Ful Medames

And now for the easiest recipe of the 101 Recipe Challenge thus far, Ful Medames.  The introduction to the recipe lists the dish as the national dish of Egypt and a delicacy usually eaten for breakfast.  I'm a big fan of many types of beans, so I was looking forward to this recipe (with the exception of the hard boiled eggs).

The recipe consists of canned fava beans, lemon juice, garlic, olive oil, cumin, cayenne pepper, salt, black pepper; with chopped parsley and hard boiled eggs for garnish.  I drained and rinsed the beans and placed them in a 2 quart saucepan and covered them with water by 1" and boiled over medium high heat for 8 minutes.

I drained the beans again and combined with the liquids and spices in a bowl.

Using my wooden spoon, I mixed the ingredients, taking care to begin mashing the beans lightly while stirring them.  To plate, I placed the bean mixture on a plate, drizzled with olive oil, sprinkled the dish with minced parsley and surrounded with egg wedges.

Credit: Todd Coleman

While I didn't have the Ful for breakfast, after one taste I can understand why it is beloved by many in the Middle East.  I am not a big fan of hard boiled eggs, so I started by tasting the beans straight.  There haven't been many things I've eaten that have had a flavor that evolves through the mouthful as this does.  Before the spoonful even fully hits your mouth, the smell of the beans and cumin start the process, then you first taste the savory beans.  Next you catch a bit of the olive oil, but more importantly the acidity of the lemon juice.  Finally, the black pepper and cayenne give you a good kick, not enough to distract, but you still feel it.  The mouth feel of the Ful was fantastic.  The velvety mashed beans studded with some whole beans, drizzled with olive oil...it was fantastic.  I did try a few bites with the egg and didn't mind it...which is probably the best thing I could ever say about a hard boiled egg.

My wife Kim enjoys cumin as much as I enjoy hard boiled eggs, and to her credit she tried the Ful Medames.  She didn't mind the texture but the cumin was just too overpowering.  My sister had joined us for dinner (Ful for an appetizer, Beef Stroganoff - which will be my next post -for the entree) and enjoyed the beans.  Between the two of us, I believe we cleaned the plate.

All in all, will be making this again for sure.  It's quick, easy and tasty - some of my favorite qualities in a meal.

7 down, 94 to go.

Chicken with Forty Cloves of Garlic

Next up, Recipe # 32 in Saveur Magazine's 101 Classic Recipes, Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic.  I've seen variations of this recipe in several cookbooks (like these versions from the Gourmet Cookbook and Allrecipes.com) but have stayed away because I thought that the garlic would have been so overpowering that it would render the meal inedible.  In a small way, this recipe exemplifies one of the main reasons that I undertook this challenge, to expand my horizons and put me outside of my culinary comfort zone.

The ingredients for the recipe are olive oil; a whole chicken cut up into 8 pieces; salt and pepper to taste, dry vermouth, tarragon and of course - 40 cloves of garlic.  I first used my semi-fabulous butchering skills to split up the chicken into its various parts.

One of my college roommates that was a butcher's assistant taught me how to split a chicken and it is a skill that has served me well (you can find online instructions here).  In most cases, I prefer to buy whole chickens and cut them up for recipes.  If nothing else - it saves me a little on my grocery bill (usually whole chickens cost a bit less than prepared chickens; a whole lot less than boneless, skinless chicken breasts) and I usually toss the remaining carcass into the freezer to use in making chicken stock when I have the opportunity.  Nothing is better than chicken soup in the middle of December made from scratch.  After splitting the chicken, I applied an ample dose of kosher salt and ground black pepper on both sides.

I warmed up the olive oil in my dutch oven over medium high heat and once it was up to temperature I  added the chicken and browned for approximately 15 minutes, turning once.  As well I began pre-heating the oven at 350 degrees.

 

While the chicken cooked, I took the opportunity to peel the forty cloves of garlic.  The recipe notes that you can use as many one hundred cloves when cooking, but I barely got forty peeled in the time it took the chicken to brown.  In retrospect, pre-peeled garlic would have been key and much more time efficient.

And of course, much easier to clean up after cooking!

After the chicken had finished, I placed it in a casserole dish and set aside and tossed the garlic into the dutch oven to cook for 6 minutes, stirring often, until they too began to brown.

Once the garlic was browned and I had successfully tested the vermouth (martini anyone?), I added a half cup to the garlic and reduced it, scraping the bottom of the pan well as it reduced.  After two minutes I added the chicken stock and brought it to a boil.

 

 After the fragrant brew came to a boil, I transferred a quarter of the cloves to the casserole dish and used my potato masher to mash the remaining cloves into a pulpy mix, which I then poured over the chicken and placed in the oven for 20 minutes.

After the chicken was fully cooked, I followed a "bonus" step in the recipe and cooked the garlic a bit longer, then took a whisk to it to make a pan sauce.  The whisk didn't break the garlic down as much as I would have liked (maybe if I had cooked the garlic longer, it would have had the desired effect) so I used an immersion blender on the sauce until it was an outstanding emulsion of garlic and chicken juices. Below is a picture of one of my standard sauce tests - a roll or slice of bread dipped in the sauce to test it for seasoning and flavor.  I could simply use a spoon, but what fun is that.

As I noted, going into the recipe, I had a concern that the garlic would be too much and overpower the dish.  I did not need to worry.  I'm not sure if it was cooking the garlic in vermouth that mellowed out the flavor a bit or if any dish can only attain a certain level of "garlicky", no matter how much garlic you put into it.  The chicken was moist and had a great flavor, especially when additional sauce was spooned over it and sprinkled with tarragon.

Credit: Penny De Los Santos

My dining companion loved the chicken (breast) and thought that the flavor was intense, but enjoyable.  I had a wing and thigh and agreed that though it was intense (I think that we cleared the vampires from our neighborhood for good), the chicken had a great texture and earthy, almost root vegetable (parsnip, carrot) undertones in its flavor.  When I make this recipe again, in addition to using peeled garlic, I will also brown both the chicken and the garlic for quite a bit longer.  The wing I had, while cooked, was missing the slight crunch that it should have had and I believe that if I cooked the garlic longer in the first stage, it would have brought a deeper flavor to the dish and broken down more readily in the sauce when it was whisked.

Another one in the win column and and easy recipe that could be made on any given Sunday afternoon when I'm in the mood for some garlicky goodness.

Next on the list - Ful Medames (Stewed Fava Beans).

6 down, 95 to go. 

Spaghetti Carbonara

I had the day off earlier this week and decided to knock two recipes off the list at once, wanting to create two classic comfort food items - Spaghetti Carbonara and Elvis Presley's Pound Cake (post on the pound cake coming up in the next few days).

I've made Pasta Carbonara in the past using a few different recipes and I figured this wouldn't be much different than those experiences.  I unfortunately was mistaken.

The recipe calls for E.V.O.O., garlic cloves, pancetta, white wine, spaghetti, finely grated Parmesan, finely grated pecorino Roman, finely chopped parsley, eggs, salt and pepper.

I put the pasta pot onto boil first - and spoiler alert ...while I prepared the rest of the recipe, I cooked the pasta.  After heating the olive oil, I added the peeled and crushed garlic.  Funny thing about our garlic press, I always think remember seeing it in an exact spot in our kitchen utensil drawer but I can never, ever, seem to find it.  I have actually purchased multiple garlic presses, at different times, then found them intermittently while searching for something else, but can NEVER find one when I need one.  In this case I made due with our potato masher and a plate.

One of the issues I had with the recipe was that it called for me to add the crushed garlic to the oil, cook for a few minutes, then remove.  Removing any small items from hot oil is not a fun, or even safe, task, but removing crushed garlic seems to be near impossible.  In retrospect, it would have probably been just as effective to have sliced the cloves.  Regardless - it got done.

I added the pancetta and fried it until the edges browned...creating a delightful smell that drew my wife into the kitchen a few times.  Once browned I added the white wine and reduced it.  Once it had reduced by about half I pulled it off the burner.

While that bubbled away happily, I combined the cheeses, parsley and egg in a large plastic bowl to prep for the tempering process.  To the gentle readers not used to working with eggs in cooking (other than over easy and poached), they are part of some of the most phenomenally textured dishes when used correctly.  Sauces (Hollandaise for example), soups, ice cream and of course Spaghetti Carbonara owe their silky texture to eggs.  In order to achieve this state however, the egg must be slowly brought up in temperature so that they don't curdle.  It requires a certain amount of patience because if you try to push your temper you will end up with a bowl full of scrambled eggs.  In this recipe, you take a 1/4 cup of the boiling pasta water and slowly drizzle it into the cheese/parsley/egg mixture.  The heat from the water is then supposed to not only melt the cheese, but bring the egg temperature up and slowly thicken them.

While I didn't end up with very salty scrambled eggs, I did have some difficulty.  I believe that there were three things that contributed to the issue:

1. The temperature of the ingredients - This is usually a fairly quick recipe to turn around.  I had pulled the cheeses and eggs out of the refrigerator approximately 15 minutes prior to attempting to temper the eggs.  Obviously this was not long enough.

2.  The cheese I used - This one is my fault and a lesson that I should have learned when I made Kibbeh to kick off this project.  The recipe called for finely grated Parmesan and pecorino Romano cheeses.  The cheeses that I used were shredded and probably not of the highest quality.  Through my experiences in data management I should know - Garbage in, Garbage out.  If you use low quality ingredients, your final product will be low quality.

3.  Big plastic bowl - I'm not sure if this made a large difference in the process, but a warm bowl would have probably helped the mix keep its temperature better.

I slowly drizzled the 1/4 cup of pasta water into the bowl while whisking the mixture.  The ingredients began to break up a bit, but the cheese did not melt in any way.  I did a little temperature check and the mixture was stone cold.  I quickly went through my options for heating the eggs.  No amount of whisking would have brought the eggs up to a higher temp and throwing them into a saucepan and trying to bring them up to temp on a burner greatly increased the likelihood of scrambled eggs.  I could have simply added the hot pasta in hopes that by tossing the hot pasta in the mixture, the cheese would melt and the eggs would coagulate into the silky sauce, but, there would have been just as much of a chance that the noodles would have not brought the temp up enough and I would have the same issue, only with watery, eggy pasta.

Instead I popped the bowl in the microwave for 20 seconds at 50% speed.  When the time was up I removed it, gave it a good whisking, then popped it in the microwave again for another 20 seconds.  I did this about 6 times and ended up with a passable sauce that I then tossed the cooked spaghetti in.  I then added the pancetta mixture, tossed a bit more, then plated the meal, applying some sea salt and an ample dose of fresh black pepper.

 The pasta was not as bad as I thought it would be.  The texture wise it was comparable to my other Carbonara efforts.  The taste seemed a bit off however.  I'm not sure if it was the cheese or the parsley (2 tbsp seemed like a lot) but it seemed to have a very metallic taste.My wife didn't mind it as much, but only gave the recipe a 5 out of 10.  I will say that on day 2 (leftovers), the metallic taste abated a bit and the pasta was more enjoyable.

The experience of this recipe has let me know that I need to do more research prior to attempting the recipes and make sure I have all the correct equipment (or at least a passable substitute) and the exact ingredients in the recipe.  More on that in future posts.

After dinner I moved onto the next recipe, Elvis Presley's Pound Cake.  I'll save that post for another day, but foreshadow a bit by letting you know that as wrong as the egg portion of the Spaghetti Carbonara went, the egg portion of the pound cake went oh, oh so right.

3 down, 98 to go!