Middle Eastern Food

Finally got around to the Middle Eastern food I'd been planning for a few days. "Middle Eastern" is a ridiculously wide and varied cuisine, so I should probably find a better descriptor. Most of my food is strongly influenced by the various Mediterranean cuisines, but I don't think of them as a single cuisine, so it's unfair to group Eastern Mediterranean food together under the moniker "Middle Eastern," but I will confess that I don't know the various regional cuisines of Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, Armenia, Israel, Egypt, etc. well enough to really break them out into individual cuisines the way I can with regional French, Spanish, and Italian cuisine. The food I cook that's influenced by these cuisines is still largely "pan-Middle Eastern," and as a result, not really "authentic" as true regional cuisine.

There are a few things that I will profess strongly about this food despite the fact that I don't think I'm as well versed in it as in other areas. The first one is about Tabbouleh. Tabbouleh is a traditional Lebanese salad that has become a mainstream food in America. Unfortunately, many of us were first exposed to boxed, instant versions that are just plain wrong. As a result, too many Americans think of Tabbouleh as a bulgur salad with parsley and mint. But Tabbouleh is actually a parsley and mint salad with bulgur. The distinction may not seem important, but the dominance of herbs instead bulgur changes the salad completely. There are good recipes available to American cooks though sources like Claudia Roden's authoritative The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, but too many American versions of Tabbouleh stray too far from the real Lebanese version. These bulgur heavy versions rob this salad of its lightness and change the whole nature of the salad. If your Tabbouleh isn’t predominantly green, it’s not right.

Luckily, this year, I have a plethora of parsley. Being an essentially lazy gardener, I never pulled my parsley last year as it went to seed. As a result I now have a 3' x 3' patch of garden of solid parsley plants. It'll be a good year to make Tabbouleh.

One of the other big issues I have with this cuisine as it's normally presented in the US is with the typical Pita bread available in the US. Although there is some white pita bread in the Middle East, much (most?) of the common everyday pita bread served there is in fact whole wheat or partial whole wheat bread. Because of the ease of making this bread, it's a little tough for me to stomach the often cardboard like white pitas available in US stores. Don't know how to make these great breads? Start with a 50/50 blend of white and whole wheat flour (or go all whole wheat if you like heartier bread). I normally use about 3 cups of flour total. Add about 1 1/4 to 1 1/3 cup water, about 1 teaspoon of yeast, a teaspoon of salt, and a splash of olive oil. Knead it all together and let it rest and rise. Roll them out thin and bake them at 450 for a few minutes. Flat breads like this are great for most of because you can whip up a batch of dough in the morning, leave it to rise all day and then come home from work, roll then and bake them in a few minutes. It's a better alternative to anything you can buy, and it's relatively easy.

For more on flat breads, I’d heartily recommend you get a copy of Flatbreads by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. It’s a great cookbook featuring flatbreads from around the world. The recipes are not just bread recipes. There’s also a variety of foods that traditionally go with flatbreads from various cultures and cuisines.

Since we had been down at Higgins snacking on charcuterie, we decided to just do a few salads, dips, and fresh baked pitas for dinner. We had hummus (and for God’s sake don’t use canned beans!), taboulleh, and a dip called zhoug, which is a pesto like mix of cilantro, parsley, mild green chilies, cumin, and cardamom.

I didn’t really worry about trying to find the correct beer with this, and opted for a Full Sail Sunspot, which is one of their Brewmaster series that comes in 22 oz bottles, and is billed as a bright IPA. It was a moderately hoppy IPA, but wasn’t over the top and had a good malt backbone. The balance of malt and hops was quite nice and the bitterness went well with the food without going over the top. The solid malt backbone gave the beer enough body to standup. Overall, it’s a nice beer with food and a decent enough match for an easy dinner.

After dinner, I decided to open a Deschutes 19th Anniversary Golden Ale, which is a moderately strong Belgian style Golden Ale. It had the requisite Belgian aromas of fruit and spice and a deep gold color. It’s very cleanly made but for my tastes is a little sweet for the style. I like fairly dry Belgian Golden Ales, and with an alcohol content over 8%, this normally requires a fair amount of sugar in the recipe to boost the alcohol but to keep the body light. I think this beer needs to be a little lighter, but the flavors were right on. Belgian brewers use sugar in quantities that generally scares American brewers who fought so long against adjuncts in beer. As a result very few are willing to brew beers using 20% sugar, but for a light bodied Belgian Golden, I think that’s what you have to do. In any event, kudos to Deschutes for even brewing this beer. It’s nice to see quality Belgian style beers being brewed more often by US brewers.