One should be prepared to stumble in the kitchen now and then
- Michelle Wood: SWCD
- October 26, 2017
- 1127
I had a friend who ate falafel.
“Try it,” she said. “It ain’t so awful.”
Eager for my own falafel tale,
I cooked some up, to a miserable fail.
There are two things in the world of food about which I have rather strong feelings: Food is a chance to experience other cultures unlike any other, and one should be prepared to stumble now and then and learn from mistakes. Both scenarios collided in a greasy mess this week, leaving me sincerely wishing for a Middle Eastern teacher to get me back up and running.
I should have been prepared for trouble as I can’t even say “falafel.” For some reason the word gives my brain difficulty every time. For the record, it’s “fal-awful,” but I keep saying ‘falla fell,” as in FDR’s Scottish terrier took a tumble.
Falafel is made of chickpeas or fava beans, ground up with a mixture of herbs and spices, chiefly parsley, cilantro, cumin, coriander seed, lemon, cayenne, garlic and onions, but there are many variations.
The mixture is formed into patties or balls, fried, and usually served with vegetables and tucked into pita. An ancient food that may trace its origins as far back as the pharaohs, falafel has become more common around the world in our time and is a regular feature of street food trucks. I had never tried the dish before attempting to make it: mistake number one.
It certainly had appeal, however. Every culture, every region of the globe has its own food history. To taste the food associated with a culture or place brings you into a closer understanding of the people who brought it into being.
You can spend months reading about the struggles of, for example, the region around Turkey, sandwiched between Eastern European, Muslim and Asian nations, taken forcibly by one culture or another for centuries. As a place governed by often ruthless rulers from one culture and then another and another, cuisines were mingled by force, adaptations occurred, and new flavors emerged and spread in new directions.
The story of food is the story of humanity, and you can experience that story in an intimate, personal way in your own dining room.
That’s a lot of justification for frying up some Jewish fritters, but there you have it. The recipe I found, which looked authentic, was an Israeli version. I found it in a food blog: mistake number two. As I’ve written here before, recipes from bloggers are usually a gamble.
I picked up a cheap hand-cranked food grinder as the recipe claimed grinding made for a better final texture than using a food processor. I mixed everything up, formed them into perfect little golf-ball-sized rounds and heated oil for deep frying.
So far, so good.
Dropping one into the fat, it sizzled and bubbled in a way that looked perfect. They were to be fried for just two to three minutes, so I checked it at minute two and found a mess. It had shed layer after layer, ending up the size of a pea with exploded leaves and ground chickpeas floating in the hot oil, quickly burning.
Trying to salvage the situation, I heated a skillet and tried frying them as I turned them. Same deal: small greasy green balls and a pan of burned sludge.
I reached out to my editor, former columnist and splendid cook Kyle Valentini, for advice, and I think I’m ready to try again. I need a binder. I need to make patties instead of balls. And I need to try a sample made by someone who knows what they’re supposed to taste like.