Hassouni

Where? What world is this? The R2 (standard for many restaurants) is in the area of $1200...is there some great Robot Coupe discount I don't know about?

OK, in the Arab Levant at least, there are two sauces for shawarma. Red meat gets "tarator" which is a sauce made of tahina, lemon, garlic, salt, and water Chicken gets "toum" which is sort of like aïoli - garlic, lemon, salt, and oil drizzled slowly in while blitzing until a mayo-like consistency is achieved. These two sauces are borderline canonical and I have never heard of anything else being used. Tarator is also used for falafel, by the way. The yogurt cucumber thing is known as cacık in Turkish, whence Greek "tzatziki" (pronounced jajiki), and Iraqi Arabic "jajeek". In Levantine Arabic it's simply known as "laban w khyar" (yogurt and cucumber), much like Persian maast o khiaar, with the same meaning. It's consumed as a dip/salad, not as a sauce on meaty things.

There's a Turkish version that I've also seen in Lebanon that appears to be eggplant chunks cooked in onion and tomato sauce, or something like that. No idea what relation it has to the eggy Tunisian version that has been made famous around the world by Israeli chefs.

I've found, through a lot of recent trial and error, that the following works best: -When you put the dough onto the surface to pre-shape, no flour, no water. You want a bit of tackiness while you roll/turn the dough around to get a ball -for final shaping, very lightly dusting the top side of the now flattened ball, and lightly dusting around the perimeter of the ball/disk, and then lightly flouring a surface next to it. Quick movements with the bench scraper are your friend - you quickly jab it under the dough ball assisted by the flour along the perimeter, then when it's all loosened up, flip the floured side onto the floured surface, and then the sticky side is facing up, and you fold that on itself to create tension. In all cases, quickness and lightness of hands is really key Disclaimer: I've only been doing this for a couple months but baking very frequently in that time, and I've been focusing on pretty wet doughs and this is what has worked best for me

That plus making sure the dough has really been strengthened through a lot of folding/kneading. It makes the dough more likely to stick to itself than you or whatever surface it's on. Also, use wet hands rather than floured hands for everything until the final shaping, that'll help with sticking too

Rum, lime, and sugar

The ONLY problem I have with Darto is the absolutely ungodly amount of thick protective gunk they put on the pans when they ship the out. It takes a LOT of barkeeper's friend, steel wool, and elbow grease. It sucks.

My preferred way is to make 2 cuts parallel to the seed, removing two wide slices, sort of like this: (| |). Then peel the skin off the central part with the seed and just eat around it. For the 2 pieces you cut off, you can score the flesh and pop out the pieces into a sort of hedgehog-looking thing, and then cut them off or eat them directly - or you can just not bother scoring them and use a spoon if it's ripe enough. Mangos kick ass!

How does this book compare to Fuchsia Dunlop's new edition, The Food of Sichuan?

Nah we're all Darto converts now

Hey now, as an actual Mesopotamian, I'd like to state that my people have never eaten dung!

I found some Trader Joe's white whole wheat flour that has been sitting around for a few years and decided to bake with it. I used a technique I've employed before with great success for 100% whole wheat sourdough - flour and water autolyse overnight in the fridge, then add salt and sourdough starter and mix well - leave to ferment for a while doing some stretch and folds, pre-shape-, shape, then pop in banneton and proof overnight in the fridge. With this flour, several things were off. Firstly, the raw flour behaved and even smelled more like masa harina than wheat - pretty much zero gluten development after the overnight autolyse, then with all the mixing/kneading and S&Fs, VERY little gluten development and the dough never got "smooth and elastic". I managed to pre-shape and shape it decently and then did the proofing and baking, and it even got a little bit of oven spring (proof that it was wheat and not corn I guess!) - but cutting into it, the inside was super dense and super wet and gummy, even after 25 minutes at 500ºF, then another 20 or 25 at 450, then cooled off in the turned-off oven. It also tastes really weird, it does NOT taste like normal whole wheat flour, white flour, or anything else. Are these signs of rancid flour? Is it dangerous to eat? And moreover, when I used it to refresh my starter - did I damage my starter?

Samosa as are from sambousak which are of Persian origin and made it east to the Arab World and Horn of Africa, as well as Central asia, where they're known as "Samsa". Naan simply means "bread" in Persian. The Tandoor was around in Mesopotamia since Akkadian times with the name "tinuru", (modern Arabic "tannour") and similarly spread out. But in Persian naan/noon is literally any bread Pilav/Polow is also a Persian word. Mantı is Turkic in origin, spread by the Mongols as far east as Korea (mandu) and as far west as...I dunno, Eastern Europe, where they call it pelmeni?

Does adding commercial yeast to sourdough change the fermentation byproducts for which sourdough is so touted?

For the first time, I have enough Darto for my space that I think I can hold off