They’ll whip anythingI had forgotten how much I like Cool Whip. Leave it to a friend’s spiral-bound Louisiana cookbook printed in 1984 to remind me. We set our sights and appetites on a recipe for “chocolate yummy,” a chocolate cream pie that calls for confectioners’ sugar, cream cheese, both chocolate and vanilla instant pudding, milk and a quart of Cool Whip. “Serves 10,” the recipe reads. “A dessert men love!” There were five of us, two men. As my friends prepared the chocolate yummy, I tried a glob of frozen Cool Whip, spooned straight from the tub — still delicious, all these years later — and read the ingredients label. You really can whip anything, I thought. So let’s whip out the food processor and whip some tofu to add a little protein oomph to your favorite vegetables. It’s that enterprising spirit that yields a creamy base for the end-of-season market spoils in Pierce Abernathy’s cucumber-tomato salad with sesame whipped tofu. He aerates jiggly silken tofu in a blender until smooth, a technique you might already be familiar with. But it’s not just the silken stuff, which has a high moisture content, that will whip to your delight. Nisha Vora whips low-moisture, extra-firm tofu for her whipped tofu ricotta, which mimics the texture of dairy, with flavor-boosters like nutritional yeast to mimic that subtle cheesiness. The recipe is amenable to what you have; firm tofu will work just fine, producing a slightly looser consistency. Nisha uses the vegan spread in her heirloom tomato salad with ricotta and chile oil, but you can also use it in recipes for stuffed shells or lasagna. Heirloom Tomato Salad With Ricotta and Chile OilOf course, you can just as well whip dairy ricotta (or goat cheese, or feta) to serve as a creamy dip, or to pair with roasted delicata squash and mushrooms à la Kay Chun. Or turn to other naturally creamy ingredients to whip, like tahini. Andy Baraghani combines tahini with cooked Swiss chard stems and leaves for his dairy-free spicy green tahini dip; Alexa Wiebel blends the sesame paste with a little yogurt for the airy base in her roasted carrots with whipped tahini. But what else can we whip? We can whip beans for Nargisse Benkabbou’s bissara, a creamy fava bean purée seasoned with sweet paprika and cumin that can be served as a dip or thinned out into a soup. And we can whip nuts and garlic and bread for the chef Nina Compton’s charred broccoli rabe with ajo blanco sauce. Her recipe takes cues from Spanish ajo blanco soup, swapping out the almonds for cashews and playing up garlic’s sweeter notes with two heads’ worth of blanched cloves. For an extra silky sauce, you’re going to want to break out the immersion blender. Whipped garlic brings me to toum, the fluffy condiment that’s just as good with roasted vegetables as it is slathered all over Ham El-Waylly’s punchy toum grilled cheese. You could buy toum at the store, sure. But Ham makes a compelling case for whipping it up (sorry) at home: “It lasts for months and can be used anywhere a tangy, garlicky wallop is needed,” he writes. Whisk it into dressings, spread it on other sandwiches or eat it as a dip with crudités. They’re all pretty cool whips if you ask me.
Roasted Delicata Squash and Mushrooms With Whipped Ricotta
Spicy Green Tahini Dip
Charred Broccoli Rabe With Ajo Blanco SauceFor a limited time, you can enjoy free access to the recipes in this newsletter in our app. Download it on your iOS or Android device and create a free account to get started. One More Thing!I blinked, and somehow it’s been five months since our last Recipe Matchmaker! It’s time to reopen the proverbial hotline. Send your highly specific (and brief, please!) request to theveggie@nytimes.com with the subject line “Recipe Matchmaker,” and I’ll feature a few of them in next week’s newsletter. And it’s never too early to start thinking about the holidays. If you’ve got Thanksgiving questions, lob ’em my way for Matchmakers later this fall. Thanks for reading, and see you next week! Email us at theveggie@nytimes.com. Newsletters are archived here. Reach out to my colleagues at cookingcare@nytimes.com if you have questions about your account.
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