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You might not need a recipe to grill a hot dog, make a slice of cinnamon toast or whip up a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich. A recipe might just get in the way. It’s simple food — why complicate it?
Then there’s also a chance that no recipe could improve upon how you or your mom prepares it.
I agree with all of these opinions, and at the same time, I have also created recipes for these classic dishes for New York Times Cooking.
My goal as a recipe developer is to share the ineffable wonders that come from cooking. My original creations — and my versions of standard recipes — help home cooks make food, fast and with feeling. Cinnamon toast in bed. A hot dog in the summer sunshine. A bacon, egg and cheese to cure all ails.
For example, when made a certain way, a hot dog isn’t just a hot dog. Sure, it’s one of the most consumer-friendly comestibles around. But biting into a really good hot dog conjures a feeling — and memories. When its outside snaps, revealing a rush of spiced, salty and fatty juices, my mind zooms to images of the beach, a ballgame, a park, grassy toes, salty chips, cold drinks, sunglasses sliding down my nose.
With my recent article on tricks to grilling better hot dogs, I wanted to help bring those good vibes to anyone, anywhere, who is sizzling up a sausage during a summer cookout. So I turned to the internet and cookbooks to learn how people prepare hot dogs. Then, I bought over 10 brands of hot dogs and set up a series of tests.
The goal was to make hot dogs, including poultry and veggie dogs, with crisp outsides and juicy insides. I also wanted the final recipe to be achievable with minimal setup, so that the dish could be executed at a beach, park, campsite or backyard. If a knife or skewer was required, the final product really had to be worth it.
I weighed the hot dogs before and after grilling them to assess moisture and fat loss. I sliced some to resemble ringlets and pine cones, and slashed others like an open book. Then I cooked them on gas, charcoal and campfire grills. Successful methods moved to the next round of testing, and problematic ones were replaced with new techniques. Grill marks were sacrificed in favor of fully browned dogs that didn’t roll around. (Good dog!)
After grilling and tasting at least 40 dogs (with and without buns and toppings), I found that one method repeatedly delivered the intended results.
You can bet I grilled lots of them over a campfire in Rhode Island on the Fourth of July.
The more commonplace the dish, the more I want to explore its many versions and learn how to make an excellent one. For example, bacon, egg and cheeses, better known as BECs, fuel New York City. Something special happens on the griddles at corner bodegas, so it feels nearly impossible to replicate BECs at home. How do you recreate bacon that was warmed ahead of time, and then set aside to harden just right? That residual onion flavor from the griddle? A bodega cook has made thousands of BECs — and it’s now up to you to make just one, maybe your first one.
To do the sandwich justice, and make the task feasible for home cooks, my challenge was to mimic elements of the BEC experience that don’t exist in a home kitchen, and to consider the innumerable ways to make one. As Nikita Richardson, an editor for the Food section, once wrote, “there is no single bacon, egg and cheese to rule them all.”
I posted a poll on Times Cooking’s Instagram and TikTok accounts to get a sense of the prevailing bread, egg, cheese and condiment picks. I scoured TikTok videos and Yelp photos to see how the pros griddle up their sandwiches. Then I visited my test kitchen (otherwise known as my home kitchen), with a notebook filled with questions and methods in hand.
My recipe-developing process always includes lots of questions, but the paths to answers rarely repeat. Scheming an Italian Hero Sandwich, piled high with cured meats, cheese and punchy condiments, required drawing assembly diagrams. For Chili Mac, I consulted ingredient lists of M.R.E.s, shelf-stable pouches of food created for the United States military. And Cinnamon Toast took me from children’s books to the science of sugar and the history of French toast, and through many bags of sliced bread (and English muffins, and burger buns).
It’s always nerve-racking to publish recipes for dishes that are so dear to so many, because no one makes anything the exact same way, or how Mom makes it. (Friendly debate is welcome in the comments.) But what outweighs the fear is the possibility that the dish might find a new fan.
What I would do to get another first bite of cinnamon toast …
