Collapsed with Soda)
The British side: marrowfat peas, matured and dried on the plant, soaked overnight in water with bicarbonate of soda, rinsed, and boiled until they collapse inside their own skins. The soda is not dissolving the skin — it dissolves the pectin gluing the cells of the pea together, so it goes from the inside. Without it they stay gritty however long they boil.
Uroe-jangajji (Melon Pickled in Sake Lees)
A Gunsan pickle: melon salted hard to drive the water out, then buried in sake lees for months. This site’s guide to alcohol in cooking sorts it into four moments and every one of them involves heat. Nothing here is ever heated, so the eight percent or so of alcohol left in the lees stays at full strength and preserves the melon alongside the salt. And the lees still carries the enzymes koji made during brewing, so what softens and sweetens this melon is not a fermentation of its own but somebody else’s leftover enzymes.
Umeboshi (Salted and Sun-Dried Ume Plums)
The Japanese cure in which ume plums spend a month under salt, three days in the sun, and then go back into their own liquid. In the dried things around it the drying is the last step — gotgam is finished by it, danmuji is dried so a bran bed can work unsubmerged, bugak so it can be fried, lavash is dried and then revived with water, hwangtae is freeze-dried into a sponge, qurut is dried to a stone. Umeboshi is the one where the drying sits in the middle, and where the fruit returns afterwards to the brine it made.
Tempeh (Fermented Soybean Cake)
The Indonesian ferment in which boiled beans, given a mould and a day or two, become a firm cake you can slice. This site’s fermentation guide tells you what to do about mould: discard it, because scraping the visible part off does not help — the hyphae run deeper. Tempeh wants them to run deeper. The white hyphae of Rhizopus grow between one bean and the next and knit a mat, and that mat is the structure of the food. What holds things together on this site so far has been blood, salt-drawn muscle protein and swelling oatmeal. This is the first one where the binder is a living organism’s body.
Attiéké (Steamed Fermented Cassava Granules)
One of Côte d'Ivoire's national dishes. This site's kedjenou page names attiéké and then tells you that African grocers sell it dried or frozen — this is the page that makes it. The ferment is started by mixing freshly grated cassava with cassava that has already fermented, so the starter is a piece of the last batch of food rather than a liquid kept in a jar. Everything after that is taking water out: the mash is pressed under a weight, pushed through a sieve, and then steamed rather than boiled, which is the only reason it arrives as separate granules.
Papas Arrugadas (Wrinkled Potatoes in Salt Crust)
The Canary Islands potatoes boiled in their skins in water as salty as the sea, then drained and dried out in the pan until the skins wrinkle and salt crystallises on the outside. The salting guide puts blanching water at 10g of salt per litre. This is fifteen times that, and at that concentration what the salt does inverts: instead of seasoning its way in, it draws water out through the skin, and then stays behind as crystals once the water has gone.
Miso (Fermented Soybean Paste)
The Japanese paste made by growing koji mould on rice, mixing it with cooked soybeans and salt, and leaving it for months. This site's fermentation guide teaches you how to keep mould out — lactic bacteria do not need oxygen but moulds do, so hold everything under the brine. Miso starts by growing a mould on purpose, in air, first. And the mould does not ferment anything: it manufactures enzymes and then stands aside, and the enzymes work for months.
Onsen Tamago (Slow-Set Egg)
The Japanese egg with a set yolk inside a white that still runs — the exact reverse of a boiled egg, and the only reason is that there is no temperature gradient. A boiled egg sets its white first because the outside is at 100°C while the middle is still cold, not because the white is the quicker protein. The bulk of the white needs close to 80°C to firm up and the yolk is done by about 70, so hold the whole egg at 68-70°C and the order reverses. What this recipe has is not a timing but a temperature to hold.
Jangjorim (Soy-Braised Beef Strands)
The Korean side dish that keeps for weeks in the fridge, and the whole of it is one question of order: the beef is simmered in plain water until it is completely tender, and only then does the soy go in. Soy sauce is concentrated salt, and added at the start it tightens the muscle fibres before the collagen has had a chance to let go — two hours later it is still tough. Cook first, shred, then feed it the soy.
Natto (Soybeans Fermented with Bacillus subtilis)
Japan’s fermented soybeans: boiled beans inoculated with Bacillus subtilis natto and held at 40°C for a day. This site’s fermentation guide lists natto almost exactly, under failures — slimy and stringy, no salt at all, deliberately warm, and air let in rather than kept out. The guide’s thesis is that the safety of a ferment comes not from cleanliness but from the acidity dropping fast. Natto’s pH climbs to about 8, and its safety comes from a pure culture on sterilised beans: from cleanliness, exactly.
Aligot (Mashed Potato Beaten with Fresh Tomme)
A potato dish from the Aubrac, in southern France: mash beaten hard for ten minutes with a fresh day-old cheese until a spoonful lifts out of the pan in a ribbon. This site’s mashed potato page tells you not to overwork it because the starch turns gluey. Aligot spends ten minutes making exactly that gluiness on purpose. Beaten while hot, the amylose coming out of the potato starch and the still-unripened casein network in the cheese knit into one thing, and mashed potato becomes a material that stretches.
Bugak (Kelp and Vegetables in Dried Rice Paste, Fried)
A dry banchan from Korean temple kitchens: kelp, laver, perilla leaves or lotus root painted with a cooked glutinous rice paste, dried hard, and kept until someone wants to fry it. What fries is not the vegetable but the film of starch set on top of it. The starch was cooked and then dried, so the moment it meets oil the little water left inside it turns to steam all at once and blows the film into a foam. That is why the frying is measured in seconds rather than minutes, and why something this thin comes out without absorbing oil.
Paocai (Sichuan Brine Pickles from a Perpetual Jar)
The salt-brine pickle of Sichuan. What matters here is not the vegetables but the brine left in the jar. You do not make a batch and empty it: you take vegetables out, put new ones in, top up the salt, and keep the same brine going for years. An old jar ferments faster and more reliably because its lactic population is already established. So the first batch is the worst one you will ever make, and the dish comes with a rule no other recipe on this site has — the thing you are finishing is not a side dish but a culture.
Horta (Boiled Wild Greens with Lemon and Oil)
Wild leafy greens boiled and dressed with nothing but lemon juice and olive oil. It breaks almost every rule this site’s blanching guide sets out: twenty minutes rather than twenty seconds, the cooking water kept and drunk rather than discarded as the guide says to do for bitter greens, and no ice bath and no squeezing — the oil goes on while the leaves are still hot. There is one reason for all of it. These are not spinach but tough wild greens, and the aim is not a bright colour but a bitterness that has been talked down.
Takuan (Rice-Bran-Fermented Daikon)
Daikon buried in rice bran and left to ferment. This site’s fermentation guide reduces pickling to three levers and calls the third one pressing everything under the liquid. Takuan has no liquid. No brine is poured: the radish is packed into a dry bed of rice bran and salt, and the water pressed out of the radish itself wets that bran into a paste which excludes the air. What makes that possible is the two to four weeks before it — the daikon is hung until it will bend double, losing about two-thirds of its water, so the crock never floods. It is fermentation with the water taken out first.
Kinpira Gobo (Stir-Fried Burdock and Carrot)
The Japanese side dish of burdock and carrot cut fine, fried in sesame oil and glazed with soy and mirin cooked away to nothing. Burdock does not go tender however long you cook it — it is almost entirely indigestible fibre — so the strategy is not to soften it but to cut it thin enough that it does not need softening. And cut burdock turns brown within a minute. That is a third kind of browning, neither Maillard nor caramelisation, and it happens with no heat at all, which is why the first step is a bowl of water.
Caponata (Sweet-and-Sour Aubergine)
A Sicilian vegetable dish in which aubergine, celery and onion are cooked separately and then finished by pouring vinegar and sugar over them and boiling it down onto them. The sweet-sour axis is the same as sweet and sour pork, but the construction is the opposite: there a sauce is made separately and poured over, here no sauce is made at all — it is reduced away in the pan. What is left is a gloss rather than a liquid, and it is better the day after.
Bindae-tteok (Mung Bean Pancake)
A jeon made from soaked mung beans, skinned and ground, and fried exactly as they are. Unlike every other Korean pancake there is not a spoonful of flour in it: the batter is the bean. That changes how it is cooked, too — not a thin film of oil but a generous pool of it, so the edges fry rather than griddle, which is the only way something this thick cooks through while the outside stays brittle.
Dotori-muk (Acorn Starch Jelly)
Acorn starch whisked into water, boiled and left to set. With only two ingredients the ratio is the recipe, and almost every failure is undercooking: it thickens and looks finished, but it needs another ten minutes after that or the set jelly weeps water. And once made it does not go in the fridge, which is the instruction people most often get the wrong way round.
Oi-sobagi (Cucumber Kimchi Stuffed with Chives)
A summer kimchi: cucumbers cut into a cross and stuffed with a garlic-chive filling — sobagi means to pack a filling in. Unlike kkakdugi or cabbage kimchi this is not made to ripen; it is eaten from the next day and finished within a week, so the goal is different — crunch rather than fermentation. One trick, brining the cucumbers in hot rather than cold salt water, buys several days of that crunch.
Kkakdugi (Cubed Radish Kimchi)
Kimchi made from radish cut into cubes. Far quicker and easier than cabbage kimchi, because nothing has to be brined whole and rinsed. There is one hard part: radish is over 90% water by weight, and if that water is not salted out first, by the next day the seasoning has been diluted into a thin pink liquid. The crunch of the kkakdugi served with seolleongtang comes down to that single step.
Gratin Dauphinois (Potatoes Baked Slowly in Cream)
Thinly sliced potatoes baked for over an hour in cream, from the Dauphiné region of France. The ingredients are potatoes, cream, garlic, salt and nutmeg — no cheese, no flour. The only thing thickening it is the starch that comes out of the potatoes, which is why rinsing the slices washes that starch away and leaves the cream to separate into layers. The most important step in this dish is a step you do not take.
Pad Pak Boong Fai Daeng (Fire-Charred Morning Glory Stir-Fry)
Water spinach thrown into a wok hot enough to smoke and finished inside a minute. "Fai daeng" means red fire, and that is the whole recipe: heat. The stems are hollow, so how thoroughly you dried them is what decides whether this sears or steams.
Ganjang-gejang (Raw Blue Crab Cured in Soy Sauce)
Live blue crab cured — not cooked — in a soy brine that has been boiled and then chilled completely. The brine goes on cold and is re-boiled once after a couple of days, and only marine blue crab is used, never freshwater crab. Read the safety notes first.
Rösti
A Swiss potato cake of coarsely grated potato pressed into a pan and fried golden and crisp. Golden and crunchy outside, tender and comforting within. Once a Swiss farmhouse breakfast, it becomes a full meal with eggs, bacon, or sausage.
German Potato Salad
A southern-German potato salad (Kartoffelsalat) dressed while warm with vinegar, mustard, and bacon instead of mayo. The tangy, savory dressing soaks right into the potatoes. A hearty side that pairs beautifully with sausages and schnitzel.
Kongnamul Muchim (Seasoned Soybean Sprouts)
A staple Korean side dish — crunchy soybean sprouts quickly blanched and tossed with sesame oil, garlic, and salt. Ten minutes and a few ingredients, it works as a rice side and as the topping for bibimbap and gukbap alike.
Mashed Potatoes
Fluffy boiled potatoes mashed smooth with butter and milk into a creamy side. A perfect partner for steak, chicken, and gravy, and a Thanksgiving table staple. A handful of ingredients, and almost impossible to get wrong.
Elote (Street Corn)
Mexico's beloved street snack: grilled corn slathered with mayo and crema, rolled in crumbly cotija cheese, and dusted with chili powder and lime. Creamy, salty, tangy, and spicy in every bite — served on a stick to eat by hand.
Patatas Bravas
Crisp-edged, fluffy-centered potatoes drizzled with a spicy brava sauce and garlic aioli — Spain's signature tapa. The bar snack you'd order with a beer, easy to make at home in the oven or air fryer.
Gamja Jorim (Soy-Braised Potatoes)
Cubed potatoes braised down in a sweet-savory soy sauce — a classic Korean side. Glossy on the outside, fluffy within, and just salty-sweet enough to make a bowl of rice disappear. Shishito peppers add color and aroma.
Myeolchi-bokkeum (Stir-fried Anchovies)
A classic Korean side dish of small dried anchovies tossed in a soy-and-syrup glaze. Dry-toast them first and add the syrup off the heat, and you get a savory-sweet banchan that stays crisp when cooled.
Sigeumchi-namul (Seasoned Spinach)
A classic Korean seasoned-vegetable side of lightly blanched spinach tossed with garlic, soy sauce, and sesame oil. A healthy 5-minute dish — great as a side or a bibimbap topping.
Dubu-jorim (Braised Tofu)
A classic Korean side dish of pan-fried tofu braised in a sweet-and-spicy soy sauce. Made from everyday ingredients in one pan in 20 minutes — the saucy bits are great over rice.
Eomuk-bokkeum (Stir-fried Fish Cake)
A classic Korean side dish of fish cake stir-fried with vegetables in a sweet soy sauce. Made from everyday ingredients in one pan in 10 minutes, and just as good cold for lunchboxes.
Gyeranjjim (Steamed Egg)
Korean steamed egg — beaten egg blended with stock and gently steamed in an earthenware pot until soft and puffed. Served bubbling at the table, it's a universally loved everyday side.
Kimchi (Napa Cabbage Kimchi)
Korea's iconic fermented dish — napa cabbage salted, then layered with a paste of gochugaru, garlic, ginger, and fermented seafood, and left to ferment. Crisp when fresh, deep and tangy when aged; the foundation of Korean cooking.
Gyeranmari (Rolled Omelette)
Korean rolled omelette — beaten egg mixed with carrot and scallion, poured in stages over low heat and rolled into a thick log. A lunchbox and side-dish staple: simple, but all about the technique.
Japchae (Glass Noodle Stir-fry)
Chewy sweet-potato glass noodles tossed with colorful vegetables and beef in a sweet-savory soy seasoning — Korea's classic celebration dish, a fixture at holidays and birthday tables.