There’s a train wreck coming your way. Several, actually. This week’s menu is a mishmash, a train wreck, a collection of heresies, shortcuts, and poor translations. This week, I’m playing with flavors and techniques from all around the Mediterranean – from North Africa and Egypt to Italy, and the Aegean – all mixed and mashed and well … pretty much everything here is a travesty. A delicious travesty, I hope, but almost certainly a travesty none the less.
These dishes aren’t Moroccan, Tunisian, Greek, Egyptian, or Italian – although they draw on flavors and techniques from each of those countries and cultures. I didn’t learn from a Moroccan master chef, or an Egyptian aunt. I can’t and won’t claim to be making anything resembling authentic recipes from any of the cultures these flavors and techniques represent. But these flavors … they’re fabulous, complex, and unfortunately, still unfamiliar to a lot of American cooks and diners.
Fresh cheese with honey, preserved lemon, Aleppo, mint, and pistachios
Fresh cheese is a wonder. Something as simple as milk, salt, and acid yield something that’s transcendent: creamy, soft, unctuous, and luscious – something that’s wonderful on its own, but also a vehicle for all sorts of other flavors. Around the holidays, I love to dress fresh cheese with pecans, maple syrup and rosemary. Sometimes just a drizzle of good balsamic vinegar is enough.
Here, we’ll run the gauntlet of Mediterranean flavors: zip from Aleppo pepper – a mild dried chili from Syria; zing from the preserved lemons that are essential to Moroccan and neighboring cuisines; honey for sweetness; crushed pistachios for crunch; and a high note of herbaceous menthol from fresh mint leaves. Somehow that mess of flavors doesn’t overwhelm the mild cheese but makes it even better.
Preserved lemon is easily found in a lot of grocery stores these days, but if you can’t find it you can order it online – and if you’re feeling adventurous, it’s fairly easy to make at home, though it requires a few weeks to mature.
4 cups whole milk
¼ cup lemon juice
1 tsp kosher salt
¼ cup heavy cream
¼ cup crushed pistachios
1 tbsp honey (acacia or orange flower blossom honeys are great for this dish)
1 tsp minced preserved lemon peel
½ tsp Aleppo pepper
1 tbsp finely chopped mint leaves
Add the milk and salt to a thick bottomed pan over low heat and bring to a low simmer.
Remove from the heat, and add the lemon juice, stirring to distribute it.
Allow the pan to sit, undisturbed, for 15-30 minutes.
Drain the mixture through a layered cheese cloth or a very fine strainer, discarding the liquid (the whey).
Allow the curds to cool completely, then stir in the cream. Refrigerate until ready to serve.
To serve, whisk the fresh cheese to break up any clumps.
Spread the curd on a plate, scatter pistachios around it.
Drizzle with honey.
Scatter preserved lemon, Aleppo pepper, and mint leaves over the top.
Serve with warm flatbread.
Fried Onion Flatbread
A few years ago, I decided I was tired of terrible store bought pita bread. There are good flatbreads to be found in stores, but they are few and far between. I discovered that I could make delicious homemade flatbreads with just a few minutes of active work, and that the end result was unimaginably better than the sawdusty, dried stack of pocket breads masquerading as pita that were available at our local stores.
300 g All Purpose flour
7 g instant yeast
15 g olive oil
5 g kosher salt
30 g Greek yogurt
175 g warm water
Fried Onions (see below)
Combine all ingredients except the onion in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a dough hook.
Process on medium speed until the dough is smooth, shiny, and has pulled away from the sides of the bowl.
Cover, and allow to rise until doubled in size.
Punch down, and form into a ball.
Divide the ball into 8 even portions, and form each into a small ball.
Cover with a towel and allow to rest for ten minutes. This will relax the gluten and make rolling and stretching the dough easier.
Preheat a thick bottomed frying pan or a comal over medium heat.
Using a well-floured bench, roll and stretch each ball into an 8-inch round.
Press fried onions into one side of the round.
Cook onion side up in a dry pan over medium heat until bubbles begin to form on the top, then turn and cook 1-2 minutes on the onion side.
The bread may or may not puff slightly.
Serve immediately, or warm in the microwave before serving.
Fried Onions
1 medium onion
Neutral Oil
Peel, trim, and thinly slice the onion end to end.
Place the sliced onions, along with enough oil to barely cover them, in a thick bottomed pot over medium heat.
Cook, stirring frequently, until the onions just begin to brown.
Remove from the oil and drain well.
Reserve the onion oil for frying Dukkah potatoes (below) or other delicious frying things.
Marinated Chickpea Salad with Preserved lemon, dates, and goat cheese
Yeah, yeah, yeah, another salad with aggressively bitter greens. I just can’t stop myself. Those mixes of tender lettuce you buy in the store just turn to mush when dressed with strong flavors and I like salads with strong flavors … the greens included. This take on my overused standard uses marinated chickpeas as a backbone, and the greens are really more of an accompaniment. The chickpeas are almost nutty – and in fact I thought about adding fried chickpeas (which really do taste like nuts) as a textural element before I decided I didn’t feel like the fuss of frying them.
4 cups frisée, curly endive or escarole, or other sturdy bitter salad green
1 cup cooked chickpeas
1 clove garlic
Juice of one lemon
3 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp kosher salt
½ tsp chili flake
½ tsp fresh ground pepper
1 tsp minced preserved lemon peel
1 tsp finely minced mint leaves
4 tbsp goat cheese or feta
2 pitted dates
1 small radish
Peel, trim, and crush or microplane the garlic into a non-reactive bowl.
Juice the lemon into the bowl with the garlic.
Add the pepper, preserved lemon, chili flake, and salt.
Whisk in the olive oil.
Add the chickpeas and allow to marinate in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours and up to 24 hours.
Wash and drain the greens.
Slice the dates into thin rounds.
Clean and trim the radish and slice thinly.
Toss the radish, greens, dates, chickpeas, and marinade.
Top with crumbled goat cheese, and thinly cut mint leaves.
Dukkah Potatoes
Dukkah (spelled a number of different ways in English) is an Egyptian blend of nuts, seeds, and spices that’s oven used as a dip – you dunk a little bread into olive oil, and then into dukkah and enjoy. It’s full of warm spices and toasty notes from the nuts and seeds and … well, it’s really wonderful stuff. I make my own, mostly out of habit, but you can order it online or find it at better spice shops. If you do tackle making your own, there are any number of recipes available on the internet. I can’t speak to the authenticity of any of them – nor to the one I make myself.
There’s not a lot on this menu that’s a traditional use.I don’t think dusting fried potatoes with Dukkah is a traditional use. My thinking here was that fried potatoes are already dipped in oil, so why not dust them with dukkah. It works pretty well. But because I’m all about gilding the lily, I’ve also included a quick harissa mayonnaise here … because two dips are better than one and because I love spicy mayo on fried potatoes.
1 lb. small yellow potatoes
¼ cup olive oil (or onion oil from above)
¼ cup Dukkah
1 tbsp finely chopped fried onion (see the flatbread recipe above)
Prepare a large pot of heavily salted boiling water.
Clean and half the potatoes.
Add the potatoes to the boiling water and cook until the potatoes are just barely tender – 7 to 8 minutes.
Drain the potatoes and allow them to cool completely.
Add ½ inch of oil (the onion oil from making fried onions is great here) to a frying pan over medium heat and arrange the potatoes cut side down. Cook over medium low heat until the onions are brown and crisp on the cut side, then turn and cook just slightly on the curved side – 1-2 minutes. Work in batches if necessary.
Remove the potatoes from the pan and drain.
Toss with Dukkah and chopped onions.
Serve with harissa mayo (below) and or Chermoula (also below) as a dipping sauce.
Harissa Mayo
4 tbsp good quality mayonnaise
2 tsp prepared harissa
Whisk together mayonnaise and harissa. Refrigerate for 30 minutes before using to allow flavors to combine.
Spatchcocked Chermoula Chicken
Chermoula is a herbaceous North African condiment that shows up in a number of cuisines from the region. Though traditionally it’s often used as an accompaniment to fish, I’ve found it makes an amazing sauce and marinade for roasted chicken, and in fact have a recipe for it posted over at The Chicken Thigh Guy. This recipe varies slightly from that one in that it’s a little more refined, and has a brighter flavor profile.
Spatchcocking is a technique that, by removing the backbone from poultry, allows you to cook a whole bird as a flat piece. It’s great for grilling, but even roasting it makes for more even cooking and browning.
Chermoula
½ cup olive oil
2 cups loosely packed parsley leaves and stems
2 cups loosely packed cilantro leaves and stems
1 cup loosely packed mint leaves and stems
4 cloves garlic
1 serrano pepper or other hot green chili
1 half preserved lemon
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground coriander
1-2 tsp red pepper flake
Juice of one lemon
1 tsp kosher salt
Add all ingredients to the container of a blender and process until smooth.
Store covered and refrigerated until ready to use.
Spatchcocked Chicken
1 3 ½ - 5 lb. chicken
1/2 cup prepared chermoula (above)
1 tbsp kosher salt
Using poultry shears, or a sharp heavy knife, remove the backbone from the chicken.
Flatten the chicken, skin side up, and season heavily with salt.
Allow to rest 10 -15 minutes.
Coat the chicken generously with chermoula, and place in a plastic zip top back to marinate for 4-12 hours.
Roast at 400°F or grill over indirect heat until the thickest part of the breast reaches 160°F. Allow to rest in a warm place 10-15 minutes before serving (the internal temp should rise another 10 degrees).
Serve with additional chermoula as a dipping/drizzling sauce.
“Baklamisu”
Every once in a while, I get a crazy idea in my head. Ok, actually I get crazy ideas in my head all the time, just sometimes those ideas are food ideas that I can actually follow through on. That bit of unhinged culinary madness has led to mozzarella cheese sticks wrapped in tater tot, a chicken fried burrito, an attempt at making a chicken thigh clone of a famous fast food sandwich, and a few other less notable or less photogenic gonzo concoctions.
Sometime last week I decided that this terrible-no-good-bad-idea was in fact not a terrible-no-good-bad-idea and that making Tiramisu with rolled baklava was going to be awesome. It is awesome – mostly in the literal meaning of awesome in that it inspires awe that I thought this was a good idea. It’s also a little awesome in that it works. Lightly lemon scented custard whipped with mascarpone and whipped cream topping sweet, crunchy nutty rolls of pastry … it’s not baklava and it’s not tiramisu … it’s both. Like I said in the introduction. Train wreck.
The recipe is a little more involved than … well, almost any dessert I’ve ever posted here. You’ll need to make or acquire the pastry, make a sabayon (a whipped custard), whipped cream, and combine that all with the cheese. You can- if you can find them- simply use pre-made baklava rolls. They’ll probably be better than my clumsy attempts.
Syrup
1 cup sugar
1 cup cold water
Pastry
1 cinnamon stick
½ package filo dough sheets
1 cup pistachios
1 cup walnuts
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 stick unsalted butter, melted
Topping
4 egg yolks
½ cup sugar
2 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp brandy
1 8oz tub mascarpone
1 package cream cheese
1 tsp powdered unflavored gelatin
1 tbsp cold water
1 cup heavy cream
½ cup pistachios
½ cup confectioners’ sugar
Prepare the pastry:
Add 1 cup of sugar, 1 cup of cold water, and 1 cinnamon stick to a thick bottomed pan over medium heat.
Bring to a low simmer and cook for 5 minutes.
Remove from the heat and allow the cinnamon syrup to cool completely.
Add the walnuts pistachios, and ground cinnamon to the container of a food processor.
Pulse until the nuts are finely and evenly ground.
Preheat your oven to 375°F.
Brush a ½ sheet pan with butter or spray with cooking spray.
Stack two sheets of filo dough on your workspace.
Brush with melted butter.
Spread evenly with the cinnamon and nut mixture.
Layer two more sheets on top, and brush with melted butter.
Spread another layer of nuts on top.
Working along the long edge, tightly roll the dough sheets and nut mixture into a long roll. You can optionally wrap an additional sheet around the roll if you want to create a more finished roll.
Brush the finished roll with melted butter and transfer to your prepared half sheet pan.
Repeat 3 times to create 4 long rolls.
Bake until well browned and crisp, about 30 minutes.
While the pastry is still hot, brush with the cooled cinnamon syrup, repeating several times as the pastry cools.
Set aside and allow to cool completely.
Make a Sabayon/Zabaglione:
Bring 2-4 cups of water to a low simmer in a heavy pan.
Choose a metal or heat proof glass bowl that’s slightly larger than the top of the pan.
Add 4 egg yolks, ½ cup sugar, 2 tbsp lemon juice, and 1 tbsp brandy (if using) to the bowl and whisk together.
Place the bowl over the simmering water, and whisk vigorously as the steam from below cooks the eggs into a thick foam. This may take up to 10 minutes. Constant whisking keeps the eggs from scrambling and incorporates air to make the custard lighter in texture.
Remove from the heat once thickened, and allow to cool completely.
Allow the cream cheese and mascarpone to warm slightly on the counter.
Add both to the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a whisk attachment.
Whisk until smooth, completely combined, and fluffy – up to 10 minutes.
Add the cooled Sabayon/Zabaglione mixture to the bowl and process just until fully combined.
Add 1 tbsp cool water to a small glass bowl.
Sprinkle 1 tsp unflavored powdered gelatin on top of the water and allow to hydrate for 2 minutes.
Microwave the gelatin mixture on high for ten seconds – stir – and microwave for an additional 5-10 seconds, or until the gelatin is completely dissolved.
Allow the gelatin mixture to cool slightly.
With the mixer running on medium/high, drizzle the gelatin into the Sabayon/Zabaglione mixture, mixing until fully combined.
Transfer the mixture to a large, clean bowl.
Wipe out and dry the bowl of the stand mixer.
Add 1 cup of heavy whipping cream to the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a whisk attachment.
Start the mixer on medium, slowly raising the speed over 5 minutes. Beat the cream on high speed until very stiff peaks form.
Carefully fold the whipped cream into the Sabayon/Zabaglione mixture, working gently until fully combined.
Process pistachio topping:
Add ½ cup roasted pistachios to the container of a food processor with ½ cup of confectioners’ sugar.
Process until a very fine powder forms.
To assemble:
Line a 9x9 pan – including the sides - with parchment.
Cut the baklava rolls into lengths that will fit into the pan.
Arrange the pieces in the pan in one layer covering the bottom.
If there are extra pieces, have a snack.
Pour the Sabayon/Zabaglione/whipped cream mixture over the rolls. Spread the topping with a silicone spatula or cake froster until even.
Use a small sieve or strainer filled with ground pistachio sugar (above) to scatter an even coating across the top.
Refrigerate uncovered for at least 4 and up to 8 hours.
Cut and serve.