Regardless of the approach, on a rainy and damp day, us kids would devour the delicious results with zeal and were grateful for the offering… Mom is more of a tomato purist with more delicate flavors from freshly pureed tomatoes with very few spices. Dad loads up his roughly chopped tomatoes with green and red peppers and a heavy dose of heat and spices. Throughout my childhood my mom & dad have had a Shakshouka dispute. Add a side salad, some good bread, or if going the traditional route – some quality hot pita – and dinner is served! Beginning to finish – no more than 25-30 minutes. Then gently slide raw cracked eggs into the sauce add your choice of topping, cover and finish cooking on the stovetop or in a hot oven. Start by cooking your garlic (and onions, if using) with the olive oil and spices, add your pureed tomatoes (fresh or canned) and simmer until somewhat thickened. This dish is so popular throughout Israel for an easy breakfast or a light dinner, that Tel Aviv even boasts a restaurant dedicated solely to this dish: Dr. The secret? Tender eggs poached in a spicy tomato sauce, warm with cumin, paprika and more ready to be scooped up with fresh pita or crunchy bread. I’m just following tradition.Mid-winter humdrum got you down? Tired of the same boring flavors? Put together this quick, flavorful and satisfying “wake me up” Middle Eastern meal and kiss your winter blues goodbye! It’s my shakshuka and I’ll add it if I want to. I like cumin, which adds an earthy bitterness to the chile heat.Īnd, in my own addition to the shakshuka scramble, I add a little bit of Spanish pimenton de la Vera - radical, perhaps, but the smokiness adds another layer of complexity. I like harissa for heat and complexity (brands vary in spice, start low and add more to taste). In testing the recipes, I learned that I like peppers in my tomato sauce - they add sweetness and a certain silky texture. In “Jerusalem,” which came out in 2012, the shakshuka comes from his co-writer and business partner Sami Tamimi and is a more stripped-down version, that complex spicing abbreviated by the substitution of harissa, with only cumin added. In 2010’s “Plenty,” the version that drove the dish’s recent popularity, the tomato sauce is flavored with a very complex, fairly restaurant-y combination of onions, red and yellow peppers, sugar, bay leaves, fresh thyme, parsley, cilantro, saffron and cumin. If you want a perfect example of how diverse shakshuka recipes can be, you need only compare the two most recent Ottolenghi books. Transliteration, like cooking, is an art, not a science. Some prefer chakchouka, others go with shakshouka. There’s not even any definitive agreement on how the dish should be spelled in English. Most of the recipes I found included some kind of bell pepper, but there were many that did not. But because this is shakshuka, she also has variations: variously adding harissa, caraway seeds, preserved lemon, capers, cooked potatoes, zucchini, eggplant, onions and - one that I’m going to file away for later - frying it with merguez sausages. The most basic recipe I tried was from Claudia Roden’s encyclopedic “The New Book of Middle Eastern Food”: fry peppers, add garlic and tomatoes, drop in the eggs. It’s no more a single recipe than, say, “spaghetti with tomato sauce” is. Like so many traditional dishes, it is almost infinitely variable, adapting itself to the tastes of different countries, regions, cities, families and even individuals. In reality, shakshuka is more an idea than a recipe. That required several weeks of testing shakshuka recipes from various sources, and after going through pounds of peppers and tomatoes and a couple dozen eggs, I’m here to say quite definitively that shakshuka is delicious - however you fix it. Like my house.Īfter several months of playing around with the dish, I decided to get serious and really try to understand it. Granted, that popularity boom hasn’t been quite so heated as the run on eggplants inspired by the book’s cover photo, but shakshuka is definitely turning up in places it never had before. Once beloved only by cooks who follow Middle Eastern traditions, shakshuka - essentially eggs cooked in a spicy tomato sauce - had a breakout moment a couple of years ago, thanks to Yotam Ottolenghi’s cookbook “Plenty.” All of a sudden, the whole world seems to be going shakshuka.
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