I find most foods are best as soon as they are made, but some things seem to get better when the flavors have more time to meld. The only two I can think of right now are chili and hummus. What other dishes am I forgetting, or haven't tried that you think get better with a little time?
Stews! Beef stew is great the next day.
I think I first saw it from Alton Brown, but he braises the beef the day before, then cools it down and uses any drippings from that the next day to cook the veggies/potatoes. Then when it's ready to eat, you just toss in the beef and let it warm up.
It works because you need high temp (simmering/boiling) for the collagen to break down into gelatin. That's when the beef gets really "shreddy" for lack of a better term. If you cool it down, though, the gelatin solidifies and holds the beef together in good bite sized pieces. When you warm it back up, you don't warm back up to a boil (or at least not for long), so all that gelatin doesn't completely dissolve, and you still get those good chunks.
That sounds amazing! I need to look up that recipe.
I make chef John's bigos recipe, I don't eat it until the next day.
I've made bigos a couple times, my family is polish, but we're a few generations removed from the old country, so it wasn't exactly part of our regular diet growing up, just something we had once or twice at the local polish church's feast.
The first time I made it, most of the recipes I found were ridiculously plain, mostly just cabbage, sauerkraut, pork, and kielbasa stewed together without much else, which don't get me wrong, is a damn fine meal on its own, but I kind of knew deep down there had to be more to it.
So I just kind of took what I knew about polish food and threw it all in a pot, and what I came up something really close to that Chef John recipe. I don't think I had allspice in mine, and I threw in a jar of pickled beets and every kind of mushroom I could get my hands on, but otherwise that's almost exactly what I came up with. I'm kind of proud of that now that I've seen his recipe.
If anyone has ever been curious about the perpetual stews you tend to hear about in medieval fantasy books and such, bigos is probably about as close as you can get without actually keeping a pot simmering for weeks at a time (although if you want to keep it simmering and add to it as you go, more power to you.) Historically that's pretty much exactly what it was, whatever the local hunters showed up with went into the pot, so it's also a pretty hard thing to screw up, there's not exactly a wrong way to make bigos.
Honestly, almost everything. I like most food better as left overs. Especially if it's hot/spicy. It tends to get spicier overnight. Also marinara based foods do really well, like lasagna, manicotti, spaghetti, et cetera.
My favorite has to be our way of doing taco meat. A bunch of diced tomatoes (normally canned, sometimes fresh), and diced chili peppers, like jalapeños, poblanos, hatch chilis, habaneros, et cetera, spices and ground beef. Lightly fry the corn tortillas and eat. But I always make enough to have the next day, because after it's sat overnight, it's so much better.
Flavors will always deepen after a few days but textures may worsen. Some things, like traditional fish and chips batter, will degrade in cold temperatures due to condensation... other things may survive cooling but be difficult to reheat without destroying the texture... and then most things that can be reheated still won't reheat gracefully in a microwave.
Stew/Chili is often held up as "better the next day" but if you're willing to use the oven or stove top to reheat things there's a lot of other food that reheats well. There are also a few things that you can transform during reheating, fried rice is a classic example here but pan fried pasta can also be excellent as well.
Lasagna is pretty universally agreed to be better as a leftover. Non-pasta soups are usually better too. I have a sausage, potatoes and pepper hash I make that is mostly a excuse to have it with a fried egg as breakfast in the morning
If alterations are allowed, fried rice is better with old rice. I think leftover mac & cheese fried with some garlic salt is better than fresh.
There are some desserts I make that need to be chilled for a few hours, those are mostly better after a few days and the porous parts can spend time absorbing flavor.
fried rice is better with old rice
Very recently learned this after wondering why my fried rice was coming out so clumpy and mushy. It needs to sit in a fridge overnight for the starches to calm down and dry
You can use a dehydrator or oven to speed up the process but yea - there's a good reason fried rice recipes ask for day old rice.
I agree, but only about the rice. Fried rice made with day old rice is better, but with day old fried rice the added components dont maintain their integrity as well.
Most food to be honest. We always cook enough for leftovers because we’re lazy to cook up a meal in the morning, and somehow everything tastes better the next day. Asian food gets better as leftovers
Almost all pastas, as long as they were sauced before being refrigerated.
Curry, every time
Curries, definitely. Meat loaf. Red beans and rice (I tend to make fresh rice though).
Birria, green chile stew, sourdough bread,
Chili is much better the next day. There's even a chili restaurant in Virginia that makes their chili the day before, refrigerates it, then heats it back up specifically because of this (the name of the restaurant escapes me at the moment, but I used to love going there).
Spaghetti (most pasta/sauce combos), chili.
We usually cook batches of things on the weekend and eat them for the first part of the week. Quiche is better the next day, Mattar Pander, Caribbean rice and beans, bolognese sauce. Anything with spice based flavors improves as the spices infuse into the other ingredients IMO.
Cottage pie, beef stew, lentil soup, chili, potato salad.
We occasionally make a beef barbacoa taco recipe that seems to get better after sitting in the fridge overnight.