Gruyère

What you put on your pizza is just as important as how much. It’s about quality, not quantity. Don’t go crazy and overload pizza with a jumble of toppings. Think about balance and a few well-chosen ingredients that work together. The Caponata (page 70) and the sugo (page 111) are delicious spread on pizza with a few cubes of mozzarella, for example. Here earthy mushrooms matched with fragrant thyme and sweet caramelized onions pack this rustic pizza with major punch. Gruyère’s robust and savory flavor profile knocks this no-sauce pizza off the charts. When it comes to pizza, this one delivers.

A few years ago my wife, Tamara, and I started raising chickens in our backyard in Miami. It’s been a really funexperience and today we have eleven hens! With the coop comes lots of fresh eggs, so I’m always trying to find ways to use them creatively. This hearty onion soup is absolutely transcendent with a poached egg on top. When you cut into the egg, the runny yolk oozes into the soup, making it extra luxurious.

This is the quintessential simple supper for many Italian families.

This creamy, cold-weather casserole with a golden, crunchy topping can be assembled ahead and baked when you’re ready.

This is a sandwich that was so good we had to take it off the menu! Conceptually similar to a cheese steak, it was offered as a pressed sandwich, and when too many people ordered it at once, we had a traffic jam on our premises. So while you can no longer find it at ’wichcraft, you can make it for yourself. Flank steak is wonderfully easy to work with because it’s lean—there’s no waste, and it has an excellent texture for braising. There are many schools of thought about the right wine to cook with. Some advocate cooking with the best wine, or at least a wine that you would want to drink; others believe in using the cheapest wine available. We suggest going with the wine that you can afford to use for cooking or the one you have lying around. At home, whenever he has some leftover red wine at the end of a meal, if he doesn’t drink it the next day, Sisha puts it in a container in the freezer. He keeps adding to that container, and when he needs wine for braising, there it is. The blend is never the same twice—and always good.

You’ll recognize this sandwich as a Reuben—with a few adjustments. Chief among them: We believe that mustard is the perfect condiment to cut the salty, sweet richness of cured meats, so we’ve replaced the Reuben’s more prosaic Russian dressing with an easy-to-make mustard sauce. Using really good pastrami sets the tone for the entire sandwich. While the meats you typically find in a supermarket are injected with water, an artisanal product is simply cured, then smoked with real wood chips, concentrating rather than diluting the flavors. And though the product is more expensive, you’ll need far less of it. You can try this sandwich with corned beef, too, especially if you’re in the mood for a milder and less smoky experience.

This is a straightforward version of the classic sandwich—with a few improvements. We opt for good-quality tuna, we use celery root instead of celery, and we roast the tomatoes to extract the most flavor. Since this is a warm sandwich, the roasted tomato actually holds up better than would its raw counterpart. We think you’ll agree that the addition of the fresh oregano brings out the flavor of the cheese.

This is one of Tom’s favorites, one that showcases how a sandwich can be adapted from a meal. The meal here is French onion soup. Whereas in the soup the onion is the star, with the crouton and cheese to support it, in the sandwich we flip that: the onions serve as the relish. We roast the onions very slowly, caramelizing them, until dark golden brown to balance the assertive and pungent Gruyère. With the rye bread to hint at the Alsatian origin of the soup, we end with something rustic and homey, and yet something that, unlike soup, can be enjoyed while walking down the street.

I know! I know! Refrigerated dough? But this dish works beautifully as a side, and when you’re making the rest of the meal from scratch this recipe will come in very handy. You can use any cheeses and herbs, but this is my favorite combination: The Parmesan and Gruyère make the bread sticks perfectly cheesy, and the rosemary gives them a hint of freshness and color. Don’t tell anyone about the refrigerated dough, and they’ll never know.

The patty melt first appeared on the American diner scene in the 1940s and is still a favorite more than sixty years later. Take a good look at what it is—meat and cheese pressed between slices of buttered bread—and you might wonder: Was the patty melt America’s first panini? As a rule, my perfect burger consists of a thicker patty served on a soft roll, but everyone needs to break the rules, even their own, once in a while. This patty melt, with its sophisticated jam-like onion relish and buttery Gruyère cheese, makes breaking the rules extra delicious.

One of my favorite bistro meals consists of a thick and juicy steak crusted with coarsely ground black pepper–steak au poivre–served with a simple green salad tossed with a mustardy vinaigrette. The bistro burger takes the flavor highlights of that meal and packages them in burger form. The coarse black pepper makes a great crust for the burger –just as it does on steak au poivre!—and adds a nice touch of heat. Shredded endive in a mustard vinaigrette (of course) and nutty Gruyère cheese are natural accompaniments.

Because quiche is a custard, by definition it requires that a protein (egg) and fat (cream) mixture set up during baking but remain soft and silky when served at room temperature. Here, the cream has been eliminated completely, making a portion that is just over 200 calories. The flavor comes from caramelized onions, a little bit of bacon, and a small dose of an assertive cheese, such as Gruyère.