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melamed

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Everything posted by melamed

  1. Store bought jachnoon is convenient but is usually made with margerine or oil. The traditional jachnoon is made with Samneh, or carified butter. In anycase, a pot with a tight fitting lid is important as others have mentioned. You can also rub a bit of honey on the jachnoons before baking, they come out nicely browned and delicious.
  2. Anissa is giving a culinary tour in Syria in May, check it out in http://www.anissas.com/travels.html hope this didn't come too late, Did you find anything interesting in your search? A nice book is Poopa Dweck's Aroma's of Aleppo
  3. Why do you think that was? Was semolina less available, or was it just a regional preference? I had never seen stewed kibbeh before--it looks great! Now I'm thinking I should try making it. Any small-batch recipes you'd recommend? ← My grandmother comes from a village in Iraq near the Iranian border so they were influenced by Persian food. The Persian have a stewed dumpling called Gondi made with rice (The most wellknown Gondi is the chickpea flour one).
  4. images tomato kubba syrian fried kubba Kurdish kubba with Arum (don't try this at home) A brief introduction to the wonderful world of kubba kubba is a Middle Eastern dumpling with many names and many variations: Kubebeh in Egypt Kubba/kuba in Iraq Kibbeh in Lebanon and Syria The gondi dumplings in Iran are a close relative Fried Kubba The most well known is the syrian/lebanese fried kibbeh. Versions are also made in Turkey and throughout the Levant, including Egypt. The shell The shell is usually maade with burghul/bulgar (this is wheat that has been parboiled, husked removed and ground to various degree of courseness-best known in tabouleh), lean lamb and onions and flavored with cumin, baharat (middle eastern mixed spice). There are versions that use flour, matza meal or potato as a binder You can also use ground rice instead of burghul. Some add orange peel, nutmeg, and even zaátar to flavor the shell. The filling The filling is traditionally fatty lamb, fried onions, pinenuts and parsley. Sometimes yogurt is added to keep it juicy. Pomegranate seeds are occasionally used as well. Stewed Kubba Iraqis, Kurds, Turks, Syrians and Armenians all have their own versions and perhaps others as well. The shell The shell can consist of either semolina (or farina if not available), ground rice with ground meat such as lamb, beef or chicken, a combination of semolina and fine ground wheat (jereesha). Sometimes matza meal, flour, and bread is added but this is not traditional. The filling There is an endless variation but I use two main types 1. ground beef, chopped celery leaves, chopped onions, 2. fried onions (deep golden brown) and fried beef or lamb. The soup The most common soup (for me) is tomato based with vegetable additions such as pumpkin, okra, zucchini and celery. Another common soup consists of swisss chard (beet leaves), green onions and celery. Again I can go on forever. Besides the stewed and the fried, there is the baked kubba and the raw kubba. Sizes range from small ovals, to pita-sized discs. There is even a turkish vegetarian version using red lentils I will post my recipes in another post as this one is running a bit long Sarah www.zarifa.co.il ←
  5. We use semolina, # 2 to be exact (you know how finicky grandmothers can be!). We also make our beet kubba sweet and sour, although I find that beets are so sweet these days that I only need to add the "sour", lemon and lime. It's also my favorite. Here the celebrity chefs try to gentrify the kubba by adding bread, matza meal, butter and other nontraditional additions. The grandmothers don't like messing around with the authentic kubba. I didn't know until recently but my grandmother used to make the shell using ground rice and meat as a binder (lamb, beef or chicken) and never used semolina in Iraq.
  6. wow, I am very impressed, those kibbeh look professional. I find that fried kibbeh are more difficult to make than the stewed ones, its a matter of taste. Do you use ground lamb or beef in the shell? The fried kibbeh is usually attributed to the Syrians or Lebanese but they also have stewed versions as I found out from the book Aromas of Aleppo (Poopa dweck)
  7. What soup are you making? today its lemony Harira soup with chickpeas (garbanzos), cilantro, parsley, lentils.... kids wont touch it with all the stuff lurking in it, they don't know what they are missing
  8. How hard is it to cook a pot of beans? Apparently very hard and I lost all confidence in cooking beans because even after hours of cooking and doing everything the text books told me to do (no salt, no acid, fresh and not old beans etc) I always ended up throwing it away. That is, until I found out why I was having all this trouble. So simple! I was using hard water and this was the main culprit. The solution: either filter the water or use a bit of baking soda. Baking soda binds to the calcium and magnesium ions in the hard water making them unable to interact with the beans. Only a small amount should be used when soaking the beans and this water is dumped before cooking. I also add more during cooking only if the beans still remain hard. Too much baking soda has an aftertaste and also degrades some of the vitamins (B's, I think). All those living in soft water areas don't know how blessed you are. I dismissed baking soda as an old wives tale but sometimes they have the best advice
  9. melamed

    Garbanzo Beans

    My Middle Easter chef friends showed me a trick. They soak the beans over night, change the water and then simmer. During the simmering, they add a small amount of baking soda. This causes the beans to lose their skins and you can skim them right off. Also neutralizes the acid a bit in the beans making them smoother and tastier. doc ← I add the baking soda in the soaking water and dump that before cooking. Baking soda is especially useful when using hard water (if you have lots of limescale in the coffee pot, you have hard water) because beans never get soft, even after hours of cooking. Don't overdo the baking soda, however because it leaves an unpleasant taste and also degrades some of the vitamins. When I can I use purified or filtered water instead of the baking soda trick, the chickpeas are sometimes not as soft, but they taste better to me.
  10. melamed

    Garbanzo Beans

    what I usually do is soak dried chickpeas overnight and the following morning I freeze it (without cooking), saving alot of time.
  11. It's nice to know that Iraqi cooking is alive and well in Nova Scotia. I have never made potato kubba before, as my family comes from Northern Iraq (what is now the autonomous region of kurdistan) and they have different styles of kubba. Do you make your kubba with semolina (or perhaps farina?). Beet kubba is my favorite type, I make it sweet and sour and it is just beautiful. The arum kubba is kurdish. You can read more about the arum plant on my new blog Zarifa's Melting Pot: http://zarifas.blogspot.com/ Delights in the Garden of Eden, by Nawal Nasrallah also has some excellent Iraqi Kubba recipes
  12. I would like to post a topic dear to my heart and stomach, kubba, the ultimate Middle Eastern dumpling. I once thought there was only one type of kubba (or kibbeh) but after doing a bit of research I found out there are an endless variety, from Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan, Turkey, Armenia.... They can be baked, fried and stewed. Paula Wolfert gives many kubba tips in her book Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean which was a great help. Of course, my grandmother has a PhD in kubba making and my first kubba teacher. Here are a few samples of Kuba which I cooked this month images tomato kubba syrian fried kubba Kurdish kubba with Arum (don't try this at home) Are there others passionate about Kubba out there? Sarah www.zarifa.co.il
  13. I don't think making ingira (or yemenite Lachoch bread) is very easy. I have made lachoch, which is similar to ingira except that wheat flour is used and not teff. It is tricky to get the consistancy right. To make authentic bread you must have all those little holes on top, otherwise you end up with pancakes or crepes. I still have to get used to the teff flour, very different.
  14. I believe that DC has the largest Ethiopian population in the United States. There definitely are a lot of great restaurants there. ← I heard that philly has a good selection of Ethiopian restaurants and grocery stores. sorry, but only have a hebrew ethiopian cookbook.
  15. Freekah is used by Egyptians but also by the Arabs in Israel and Palestine. Lebanese and Jordanians are also fond of it. I am not sure about the Turks.
  16. melamed

    Fenugreek

    Sorry to say, but you have been reading the recipes incorrectly. These recipes don't use the seeds which are a spice, they use the leaves which are the herb. Hence the word sabzi! It's like corriander and cilantro. I've heard of people messing this one up too - especially between british and american recipes. The British english use the word corriander - and it can mean either the seeds or greens, though they are NOT interchangeable so you have to know to what they refer. In the US cilantro has been adopted from mexican cuisine to mean the leaves, while corriander is almost always used to refer to the seeds. I suspect that you read fenugreek and thought it meant the seeds, when it actually was refering to the leaves. Now having said that there are Persian dishes that do use the seeds - but the quanities used are very different. ←
  17. Therefore I have decided to make it myself. I even got fresh Zaatar, a special Zaatar plant (Majorana syriaca) and not Thyme as many think, Authentic (relativley expensive) Sumac from the north Lebanon Border (grape looking/Red) and even grind that myself, because I even heard that most Sumac u get are mixed with something red to win on volume -- because you can only trust what you make yourself from scratch. ←
  18. Isayyen might be from the borage family, prickly alkanet. The Arab name is Lisan as far as I know. Sometimes the leaves can become quite large, the right size for stuffing but I have never eaten it. Shouldn't be eaten by those with kidney or liver problems.
  19. Another method is to stack them with a bit of salt between the leaves to keep the leaves from sticking to one another and storing them in a sealed plastic bag in the freezer. I have not tried this method but it seems very easy and the leaves don't have to be boiled to soften them before use, as they will be soft enough after defrosting. In addition, the leaves can also be dried, like peppers in the sun
  20. The only thing I can think of is making gondi, sort of an iranian matza ball made with roasted chickpea flour, chicken meat, onions and flavored with cardamon and turmeric and cooked in chicken soup. My spiceman grinds the roasted chickpeas for me. Its a great gluten-free recipe as well.
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