Every Monday night, Bon Appétit editor in chief Adam Rapoport gives us a peek inside his brain by taking over our newsletter. He shares recipes he's been cooking, restaurants he's been eating at, and more. It gets better: If you sign up for our newsletter, you'll get this letter before everyone else.
If it gets to a point where we’re all holed up in our homes for a few weeks, we’re going to need something to do. And, I imagine, if you’re the type who subscribes to this newsletter, that might mean cooking.
In days like these, the best kind of cookery is project cookery—the more time a dish requires the better. Whatever it takes to not fixate on the steady crawl of coronavirus updates.
To be honest, I’m already at that point. So this past Saturday afternoon, I set out to make Amiel Stanek’s French Onion Beef Noodle Soup. It’s a riff on Taiwanese beef noodle soup, infused with the irresistible sweetness of five pounds (!) of caramelized onions.
Start to finish, it took me about four hours. Nothing terribly complex or deft. But it means patiently searing off three pounds of bone-in short ribs, gradually sweating down a mountain of sliced white onions till jammy and tawny, and sizzling a medley of ginger, garlic, scallions, star anise, coriander, and cloves in the fat rendered from the ribs.
Because there are so many assertive flavors contributing to the assembly of the dish, it doesn’t require that cherished, rich homemade chicken stock you’ve got stowed away in your freezer. Twelve cups of water will do.
It’s a sweet, fragrant soup, fortified by the shredded beef ribs, and then given further substance by the last-minute addition of store-bought fresh ramen noodles (which, I’ll just say, are pretty much the best thing to hit supermarkets this past decade).
None of us know how the next few months will play out, but we’ve all been here before, to some extent. As Carla Music pointed out last week in her newsletter, we have weathered blizzards and hurricanes and power outages by turning to our stoves to feed ourselves and those in need. And we’ll do it again, if need be. We’ll keep calm and we’ll keep cooking.
