The Top 10 Genius Recipes of All Time

Every week—often with your help—Food52 founding editor Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that are nothing short of genius.

With Genius Recipes hitting 10 years young this week, it's a fitting moment to look back at the all-time most popular recipes in the column's history. A decade after launching with a 3-ingredient wonder sorbet, there have been 417 of these puppies and counting—but when it comes to recipes you (and we) turn to again and again, these are tops.

10. Yotam Ottolenghi & Sami Tamimi’s Basic Hummus

This is the ultra-smooth hummus that got a lot more people making their own hummus, thanks to this coup: Most from-scratch hummus recipes require simmering dried chickpeas for 1 1/2 to 2 hours. Ottolenghi and Tamimi's are done in 20 to 40 minutes (and without having to peel the chickpeas by hand).

9. Paul Bertolli’s Cauliflower Soup

This recipe sounds like it should be terrible, frankly—it's made from caulflower, onion, and a whole lot of water (which is why I never would have found it without a tip from Simran and Stacie of the blog A Little Yumminess). But Paul Bertolli knows exactly how to make a vegetable become the best it can be, letting the natural pectin in cauliflower do the work, whipping up creamy and smooth as all get-out.

8. Ideas in Food’s Caramelized Cream Eggs 

This egg recipe might not just change how you think about cooking eggs, but most other ingredients, too. Because instead of cooking in butter or oil, there are a lot of good reasons we should be sizzling everything from eggplant to greens to smashed potatoes in straight heavy cream. 

7. Alice Waters’ Ratatouille

Unlike some traditional ratatouilles that call for cooking each vegetable separately (I wouldn't do that to you!) or layered, fancy-pants versions you may have seen at the movies, this one fusses only where it needs to fuss (over the eggplant).

6. Maialino’s Olive Oil Cake

This is the perfect olive oil cake, which will ruin you for all others—and it only requires whisking a few things together. (No whipping, folding, or creaming needed when loosey-goosey olive oil is your star.) At Maialino, they also serve it in muffin form, and sometimes turn it into a birthday cake, layered with mascarpone buttercream. Either way, bonus points if you want to make Michelle Polzine's Slow-Roasted Strawberries, which you can see here (as we buddied them in Genius Desserts).

5. Bill Smith’s Atlantic Beach Pie

This sweet-salty twist on a classic North Carolina lemon pie is as lazy and beachy as summer should be—and Bill Smith has started calling it "that stupid pie" because it seems like it's all anyone wants to talk about.

4. Marcella Hazan's Tomato Sauce With Onion & Butter

This is the recipe that started it all—in three ingredients, you can change the way you think about making pasta sauce forever. (Then tell all your friends about it.)

3. Judy Hesser’s Oven-Fried Chicken

With this smart recipe from our co-founder Amanda Hesser's mother, Judy, you can stick some chicken in a salty ice bath in the morning and come home from work to finish off the best fried chicken you can make—without actually frying. (Fun fact: The recipe only calls for 2 tablespoons of butter.)

2. Momofuku's Soy Sauce Eggs

Make a batch of these on Sunday and you'll have the most thrilling breakfast-on-the-go / lunch perker-upper / late-night snack just chilling in your fridge all week. Or do as Christina Tosi says: "These eggs can be used in a thousand different ways: They are perfect on their own as a snack, or on an English muffin (eggs Benny setup), in pasta, or cut up and mixed into a salad."

1. Martha Stewart's One-Pan Pasta

This pasta cooks entirely in one pan (without boiling water first) and makes its own sauce, all in about 9 minutes. For more on the story behind this internet-famous pasta—which came from a visit to the back of a restaurant in a tiny town in Italy, a few glasses of wine deep—we have that, too.

Tell us: Which Genius Recipes do you think should have made the top 10?

This article has been updated from earlier versions in 2015 and 2019 to celebrate Genius Recipes' 10th birthday (and to give some of the newer recipes a chance to shine!).