In gearing up forPassoverI've found myself looking througha stack of modern Jewish cookbooks, finding cooking secrets I would otherwise have missed. My favorite secret? The way Steven Rothfeld makes pistachios taste like falafel in his bookIsrael Eats.
The spice blend Rothfeld uses is simple: a mixture of dried basil, marjoram, rosemary, cumin, coriander, and turmeric. Forthe pistachios, Rothfeld has you cook some garlic in oil; when that oil is infused with the garlic flavor, the pistachios gets sautéed in a few spoonfuls of it, then coated with the spices.
I immediately went home to try the dish. When I was done, the turmeric had turned my fingers the color of a mango and the delightful aroma of all those spices was deep in every clothing stitch and hair follicle. It was then that I decided: if I'm going to go through all this effort, I'm going to falafel-ify more than just pistachios.
But I had a different idea for how to do so. Rothfeld's recipe has you cook thinly sliced garlic chips in a high quantity of oil. You use just a few tablespoons for the pistachios; the rest of the garlic oil is leftover. While you could use the oil for additional cooking ora really punchy Caesar salad dressing, it got me thinking: why not just make the oil the star here?
And thus falafel oil was born.
Frying spices, or“blooming” them, is common in Indian recipes. It’s part of the reason why Indian food is so flavorful—from the get-go, the cooking oil is spicy. I applied that concept here, figuring that if I bloomed the falafel spices, I'd end up with an infused oil that tastes just like falafel.
我对1/2杯橄榄油加热,把在ree crushed garlic cloves, and cooked them until slightly golden. (This is not a task you can turn your back on; overcooking anything will make the oil acrid and useless.) I removed the garlic, took the pan off of the heat, and tossed in the falafel spice blend. I stirred the spices for less than 10 seconds before pouring it off into a cool Pyrex measuring cup. (The oil was still plenty hot, which nudged the spices to bloom.)
The resulting oil has all kinds of applications. Use it as a salad dressing base orrub a roast chicken with it. Use it as finishing oil for a soup orsome brothy beans. You could also go really simple and dip bread or pita in it. Basically, if a dish incorporates oil, it can handle falafel oil.
That even goes for fried pistachios.
