Baked falafels

Falafels are sheer goodness, definitely one of the best ways to consume beans. Traditionally, they are deep fried, which would stop me from making them often. Even if you deep fry them properly, they do contain more fat than I would prefer to consume. The sheer thought of heating up a vat of oil and then having to dispose of the oils makes me want to make something else.

Luckily there is absolutely no need to deep-fry falafels. Pan frying works very well, and with a non-stick or cast-iron pan, one can reduce the amount of oil used to a minimum. That approach is good when you are in a hurry, or when you are in the middle of a heat wave and the last thing one wants to do is heat the kitchen by turning on the oven. However, baked falafels do taste great and are even less messy to make than pan-fried ones.

Baked falafels

Ingredients:

• 1 15-19 oz can chickpeas, drained. I actually always cook my beans from scratch, the result is infinitely better. See the instructions below.
• 1 chopped onion, preferably sauteed. No need to sautee if you are using the sweet onion, which is what I always do.
• 2 cloves of finely chopped garlic 
• 1 tablespoons of chopped fresh parsley. I like to up the parsley to a cup, and I chop it in a small food processor.
• 2 tablespoons all purpose flour 
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder, mixed into the flour
• 1 tablespoon coriander. 
• 2-3 tablespoons of cumin
• pinch of salt and a grinding of pepper 
• 2 tablespoons of oil - olive, corn, canola, avocado, it all goes

Preparation:

Turn the oven to 350F.

Line a baking sheet with the parchment paper, and brush or drizzle the parchment with some oil.

Mash chickpeas in a food processor or with a mortar and pestle.

Combine all the ingredients in a bowl or in the food processor. If you use the food processor you will get a thick paste like consistency. If you just mix things together, you will still be able to press the mixture together and get your falafels formed.

Shape into ping-pong sized balls, or small patties, and arrange those on the baking sheet.

Optionally brush the falafels with a bit of oil.

Bake for 15-20 minutes. You can turn them over midway, but I don't so that the oven doesn't cool down.

Alternatively, pan fry falafel patties for about 5-8 minutes per side on a medium to medium high heat, on a bit of oil. Make sure falafels don't blacken, so don't rush and turn the heat way up.

Serve with tahini-yoghurt sauce - see the recipe below. They also go very well with our best tomato sauce.

Pan fried falafel on a bed of a thick tomato sauce

Tahini-yoghurt sauce:

1-2 cups of greek yoghurt

2 garlic cloves, chopped finely

1 tablespoon of cumin

2 tablespoons of tahini

juice of one lemon

salt to taste

Mix all the ingredients and eat. If prepared ahead, refrigerate. 

Freshly cooked chickpeas:

1-2 cups of dried chickpeas AKA garbanzo beans

1 tablespoon salt

1 tablespoons of dried or fresh onion, optional

1 tablespoon of coconut oil, very optional

In a container with a lid, cover chickpeas with cold water. The volume of the water needs to be at least 3 times the volume of the beans. Close the lid and refrigerate at least for 24 hours, up to three days. The beans will expand, and the soaking will also help to reduce flatulence.

Drain the beans and rinse them well. In a pot, cover the beans with water, hot or cold. Again, the amount of water should be at least 3 or 4 times the amount of the beans. Add the salt and optionally the onion. Cover the pot with a lid and bring the water to a boil, on a medium high heat. Watch out, foam will form in the pot, and the liquid may overflow, so pay attention when the beans are close to be boiling. Reduce the heat so that the water is barely simmering, and cook for 30 minutes. Taste the beans at 25 minutes to adjust the cooking time if needed. When the beans are cooked, drain them and put them into a container. Taste and add some salt if needed - you may be surprised with how no salty the beans would be after cooking.

I love to eat the beans straight when they are freshly cooked. You can splurge and add a bit of pumpkin seed oil, or butter, or olive oil, or avocado oil.

Store the uneaten beans in a fridge for up to 3 days.

Sous vide pork loin chops and roast

Pork loin is my favorite part of a pig. And I say that with the utmost respect to pork belly and pork tenderloin, which are right up there. Cooked sous-vide, pork loin gains an incredible amount of flavor from the spices that it cooks in, yet the low-temperature cooking makes sure the loin is not dried out. In fact, pork loin is a very non-trivial piece of meat to cook without sous vide. Chops are a bit easier, but I frankly do not have the skills to prepare a juicy loin roast without using a sous vide machine.

This was evident last summer when we had friends over for a visit, and we made a loin roast in sous vide. The sous vide setup was hidden from the view, so the guest had no idea how the meat was cooked. They thought we used some kind of a foil to prevent the meat from drying out. We explained that the critical factor is the temperature - at around 140 the proteins start squeezing the moisture out, and the meat becomes tougher and tougher.

I highly recommend buying an entire boneless loin - surprisingly inexpensive in the US. Then you are facing a choice - to chop or not to chop. I slice off two longer pieces for the roast, and I cut the rest of the loin into chops, just under an inch thick seems to work well.

I put a piece of meat in a metal bowl using tongues. This way my fingers stay clean and I can reach for spices freely. I season quite liberally with salt, then I grind pepper, sprinkle some gochu, the driend korean chili, some garlic powder, and some cumin. I make sure all sides of the the meat are seasoned. Clearly, I use more spices for the roast than for the chops. Because the chops are smaller, I usually season three at a time.

The meat then goes into a bag, and I add a tablespoon of dried onion flakes. Of course, one piece of the roast goes into one bag. For the chops, I put three in a bag - two for a dinner, and one for lunch the following day. I lay the chops flat next to each other - this way I get one rather thin layer that cooks much faster. Optionally, one can also add some coconut oil to the bag. The coconut oil is a good choice, because it is not liquid and will not make vacuum sealing more challenging than it should be. At the end, I vacuum seal the packages at a normal setting - with nothing wet in the bags, there is no need for special adjustments.

We usually use one package right away, the rest go in the freezer. So when we want to have some delicious pork loin, we first defrost the meat in a bowl of cold water. It goes really fast that way - or one can leave the meat in the fridge for a day or so.

With sous vide, one has to decide how long and at what temperature to cook, and it all depends on your preferences. Here are ours:

Pork loin chops: 45 to 60 minutes at 139F
Pork loin roast: 4-5 hours at 139F

After the pork is cooked, one can torch it to sear the outside, or one can sear the outside quickly in a hot pan with some high-heat oil, such as avocado oil.

There will be some liquids in the bag. These are tasty and can be used as an ingredient in a sauce.

Ricotta sourdough almond pancakes

I call this much too neglected blog "trivial food". What do I really mean by that? Definitely not the food that you prepare by opening a box. That does not even qualify as trivial. The point I am trying to make is that most of the food we eat in our life time is, in fact, trivial to make. The level of skill required is not out of reach, all that is is needed to pay attention and decide that it is worth while to invest some time into food prep. The funny thing is that, with some practice I'll admit, one can prepare a gourmet meal faster than what it takes to drive to a restaurant, order the food, and get it on the table. Yes, it takes a bit of effort, though by using things like sous vide, the effort is going down, rapidly.

Which food is not trivial, then? Stuff that requires advanced technique and training. Soba noodles from scratch. Consomme from scratch. Tender potato gnocchi. Consistency in grilling steak. Fluffy and non watery scrambled eggs. Poaching salmon without drying it out.

Why do I talk about trivial? I was wondering whether these pancakes qualify as trivial food. I think they do, though they require a longer list of ingredients than your regular pancakes. I found the result tasty and super tender, with very little effort.

Dry ingredients:

• 3/4 cup all purpose flour
• 1/2 cup almond meal
• 1-2 TBS sugar
• 1/2 to 1 tsp baking powder
• a pinch of salt

Wet ingredients:

• 1 cup ricotta
• 1 cup sourdough starter
• 3/4 cup milk
• 1 tsp orange flavoring, or a couple of drops of edible orange essential oil
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 3 egg yolks

For egg whites:

• 3 egg whites
• 1/2 tsp cream of tartar, optional
• 1.5 TBS sugar

Depending on your griddle or a pan, start preheating so that it will be hot when the egg whites get folded into the rest of the batter.

Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl.
Separate the eggs, put the egg whites in a clean, preferably copper bowl. Egg whites will not beat well if your bowl or your beaters are greasy.
Mix egg yolks and the rest of the wet ingredients in a somewhat larger bowl.
Beat egg whites, when the peaks start to show sprinkle with sugar, finish to a soft peak meringue.
Mix the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients.
Fold in egg whites, gently, not to deflate the whites completely.

Cook pancakes on a greased griddle at medium to medium-high heat, a couple of minutes per side, until golden. I like to use somewhat heaping 1/4 cup of the batter for a pancake.

Eat with butter, or even better orange butter (whip orange zest, orange juice, sugar, and unsalted butter), and honey or syrup of your choice. I like to add fresh fruit. Whipped cream or even ice cream are optional, so are chopped nuts.

Salmon burgers

For a brief period of time, fresh Copper River salmon is available in the Bay Area. This time is now, so I promptly purchased a whole salmon. We prefer our salmon filleted, which is not hard. After filleting, there is always some meat left over on the bones - scrape it out with a spoon. The leftover meat, and maybe some additional meat from the tail end of the fish provide a nice excuse to make salmon burgers. In fact, those burgers are so good, that I am considering transforming the entire fish into burgers.

Ingredients, quantities are approximate:

1/2 lb fresh salmon chopped finely
1/2 sweet onion, sauteed
2 TBS capers
1 TBS Dijon mustard
1/2 cup finely chopped parsley
1/2 cup (or more) panko crumbs
1 garlic clove, chopped finely
a good pinch of salt
oil for pan frying

In a bowl, mix all the ingredients. I prefer salmon to be in small chunks, no larger than 1/4 inch each, some smaller - the salmon will bind everything together.

Heat a pan on a medium heat, add just enough oil to cover the bottom of the pan. When the pan is hot, shape salmon into about 3/4 inch thick patties. Pan fry the patties until it is just cooked through. My guess is about 5 minutes per side. Do not rush the cooking, stay on a medium to maybe medium high heat, otherwise the salmon will overcook and the burgers will be dry. A seasoned cast iron pan works very well as it retains lots of heat.

Copper River salmon burgers

We ate the burgers with raw cauliflower and tahini yogurt sauce.

Tahini yogurt sauce

This is my variation on tahini sauce. It goes very well with raw vegetables as a dip, meat, fish, falafels, or you can snack on it on its own. Thin it down with more yogurt and you have salad dressing. The picture below does not do this sauce the justice, this is one of the best if not the best and one of the most versatile sauces I know of.

Ingredients:

2 TBS or more tahini
3/4 cup or more jogurt
juice of one lemon
1 TBS ground cumin
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
a pinch of salt

Mix the ingredients well in a bowl. Adjust the seasoning and thickness as desired. You can thin the sauce with yogurt, and you can thicken it with tahini.

Mostly consumed tahini yogurt sauce

The chicken experiment

Today during our longish walk along the bay I contemplated what to make for supper. Flavors of the memorable chicken I had at the NoMad in NYC came to mind. They flavor the chicken with a mixture of foie gras, truffles, and brioche, an equivalent to flavor nitroglycerine. If you are in NYC and do not mind spending $80 on a chicken for two, I highly recommend the experience.

So here I am, salivating over the memories of the chicken and going over what was in our fridge and pantry. Somewhat not surprisingly, we had no foie gras, no truffles, and no brioche. Ah, the disappointments of the first world.

However, the NoMad experience got my brain going. We did have some chicken drumsticks, which are pretty much my favorite part of the chicken. What can I use to make tasty seasoning for the chicken? There is not much skin on the drumsticks, so how can I get the flavorings in?

The plan formed. We did have some truffle oil. Note that we do keep truffle oil in the pantry, even though some famous chefs claim everyone should avoid it. I claim that it has its place and laugh at the snobbery. Next, tasty fat was needed: Butter will do! Mixing softened butter, some truffle oil, and some salt would give the chicken the flavor.

Without a copious amount of chicken skin, making a favoring paste with brioche crumbs made no sense. This meant that roasting the chicken drumstick made no sense, the flavoring would simply run off. Sous vide, however, allows one to baste the meet continuously in the pouch. That was it, the supper plan was formed.

Not bad at all for the first try. Next time, I will use the torch. Brush the chicken with some butter if you wish.

Here is what I did:

• Set sous-vide circulator to 149F and turn it on.
• If you are using chicken breasts, set it to 147F.
• Prepare a sous vide pouch.
• Mix 1/2 stick of softened butter with a tablespoon or two of truffle oil.
• Using chopped garlic and some herbs like thyme, rosemary, or sage would lead to spectacular results.
• Season six or so chicken drumsticks liberally with salt an pepper.

  

  Chicken really needs seasoning

• You can use chicken breast if thighs if you so desire. I suggest to stick to dark meat only, or white meat only, because they cook at different temperatures.
• Smear the chicken with the butter-oil mixture and place the chicken in the pouch.
• Add any leftover butter-oil mixture to the pouch.
• Seal the pouch. I use the settings for wet food, gentle vacuum, and I use pulse vacuum so that no liquid is sucked out of the bag, clogging and contaminating my vacuum sealer.
• When the sous-vide bath comes to the set temperature, submerge the chicken and cook it for 90 minutes to 2 hours. I went with almost 2 hours.

  

  Chicken sealed in a pouch

• When done, take the chicken pieces out of the bag and set them on a broiler pan and broil at high for 3-5 minutes.
• Alternatively, you can crisp the chicken with your trusty torch and you get to play with fire.
• Server with a nice salad. Or whatever else your heart desires. We had some quinoa pilaf and some lentils, so that was what we used, along with a salad from shaved fennel and apples.

I think the look of the chicken would have been improved if I used the torch. The flavor, however, was spot on, rich and deep, yet not overpowering.

While we are at it, until this point, my favorite way of making chicken drumstick was to simply BBQ them on a medium heat for about 15 minutes, turning by 90 degrees every 4 minutes. It is important to seasons the chicken sufficiently, only salt and pepper are needed, and it helps to toss the chicken in some high-smoking point oil such as avocado oil. The result is on par with a great steak, at least I think so. Of course, having good quality chicken helps - make sure you get at least free-range bird that did its share of roaming around if getting pasture-raised chicken is a challenge. Which it tends to be.

Bacteria at work: Sauerkraut and sauer turnips

My grandparents were farmers and each year they would make a large vat of sauerkraut, and a somewhat smaller but still large quantity of sour turnips. Sour turnips, in particular, were needed for bujta repa, a traditional dish that is not nearly as fatty as Wikipedia claims, that we always made when we would slaughter a pig.

Bujta repa, translated as "killed turnips". Maybe one should try to modernize it...

When we lived in Waterloo, Ontario, we were always able to buy decent sauerkraut from local Mennonites, so making it yourself seemed like a waste of effort. In California, however, the story changed. For the longest time, the only place where we knew to find sauerkraut was Dittmer's, a local mostly German deli. Sadly, the only sauerkraut we could get was canned in jars. It was OK, but a motivation for trying our hand at fermentation of some cabbage grew stronger.

Remnants of braised sourkrout

Once we made our first batch of sauerkraut, there was no going back. Making it is really trivial in the most basic sense, and the results are even better than what I remember from Slovenia. In fact, today we eat a good amount of sauerkraut and sauer turnips straight, maybe we wash it a bit, and on a splurgy day we add a touch of pumpkin seed oil. Yum! Besides, now I can make fun of our Korean friends that we make European-style kimchi. Of course, the good old fashioned braised sauerkraut with its fair share of smoked pork is a dish that tends to mellow out even the toughest of days. Let us leave that one for later, first we need to make some sauerkraut.

The process for making sauer turnips is the same as the process for sauerkraut so let me just tackle the cabbage, and highlight the one and only difference in the beginning: Cabbage is sliced thinly, and turnips are grated. For both I use my food processor - this is where a wide feeding tube comes in play. Just the attachments are different, a slicer for sauerkraut, set to the smallest thickness. For turnips, I use the grater attachment on the coarser side. If I used the fine side, fermentation would pretty much dissolve the turnip shreds.

The process is really simple - basically one shreds the cabbage, mixes it with salt, packes in a crock, and waits until the fermentation has done its deed. More precisely:

• Buy green cabbage: For my 2 gallon fermentation crock I go with 6 to 8 cabbage heads, 2-3lb each.
• I am not fond of red sauerkraut, but you may be.
• Remove outer leaves and the core, and slice the cabbage thinly
• Mix sliced cabbage with salt, 2.5 to 3 TBS per 5 lb of cabbage
• I slice some cabbage and mix it with salt in a large bowl before transferring to the crock
• Pack the cabbage into a clean vessel, preferably a fermentation crock
• Press the cabbage down, it will release water
• Weigh the cabbage down with a plate, and put some weight on the top
• I procured "proper" weights, Before, I would use a plastic container filled with water, and sometimes I would put in an additional heavy object such as a stone.
• If the cabbage is not completely submerged in water, add filtered water to submerge cabbage
• I seal the crock with plastic wrap because I am not too fond of the fermentation smell, and top it with a spiffy lid for the crock.
• I found an in-depth discussion and experimentation report about the jars one can use for fermentation and how one should close them.
• Move the crock/jar to a warm place and leave it there. The length of fermentation depends on the temperature:
• 6 weeks for 60F-65F
• 3-4 weeks for 70-75F
• above 80F the cabbage will spoil
• About once a week check to make sure the cabbage is still covered with water. After 3-4 weeks also start checking whether the cabbage has fermented to your taste.
• Transfer sauerkraut to plastic containers and keep it in the fridge. This way fermentation will stop or seriously slow down, and you will be able to enjoy sauerkraut for some time.
• Share the result of your work and patience with friends. They will appreciate it.

Remember that you are letting bacteria eat away sugars in your cabbage. I found the process quite robust, so have no fear. At the same time, it is good to be careful. Make sure your cabbage ferments for long enough at a high enough temperature, make sure you keep the cabbage away from oxygen, and if any molds develop, or anything odd happens, such as your cabbage turns brown, throw it away and start from scratch. 

Here are the cabbage and turnips in my crocks before the final packing.

My old setup

Notice how the cabbage is sliced and turnips are grated

After packing the cabbage, I put a weight on the top and skimmed as much of the floating cabbage shreds as I was able to.

Having the nice weights made the whole process easier

Note the water level is above the weights

Here are the results from the previous batch. The turnips are almost gone, but we still have an abundance of sauerkraut.

Keeping these in the fridge extends the shelf life nicely