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Breaking good: recipes for the High Holy Days

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By the time break fast comes along, I’m broken.

I’ve spent 25 hours without food or water. Much of that time I’ve been in synagogue. In the morning, I’m sure I’ll never make it, especially because God seems to wait precisely until Yom Kippur to deliver the hottest day of the year to Los Angeles.

There’s a rhythm to the fast. The first challenge is going without coffee. Make it through that affliction, and it just gets easier. Sitting in the midst of Nashuva’s services in Koreatown, there’s the music; there’s my wife, Rabbi Naomi Levy, on the bimah; family and friends surround me. I can go hours without thinking of food — a record for the year.

The dip comes when services let out for an afternoon break, from 2 to 5. That’s when I usually notice: There are a lot of places to eat in Koreatown. A lot. How much can Koreans eat, anyway?

By Neilah, the closing service, the hourslong Yom Kippur liturgy has forced me to look back over the year — over the decades — and pay special attention to where I’ve fallen short. At the same time, the ecstatic singing, my wife’s sermon — those send my emotions in the opposite direction. I am emptied out and filled up. I am exhausted and invigorated.

And by the time three stars appear in the night sky, and the fast is over — I’m not hungry. Fasting plays tricks on your appetite. You think you can’t live without food, then you realize you can, then you think somehow you have reached a spiritual place beyond hunger, beyond need — and then you almost faint.

But what to eat? That’s always been the trouble with break fasts. After going foodless for so long, I want something good — but simple. I’m also not looking to start cooking, so the food should be prepared before Yom Kippur and ready to eat right when it’s over.

That’s why the go-to break fast meal is light: smoked fish, sweets, vegetables. You want to slowly awaken your senses, not put a blow horn next to their ear.

Here you can go one of two ways. Order a lox platter or make one yourself. My favorite lox these days comes from Wexler’s Deli in downtown L.A. Like everything Micah Wexler prepares there, it’s made in-house, smoked low and slow over applewood, and sliced so thin you can read a machzor through it. Wexler’s (which is not certified kosher) has smoked fish platters that are expensive, but, hey, you’ve just saved a day’s worth of food bills.

Alternatively, smoke your own. My single best food-related purchase of the year has been a Traeger barbecue, which uses pure hardwood pellets. It doesn’t maintain a low enough temperature to make lox, which needs to be cold-smoked at around 70 degrees, but it does hot-smoke cured salmon into something more deeply flavored and substantial. Serve with an Israeli salad with yogurt and za’atar dressing and some late-summer ratatouille, and you will feel the hunger dissolve, the weight of atonement lift, and the promise and joy of a new year to come.

HOT-SMOKED SALMON

  • 3 tablespoons brown sugar

  • 1 1/2 tablespoons kosher salt

  • 2 teaspoons smoked paprika

  • 1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper

  • 2 pounds wild or naturally farmed salmon filet (preferably center cut)

 

Combine brown sugar, salt, paprika and pepper; rub mixture liberally onto both sides of salmon filet. Let rest on wire rack for 1 hour or more so some liquid drains. 

Heat barbecue smoker on lowest setting. Place salmon skin-side down on rack and close lid. Smoke until cooked through, about two hours. If needed, increase temperature to finish cooking. 

Makes 4 to 6 servings.

LOS ANGELES ISRAELI SALAD WITH YOGURT ZA’ATAR DRESSING

  • 2 cucumbers, peeled and diced

  • 3 tomatoes, diced

  • 3 radishes, chopped

  • 1 avocado, peeled and diced

  • 1/2 cup plain yogurt

  • 2 teaspoons za’atar

  • 2 tablespoons good-quality olive oil

  • Salt and pepper

  • 1 teaspoon freshly squeezed lemon juice, or to taste

 

In a large bowl, gently fold together all ingredients. Adjust seasonings to taste. Refrigerate until serving.

Makes 4 to 6 servings.

See more recipes at jewishjournal.com/foodaism.  Follow on Instagram and Twitter.

Recipe: How to make harira

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When you learn to make traditional Moroccan harira from Meme Suissa, you're not learning to make harira from Meme Suissa. You're learning to make harira from her mother, from her grandmother, and so on. You're learning a recipe that goes back centuries.

But of course Meme uses no recipe. Her daughter Kathy Shapiro stood by and wrote down the amounts for ingredients that have never before been quantified. Meanwhile, I stood across from Meme and watched her cook — watched her measure onions in the palm of her hand and spices between her three fingers. Many times, she didn't even look at what she was picking up; she just knew the feel and the weight by the experience of her 84 years.

Harira is a traditional Moroccan soup. In the Suissa home in Casablanca, and then in Montreal, it was served at festive meals as well as everyday dinners. What makes the soup special is the slurry of flour and water added for thickening, followed by fresh-squeezed lemon juice beaten with egg. The jolt of acid brightens the flavors of the vegetables and chicken and puts the soup squarely into the tradition of Greek avgolemono and Persian stews and soups that rely on sour limes, sumac and other such flavorings. Make it correctly, and every bite will reveal new flavors.

It's a one-dish meal, complete with garbanzo beans, lentils, noodles, egg, many vegetables and, if you like, chicken. You could eat a salad with it, but you won't have room for much more.

Harira, gentle and nourishing, belongs to both Muslim and Jews in Morocco. The Jews eat it to break the Yom Kippur fast (well, that and a shot of fig liquor). The Muslims serve it during Ramadan. 

More after video.

When I first asked Meme to show me how she makes the harira, it was the dead of winter — and I can't imagine a better soup to have on a cold day. But made with the first vegetables of spring or the ripe tomatoes of summer, the soup is adaptable to any season.

As for spicing, Meme told me people in Morocco like the soup with fresh or dried chili. But her family, she lamented, never likes it spicy.

Making the harira couldn't be easier. Meme sautéed carrots, onions and celery, added her spices, her stock and tomatoes and let it simmer. Then she mixed together and added flour and water to thicken, then the egg and lemon juice, along with some noodles. She boiled it for a short while longer, and it was ready.

While it was cooking, we sat down — and maybe it was the smell of the soup suffusing a kitchen near Pico Boulevard that sparked her memory  — but Meme began to reminisce about life in Casablanca.  

Everyone lived together, joined by private courtyards, shaded by lemon and orange trees. The men returned from work for long lunches, the children played together, the women had help.

“We had a very good life,” she said.

After the Six-Day War caused a backlash against Jews in Arab countries, the Suissa family left for Montreal, and Meme’s life changed drastically. She and her husband worked long hours, scrimping to raise children without help, the extended family dispersed across a cold, snowy city.  

The one constant was the food, brought from Morocco, unchanged. In her son David’s kitchen, Meme conjured up the memory of Casablanca again, hot and (gently) spiced, in a bowl.

Meme Suissa's Moroccan Harira Soup

This is Meme Suissa’s recipe as written down by her daughter, Kathy Shapiro. For a vegetarian version, you may substitute vegetable broth and omit the chicken.  That’s our suggestion, not Meme’s.

  • 2 cups diced onions

  • 2 cups diced celery

  • 1 cup chopped parsley

  • 1 cup chopped cilantro

  • 1/4 cup olive or vegetable oil

  • 1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric

  • 1/2 teaspoon dried red chili (optional)

  • 1-2 teaspoon salt

  • 1 teaspoon pepper

  • 1 cup green lentils, rinsed

  • 1 can (15 ounce) garbanzo beans, peeled

  • 1 can (15 ounce) crushed tomatoes or 4 medium chopped fresh tomatoes

  • 2 quarts or more good chicken broth*

  • 1 egg

  • 1/4 cup fresh lemon juice

  • 1/4 cup flour

  • 4 cups cold water

  • 3/4 cup extra fine egg noodles

  • Half of a cooked chicken, cubed or shredded, white and dark meat (from chicken used to make broth)

  • 1/4 cup chopped cilantro

 

Whisk together flour and water, set aside.

Beat egg and lemon juice, set aside.

Heat oil and add onion, celery, cilantro, parsley, turmeric, chili (if desired) and 1 teaspoon salt.

Sauté over medium/high heat until well-cooked and blended, about 10 minutes.

Add 1 quart of the stock, lentils, garbanzos and tomatoes, bring to a boil.

Reduce heat and simmer until lentils are tender but not too mushy, about 20-25 minutes.

Add remaining stock, chicken, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon pepper and continue to simmer another 5 minutes.

While stirring slowly, stream in egg/lemon mixture, followed by half of the flour/water mixture.

Bring to a low boil. Stir in noodles.

At any point, add a bit of stock, water or flour mixture to desired consistency. The soup should be hearty and somewhat thick.

Stir in remaining 1/4 cup cilantro. Add salt to taste.

*Meme makes hers with a whole chicken, water and onion, salt and pepper, simmered for a couple of hours.

Koreatown Lunch

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At night Koreatown is Manhattan– packed restaurants, backed up valet stands, lines out the doors to even the diviest BBqs.  By day, it's a different story.  You might be the only customer. You'll see the families behind these family-run places.  You'll see the servers plucking the stems off a haystack of sweet peas piled on a dining table. Or you'll see this: the daughter sitting alone in a place that by midnite wll  be crammed full of hipsters.  She'll be watching educational cartoons in English.  Her immigrant parents will be peeling a pile of fishy-smelling brown roots, getting ready for the dinner rush.  And the girl?  She'll be going to medical school.

I took this picture when I had a lunch meeting at Yan Bian on 3rd and Western Friday afternoon.  We were the only customers. We let the owner bring us three of her favoirte Korean-Chinese dishes, all of them spiked with pointy red chilis.  My favorite things: Spicy chicken. Beef with mushrooms and chili.  And this picture.

5 Steps to the Best Nicoise Salad

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This story by Judy Zeidler about cooking for an empty nest really hit me hard.   Judy is a glass-half-full bundle of enthusiasm, and I suppose her children follow suit. Their brood departs, they adjust their recipes, move on.  I find myself not so… adjustable.

Our son left for college two years ago and I still haven't got used to cooking for three.  Now our daughter is on the cusp of college, and I'm facing cooking for two.  It just…sucks.  A big part of the joy of cooking is the joy of feeding– at least feeding the people you love.  That's what gives me the energy to look forward to shopping and cooking after a full day at work.  That's often been my recreation after a full day at work.

Long before we had kids, I loved to cook dinner for just the two of us.  Aren't I just going back to that?  Yes, and no.  Ever since we filled those two seats at the dinner table, anything less than four feels a bit empty.  I find myself making faster, simpler things, the kind of dishes that scale down from four servings to two but still feel like a meal.

Nicoise salad is one of those dishes.  Almost every week, when the kids filled the table, I'd make one with whatever vegetables were freshest.  Now I'm pushing to make a slighty smaller version– though I still find myself making enough at least four, out of habit.

Nicoise is easy because we always have a can of tuna or a hunk of wild cold-smoked salmon, and eggs.  You open, arrange with whatever good vegetables are around (lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes, green beans, peppers, avocado), add capers and olives, lemon and olive oil– done. Easy– but not perfect.

To make it even better, here are five tips I've learned over the years:

1. Use olive-oil packed tuna or use a lot of oilive oil and lemon directly on your tuna.  Dry clumps or shreds of tuna in the salad feel like eraser in your mouth.  Tuna needs moisture.  

2. Make a simple dressing. Make a dressing of 1 part fresh-squeezed lemon juice, three parts great olive oil, salt, pepper and a lump Dijon mustard.  Keep it simple but strong.

3. Warm potatoes, warm eggs, cold dressing.  Boil potatoes and slice while still warm.  I scrub but don't peel them if the skins are thin. Place them still warm onto the salad, and pour the cool dressing directly onto them.  It absorbs and each potato becomes a small salad in itself.

4. Don't skimp on capers, or olives.  Capers and olives are the salt of your salad.  Rinse the capers briefly to get rid of excess salt or vinegar, then scatter like salt across the surface.  Use whatever good olives you have, not the canned California type.  I prefer kalamata olives in my Nicoise. Saltier and meatier.  If they're not pitted, warn your guests.

5. Eggs slightly undercooked, beans slightly overcooked. Soft eggs with bright yolks taste better and separate ypur salad from the stuff they serve at the cafe in your office building.  And green beans that are one smidge softer than al dente soak up the dressing better, melt in with the rest. Place your eggs in cold water and bring to boil.  Reduce heat a bit and continue on a gentle boil for two and a half minutes.  Drain and let sit.  When ready to serve peel and slice in half.   As for the beans, blanch in boiling water until very tender, just past bright green.  Immediately plunge into cold water, drain and add to sald.

I'll put the recipe below. It serves four.  Or, with a bit of melancholy, two.

 

[RECIPE]

Nicoise Salad

1 head butter lettuce or other green (arugula, spring mix, etc)

1 handful green beans, trimmed

3 ripe tomatoes, diced

1 avocado, peeled, seeded, cubed

1 yellow , red or orange pepper, cored and diced

1/2 pounds potatoes, scrubbed.

4 eggs

olives

capers

1 lemon

2 teaspoons Dijon mustard

1/2 c. olive oil

salt and pepper

 

Make the dressing:  squeeze lemon juice into a small powl.  Add mustard and stir well.  Add olive oil, salt and pepper and whisk, shake or stir briskly.  Taste and adjust with more lemon or oil.

Fill a 2 quart saucepan with water.  Bring to a boil. Add green beans and boil until very tender, remove and plunge into cold water. Drain and dry.

Add eggs  to boiling water.  Boil for ten minutes, remove and place in cold water.

Add potatoes to the boiling water and cook until very tender.

In the meantime, in a large rather flat bowl, place lettuce, then arrange the vegetables in groups on top.  Place tuna in center, sliced potatoes and eggs around that.  Sprinkle with capers and olives. Pour dressing over all.  Serve.

World of Flavor

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Every two years, the Culinary Institute of America hosts its World of Flavors conference in its castle-like Napa Valley compound.

Some of the planet’s best chefs show up, along with food purveyors from across the globe, and the endless meals, spread out in a massive hall lined with wine casks the size of Spanish galleons, each revolve around a single educational theme, so that the attendees — institutional food vendors, manufacturers, restaurant chains, journalists — can deepen their understanding about one aspect of food, and in turn use that knowledge to impress, entice and engorge you, the ever-hungry consumer.

Last year’s subject: spices.

I went — first, because I knew I would get to eat some of the world’s best food and wine in the company of great chefs over two crisp fall days in Napa, and second, because the World of Flavors is a stealth United Nations.  It quietly, consistently, draws chefs from countries and cultures that otherwise are in conflict, if not active warfare.  I scanned the roster and found chefs straight from, or originally from, Iran, Egypt, Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, and, yes, Israel. 

World of Flavors is a kind of chefs sans frontiers, where cooks come to cook and learn from other cooks—and they bat away questions about politics from people like me.   It’s a cliché—but one that I never get tired of– that food can break barriers.  But in  Napa, I actually began to see how, and it had exactly to do with the subject of this particular conference.

Chefs from Italy, Sri Lanka, Iran and Israel, divided by culture, religion, distance, and even by cuisine, nevertheless all share a common language — spices.

It turns out those fragrant ingredients haven’t just inspired cooks, they have shaped history and culture. We are the beneficiaries of an ancient spice trade that started millennia ago, with no concern for modern borders.  The arc of flavor began in the far-off, exotic spice-producing countries and spread to Europe, China and the New World.

Not that the process was always pretty.  The Dutch decided to take over the West Indies clove and nutmeg trade, and in doing so massacred entire islands full of people. The Spaniards plundered tropical America and returned to Europe with chilis and chocolate. 

But the upshot was the beginnings of Tom Friedman’s flat world.  Most of the world’s basil, which is indigenous to India, now comes from Egypt’s Nile River valley.  Most herbs come from the Mediterranean, home to 17 species of oregano. Dutch food is inflected with Indonesian spices.

“The ramifications of the spice trade are that the world came together through food,” according to Michael Krondl, author of “The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice,” who was a featured speaker at the conference.

On the second floor of the CIA’s Greystone headquarters, a historic castle-like property in St. Helena, chefs from around world took over the stations of a gleaming, cavernous kitchen and proved Krondl’s point, dish by dish.

I was most curious, for obvious reasons, about the Middle Eastern chefs. I wandered over to demonstrations by cookbook author Joan Nathan and the Israeli chef Erez Komarovsky.

“From Thailand to Israel every dish begins with onion, garlic, and chili,”Komarovsky said.

For a dish of baby cauliflower stuffed with lamb, he added spoonfuls of cumin, cinnamon and clove, all of which he ground by hand.  The room filled with fragrance.

Fragrance, rare and familiar, was everywhere.   Singaporean Indian chef/author Devagi Sanmugam brought kapok blossoms and stone flower, a lichen that grows inside wells, from Singapore. Musa Dagdeviren—the Turkish Emeril Lagasse– made a lamb and eggplant dish flavored with cumin, lamb fat—loads of it — a slab of butter and a sun-dried Turkish chili called marash.  Marash, mark my words, will be the chipotle of 2014.

In another room,  Khulood Atiq, one of the first professional female chefs in the United Arab Emirates, was preparing a typical Emirati spice blend:  dried lemon, cumin, coriander, and fennel.  Outside, Moroccan chef Mourad Lahlou prepared a rub for lamb shoulder: saffron and cumin blended with soft butter.

“In Morocco,” he said, “food and cooking is about memories, looking back more than looking forward.”

Back inside, Yotam Ottolenghi, chef and author of the best-selling “Jerusalem: A Cookbook,” made a kind of shakshouka with ground lamb and harissa — yes, there was a lot of lamb everywhere — while chef Greg Malouf, whose family is Lebanese, looked on, and traded notes.

As the dishes piled up, the conflicts that bedevil cultures seemed to whither under the relentless sensual assault of fragrance and flavor.  The chefs ran from their own classes to taste dishes prepared by their fellow chefs.

I stood beside a Thai chef as we  sampled ‪Djerba chef Abderrazak Haouari’s chickpea sous vide egg, harissa, olives, capers and croutons.  It was the best breakfast dish you’ve never heard of. “I want to hug him,” the Thai chef said.

Spices, so often acquired in conflict, now serve as a bridge among cultures.   If only we all understood what chefs do:  It would be a dull world, indeed, without the strange, the new, the different.

“You almost think,” Ottolenghi said, “a little lemon juice would solve all the world’s problems.”

 

Read my last column on the 2009 conference here.

There is a ridiculously small fee ($7.99) to watch the videos from the conference.  They are 1000 times more educational than the Food Network.  The link is here.

[RECIPE]

Harous

Chef Abderrazak Haouari uses this Djerban version of harissa on sous vide eggs, served with chickpeas, capers, croutons and olives.   It is brick red and warmly hot:  great with fish, eggplant, chicken.

Makes 1/2 cup.

1 medium onion, very thinly sliced

Pinch of turmeric

2 tablespoons kosher salt

4 ancho chiles, stemmed and seeded

3 dried chipotle chiles, stemmed and seeded

1/2 teaspoon ground coriander

1/2 teaspoon ground caraway seeds

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper

Pinch of cinnamon

3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

In a shallow bowl, toss the onion slices with the turmeric and salt. Cover the onion with plastic wrap and let stand overnight at room temperature.

Meanwhile, heat a cast-iron skillet until hot to the touch. Add the anchos and chipotles and toast over moderate heat, pressing lightly with a spatula until the chiles are very pliable and fragrant, about 1 minute. Transfer the chiles to a work surface and let cool completely, then tear them into 1-inch pieces. In a spice grinder, coarsely grind the chiles.

Drain the onion slices in a strainer, pressing hard to extract as much liquid as possible. Transfer the onions to a food processor and pulse until pureed. Add the ground chiles, coriander, caraway, pepper and cinnamon and process to a paste. With the machine on, gradually add the olive oil and puree until fairly smooth.

The harous can be refrigerated for up to 6 months.

The Word of the Day Is Knaidel

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How do you spell knaidel?  M-a-t-z-o-h B-a-l-l.

The word that 13 year-old Arvind Mahankali from Queens, NY spelled to clinch the 2013 Scripps National Spelling Bee championship last night is German for a small mass of dough.  But its most common meaning in America is matzo ball.

Normally the word, which is German and Yiddish, is used in its plural form, knaidlach—because who can eat just one matzo ball?

From Los Angeles to Queens, the only place you’ll see the word is on deli menus. And not just in America: the menu at the venerable Harry Morgans deli – branches in London and Latvia—features Chicken Knaidlach Soup for £5.95.

I feel for the kids who lost out to Mahankali.  They’re home Googling knaidel, finding that it’s spelled in English many different ways: knaidel, kneidel, kneydl. 

There’s just as many ways to make knaidlach as there are spellings.  You use matzo meal, of course, and eggs, liquid, along with a fat and salt.  The liquid can be water or chicken broth or even seltzer.  The fat can be schmaltz—solidified chicken fat—or oil. If you use lard you’re in the wrong cookbook.

You can eat turkey outside of Thanksgiving, and you can eat matzo balls when it’s not Passover.  But the spring holiday that marks the deliverance of the Children of Israel from slavery in Egypt is the time when most matzo balls get made and eaten.  Jews had to flee Egypt before their bread had time to rise, so they are commanded to observe Passover by eating matzo, which is made only with flour and water.  Those matzos, ground fine, become a meal that can be used to make dumplings—which is all knaidlach are.

You might wonder why we eat matzo to remind us how we had to hurry out of Egypt, then make matzo balls, which take a almost two hours to mix, rest and simmer.  You could knock off a few loaves of quick bread, or even some pita, in that time.  The deep theological answer is this: matzo balls taste really good.  

You mix the ingredients, simmer them in soup or water, and the dry, unforgiving shirt cardboard that is matzo transforms into a small, warm bosom, tender and soft.  A knaidel is our small miracle of transubstantiation—maybe that’s why we eat them in Spring.

Great matzo balls should be as soft to eat as knaidel is hard to spell.  There are certain Jews who claim to prefer the kind their mothers made, the ones with a dense core of unfluffed dough.  These sinkers can require a steak knife to cut and a load of seltzer to digest.  I suppose you can get used to them, even come to think they’re delicious, in the same way the Romneys convinced themselves Karl Rove was telling the truth about the Ohio results.  People we trust can feed us crap and we’ll think it tastes like truffles.

As with most simple foods, the important variations are in technique, not ingredients.  If you’ve been blessed to learn how to make matzo balls by watching your grandmother, mother or mother-in-law, and she knew what she was doing, you’re fortunate: it’s all in the details:  Mix the batter lightly, don’t beat it.  Let the dough sit in the refrigerator until it is well-chilled.  Give those matzo particles time to absorb liquid and fat deep into their stiff-necked cells.  Form the dough again with a very light, but confident touch.   Roll pieces the size of a large walnut between your palms, quickly, but don’t rush it.  The rounder the ball, the more attractive—a misshapen ball floating in soup looks disturbingly like brain.  But don’t obsess: you don’t want to press the air out. You’ll get the hang of it.

Finally, once your balls are simmering, DO NOT lift the lid to peak. There are many commandments in the Jewish religion. This is the one I’m most scrupulous about following.

The knaidel maker at the Passover seder is the central object of scorn or praise.  At our seders, where my wife, the rabbi, leads the service, beautifully, I notice that few people will judge her either way.  But that moment when the chicken soup with matzo balls finally arrives, and people pick up their spoons and cleave a knaidel in two, and lift a portion to their mouths, and swallow— that moment is an eternity.  If the soup is hot and the balls are light, and well-salted, the entire table erupts in a semi-orgasmic chorus of ahhs, like the Children of Israel have been delivered all over again.  It is a moment of sheer joy, and relief, and for the cook, a feeling of utter victory and vindication.  

Arvind Mahankali would understand.

 

[RECIPE] Rob Eshman's Matzo Balls

4 eggs

1/4 cup schmaltz (chicken fat) or vegetable oil

1/4 cup chicken stock or water or seltzer

1 cup matzo meal

1 teaspoon salt

1/4-1/2 teaspoon ground white pepper

In a large bowl, mix all the ingredients. Do not overbeat. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until well-chilled–  two hours or more.  

Bring a large pot of well-salted water to a boil.  Wet your hands. Take a lump the size of a large walnut and using your palms, form into a round shape. Drop into the water, reduce heat to a simmer and cover. Cook for about 40 minutes.  

Remove the balls with a slotted spoon.  Taste one to make sure they're cooked through– they probably will be.  Serve in hot soup, sprinkled with fresh parsley and dill.

Boulettes Larder: When Cool Chefs Serve Hot Food

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We didn’t know anything about Boulettes Larder when we stumbled upon it in a corner of San Francisco's Ferry Building last February. That in and of itself seems to be a faux pas in food-obsessed San Francisco, if not an actual Class B Felony.

The counter was filled with jars of exotic salts and spices with handwritten labels. Behind that was a large kitchen, full of working cooks. There was just one large farmhouse style table by the kitchen—either, I assumed, for setting out more products for sale, or for some kind of scheduled Williams and Sonoma-esque cooking demonstration.

“Do you serve food here?” I asked a young, pretty woman behind a counter.

“Yes, we do,” said the woman. And as she said it, two customers just ahead of us, a pair of middle aged women in Bay Area chic, audibly snickered. Oh—nothing makes a person feel more welcome, more embraced, in a restaurant than being immediately mocked.

The hostess covered quickly. “We just finished our breakfast service,” she said. “Our lunch service begins at 11:30.”

“Can we see a menu?” my wife asked. I checked over to Mrs and Mrs Snicker—they had already taken their seats at the farmhouse table.

“Chef doesn’t release the menu until 11:30,” she said.

It was 11:26. The hostess had to see our confusion– what was this menu, FedExed from Langley?

“But I think I have yesterday’s I can show you,” the hostess added.

There were seven dishes on the small printed menu from the previous Thursday. Example: Greens Soup with harissa. Vadouvan braised chicken legs. Lamb shank ragu braised with red wine and herbs (and creamy rice). Vegetarian Farmhouse (“Caramelized cauliflower, warm lentil hummus, our cows milk yogurt, toasted cumin crispy rusks, olive oil fried eggs, shallots). I turned to my wife. They could laugh at me all they wanted, but I was staying put. Attitude or not, somewhere here knew how to cook—or at least how to make food sound really good.

The place was mostly kitchen—seating seemed to be an afterthought. Gleaming copper and stainless steel pots and skillets surrounded a large central stove. Men and women in chef’s aprons tended to their chores with librarian-like quiet and surgical focus. A woman shaped macaroon dough into mounds. The pastry chef, I figured.

Our waiter was a man in his thirties with a well-trimmed beard and a friendly manner. He sat us at the head of the table, closest to the chef. I caught the eye of Mrs. Snarky, who now was smiling at me.

“You must be VIPs,” she said. 

At 11:34 the hostess handed us the menu. It was a single  8 ½ X 11 inch piece of cream-colored paper, hot off the laser printer, folded in half. We looked: Parsnip soup. Persian Salad (sweet lettuces, butter lettuce, mache, feta, citrus, herbs, dried persimmon, cucmber, radish, za’atar, pomegranate molasses) Seafood rice congee with braised shrimp, black cod, kampachi coriander and kaffir lime, warm roasted chicken breast salad (little gem lettuce, chicken broth vinaigrette, sibley squash puree, roasted baby carrots and marinated mushrooms). The Vegetarian Farmhouse was steamed barley and chickpeas with poached eggs nettle pesto and radicchio.  

At the center of the battery of cooks a stern woman, her black hair pulled back tight, worked at the stove. She never looked up to acknowledge us. Occasionally she broke from her cooking to direct or consult with the others. So she’s the chef, I thought. There were twelve diners around our table.  There were thirteen staff and cooks, including the chef.

The chef set to work on our meal. With one hand she cracked the eggs into a skillet of simmering water. With the other she centered a stainless steel bowl that she soon began filling with the tips of chervil, lettuces, madeleine-thin slices of radish and cucumber. She never once looked at us, her guests. She never smiled in welcome, or at anyone.

“Fire a parsnip” I heard her say.

Moments later the parsnip soup arrived, hot, drizzled with sharp olive oil. If she had asked I would have said it was one of the finest soups I’d ever tasted. But she didn’t ask.

She laid some raw wild white shrimp in a saute pan, let them seize up, then braised them in a broth. We were three feet from her hands as she fileted, in deft economical movements, a loin of sea bass and a side of hamachi, for the bowl of congee.

“Nice job,” I said, loud enough to warrant, at least, a grunt. Nothing. What’s the point of an open kitchen if you have a closed personality? I got the feeling she enjoyed every aspect of the restaurant, except for the part about feeding people. It made me begin to resent the whole place, except for two things:

The first is that the food she made was just superb. Her focus rewarded us first with that soup and the Persian salad— this ideal blending of za’atar and feta and dried persimmon. Then came the congee of deeply flavored seafood broth, bright with kaffir lime, along with its perfectly poached seafood and sterling fresh fish. Then for the kosher among us there was a dish of two eggs she poached in a pan so close to us its steam swirled past my daughter’s curls. The chef placed these eggs on a stew of grains and garbanzo beans and ladled a bright pesto sauce over it. At last came a persimmon pudding, dense and light and autumnal. All, perfect.

The second reason I couldn’t resent her aloofness was because, well, I understand it. I love spending time cooking. When it’s over, when the guests arrive, I can feel loss, imposition. A couple glasses of wine later I bounce back. But for me, the really fun part is over. I learned, Googling, later, that we had lucked into one of the Bay Area’s best dining experiences. For all my food reading, I’d never heard of Boulettes Larder, or the Hungarian born chef,   Amaryll Schwertner. I read, too, that Mark Bittman declared her breakfast the single best breakfast he ever had– and that man has had a few good breakfasts.  Boulettes has since outgrown its space and is moving, in July, to a larger one, where Chef Schwertner, I assume, won't be so close to the mouths she must feed.

Sure, it’s nice for the chef—for someone—to make you feel at home., to welcome you into their restaurant like you’d welcome them into your home.  But that wasn’t going to happen with Amaryll Schwertner. Instead, she just put her feeling, her passion, her knowledge, onto the plate. As they say in sports, she left it all on the field. Which, in the end, was more than good enough for me.

 

Boulettes Larder

info@bouletteslarder.com

1 Ferry Building Marketplace

San Francisco, CA 94111

(415) 399-1155

 

Note: Boulettes Larder is not kosher, but it is a Foodaism favorite.

7 Rules for Perfect Hummus

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When was the last time you opened a tub of hummus and swooned?  When was the last time a restaurant put a plate of hummus in front of you, and you said, “Oh my God.”

Most of the hummus recipes you come across on web sites, in print, on YouTube—they’re just wrong.   Most of the hummus you buy in stores, or get served at restaurants—it’s just okay.

As hummus gets more and more popular,  its manufacturers are aiming more and more for the middle.  They are substituting variety for quality. You can get mediocre hummus in ten flavors (Avocado! Chipotle!), but try finding just one batch of perfect.

And perfect hummus does exist. Lina’s in the Old City of Jerusalem. Naji’s in Abu Ghosh. Light, almost fluffy, full of fresh flavor, creamy, warm.  It’s not Middle East peanut butter.

I eat hummus every day.  I make it about once a week.   I’ve used recipes, I’ve created my own, I’ve tweaked like Steve Jobs (z”l) on a bender.    Below you’ll find my basic recipe, which I’ve adapted from Erez Komaravsky’s, the Israeli chef and cooking teacher.  (A story on Erez appears in this month’s Saveur, along with the recipe). 

Whether you use it or find your own let these rules be your guide. 

1. Do not used canned  garbanzo beans.   Ever.    Take the canned beans in your cupboard and give them to a food bank. 

2. Fresh ingredients are always better. Always.  Fresh ground cumin seeds, fresh squeezed lemon juice, fresh garlic.  Never used bottled lemon juice, though a touch of citric acid can help. Erez uses a mortar and pestle to grind his cumin.  You’ll taste the difference.

3. Use good quality olive oil. Lots of it.  In the hummus, as well as on top.

4. Don’t forget the pepper.  I use Aleppo pepper, but hot paprika or ground chili works too. 

5. Use water.   This is key.  Reserve the water you boiled the beans in. As you blend your hummus, add the water to achieve a creamy consistency.  Use a bit more than you think is correct, because after it sits you’ll see the water is absorbed.   If you’ve refrigerated your hummus, you can refresh it by whisking in some warm water.

6. Serve warm.  Freshly made warm hummus topped with a bit of mushed-up garbanzos, drizzled with olive oil, and topped with chopped parsley and paprika is the ideal.  And the pita should be warm too.

7. Use a blender, not a food processor. You get a  creamier consistency.

[RECIPE]

Galilee-Style Hummus

[Adapted from Erez Komaravsky. See original here.]

INGREDIENTS

1½ cups dried chickpeas, soaked overnight; drained

½ cup tahini

¾ cup EV olive oil, plus more

¼ cup fresh lemon juice or more

2 tsp. ground cumin

2 cloves garlic, peeled

1 t Aleppo pepper or 1 small fresh hot red chile pepper, stemmed and seeded

1 1/2 t Kosher salt, to taste

INSTRUCTIONS

Bring chickpeas and 4 cups water to a boil in a 4-qt. saucepan. Reduce heat to medium-low and cook, covered, until chickpeas are very tender, 1-1½ hours. Drain, reserving ½-1 cup cooking liquid; let cool until warm, not boiling. Transfer all but ¾ cup chickpeas to a food processor with the tahini, oil, juice, cumin, garlic, chile, and salt; purée until smooth. Add reserved cooking liquid and continue to purée until airy in consistency, about 5 minutes. Transfer hummus to a serving dish. Top with remaining whole chickpeas, drizzle with more oil, and sprinkle with salt.

After a a few minutes, taste and adjust seasoning.  You may need more water for a creamy texture.

Israel à la Tarte Tatin

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Restaurants have souls.

It comes across as much in the food as in the feeling you get from being there. You don’t find it out from the advertising. Otherwise every time you ate in an Applebee’s you’d feel comfy and at home, instead of bored and dissatisfied. You don’t discover it in the marketing. Otherwise every time you ate in a Burger King you’d feel edgy and cool, not gross and sad.

And it doesn’t even come across just from the food. Plenty of places with great food leave you cold. Meanwhile, a place with a warm soul like my late, lamented Benice in Venice, may never get a Michelin star, but leave their diners feeling warm and satisfied.

And that explains why a visit to the small and very French Tarte Tatin Bakery & Café on Olympic Boulevard near Doheny Drive makes you feel like you’re at home … in Tel Aviv. The pastries at Tarte Tatin — pains au chocolat, croissants and, of course, tartes tatin — look and taste like something in the window of a Paris patisserie. They are stacked up behind the counter of the tiny all-white space, and they are deceiving. Because as good as they are, as French as they are, as close to the Patricia Wells-ian ideal as they are — the soul of Tarte Tatin is Israeli.

Chef and owner Kobi Tobiano is an Israeli of Algerian heritage. His little gem of a cafe is the kind of place you’ll find tucked into a side street off Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard. It has no pretensions. The service can be spotty, sometimes rushed, always familiar. The food aspires, and reaches, an international standard. It is small, it hits way above its weight, and it is full of surprises — just like Israel.

The biggest surprise of all: You’ll find the best Israeli breakfast in Los Angeles at Tarte Tatin.

In that imaginary café off Rothschild, breakfast would mean a selection of craft breads, thick leben cheese doused in olive oil, some feta, olives, chopped tomato and cucumber salad with za’atar, maybe a bite of homemade hummus and a couple of eggs. Order the Israeli breakfast at Tarte Tatin ($16) and that’s what you get, along with dark, hot coffee. It’s all laid out in neat white ceramic dishes, and every bite recalls Tel Aviv. Ask for Tobiano’s smoky hot harissa, as well as for a glass of limonana — lemonade with mint.  

The other surprise is the Tunisian Tuna Sandwich ($11.95), which has become my favorite tuna sandwich in the city. Tucked into a soft, homemade French roll you get olive-oil-packed tuna, slices of potato, a shmear of that harissa, olives, hard-boiled egg, pickles and slices of preserved lemon.

Where do the excellent olives and leben in this Israeli-French café come from?  Tobiano’s Lebanese supplier, of course.  An Israeli chef of Algerian heritage running a French cafe in Beverly Hills using ingredients from Lebanon to make the best Israeli breakfast in all of Los Angeles — of course.  

Tobiano trained professionally as a pastry chef and served as one at Charles Nob Hill in San Francisco. He arrived in Los Angeles and worked as a private chef. Tarte Tatin is his dream-come-true place of his own, and as hard as he works — constantly, ceaselessly — and as much as he bemoans his lack of rest, you can tell he has created a place that exactly reflects the food of his heritage, the foods of his home, the foods he loves. That’s what makes Tarte Tatin special. That’s what gives it its soul.

Tarte Tatin Bakery & Café, 9123 W. Olympic Blvd., Beverly Hills. (310) 550-0011. NOTE: Tarte Tatin is not certified kosher. But it is certified a Foodaism favorite.

Rob Eshman is publisher and editor-in-chief of TRIBE Media Corp./Jewish Journal.

Passover at Malachy's Bar

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For years now I have had a pre-Passover ritual: I drink one last beer before the holiday starts. 

According to Jewish law, for the entire eight days of Passover, you're forbidden from eating or drinking foods made with wheat, barley, rye, spelt or oats.  Those of you into $10,000 Pyramid would by now have guessed the answer why:  these are “Things That Could Be Leavened.”  And at passover leavened bread is a no-no.

All year I have a, hmm, complex relationship with kosher, outside our home.  But during Passover,  for some reason, I'm scrupulou. I do avoid these foods.  Even though this means avoiding one of my favorite foods, beer.

Usually I just put a bottle aside as we’re cleaning the house in preparation for the holiday, and I make it the last grainy thing to toss out—and I toss it right down my throat.

But this year we celebrated Passover in New York City, and in the apartment where we stayed the only beer was a can of Bud Light, which doesn’t have enough beer flavor to last me through the eight day holiday.  Actually, it doesn't have any flavor at all.

I asked Naomi to join me on my quest for a local bar and a last beer and she was game.   Usually on the first night of Passover we are home, and I am so busy cooking I won’t see her until the seder starts.  Now we had a moment to enter the holiday peacefully, together.

It was cold and overcast and miserable—that is, spring in New York. We  soon decided the best bar was the closest one.   At 72nd and Columbus,  I pulled open the  door on the first storefront with with a beer sign in the window – the sign above the door said Malachy’s.  

An Irish bar at 4 pm on a Monday in New York City— now that’s some good people watching.

We sat at a small table. I ordered a Guinness, and Naomi nursed a coffee with milk she’d bought from a bakery across the street. Then we began a round of “What’s up with them?”

At the side of the bar closest to the front door sat a single woman, pretty, blonde, in her Anne Klein best, drinking alone.  Two musicians walked in, lugging a standup bass in a case.  At another table an older, bald man held a series of meetings with a steady stream of rough-hewn deliverymen who came in and out—we figured he was either the owner, or a bookie.

At the other end of the bar stood the bartender. He was a very solid Irishman with the face of former boxer and shiny head, and the older man and woman he talked and joked with seemed to all be on their second or third round.

An ancient black cook emerged from the kitchen with a plate of fried food. His white apron was tied around his rib cage, over a T shirt that said, “I’m the Cook.”

At the four-top beside us sat an odd family assortment—a little girl, an old man, maybe 80, eating fish and chips, and a woman, middle age, likely the mom.  After a while these people got up to leave.   The older man paid, and I heard him tell the bartender he was about to celebrate his 74th wedding anniversary.

Seventy-four?  I had to say something.

“How is that even possible?” I asked.

His granddaughter—the woman about our age— explained.  They were Jewish. Her grandfather had been coming to Malachy's every year just before the start of Passover  to have one last whiskey—a Seagrams VO, on the rocks.  He was 99 years old.  He'd been coming to Malachy's on the even of Passover, every Passover, for 30 years.

The man and his wife live in Baltimore, but they spend the seder nearby with their daughter and her family.

“One day he went out for a walk to get away from the craziness,” his granddaughter told me, “and he stopped at this bar for a drink, and he’s been coming back ever since.  When I was my daughter’s age, he would take me.”  she pointed to the little girl. ” And now he takes his great-granddaughter.”

“He just has a glass of whiskey each year before Passover?” I asked.

Oh, no, the daughter corrected me.   “He drinks two every night.  He's been doing that as long as I remember.”

The man was tall, straight-backed, and from overhearing their conversation, I could tell he was as sharp as anybody in the place.

I raised my glass to the man and said “L’chaim,” and we wished him a Happy Passover, there in Malachy’s Pub.

The man and his family walked out.   

I turned to the bartender and said, “I'll have what he's having.”

And I toasted Passover– and a 99 year old man named Albert– with my very first sip of Seagrams V.O.