Sunday Gravy with yeah right: Falafel!

Good morning all!

Hope life is treating you well.

Always good to have you here.

It’s Gravy time!

We had a quick preview of spring/summer here in LA this last week and that, coupled with watching some Spring Training baseball, gets you all giddy and shit for spring.

I promised my offspring that we would catch an Angels game this year since we missed last year and along with my return trip to Denver in August for an evening at Red Rocks, my social calendar is slowly starting to get significant for the year.

For some reason today’s recipe found it’s way into my fucked up brain and it had to come out!

Today we are making homemade falafel!

Not just that, we’re making 3 additional recipes that would be accoutrements for the final dish.

We’re going to make homemade hummus (again), along with some “toum” or garlic sauce (again) AND we’ll be pickling some red onion as well.

You can prepare any or all of these and use them as you wish but I made them all specifically with falafel in mind.

Quick origin question: How did falafel get stuck in my head as a recipe idea?

Quick origin answer: I had some goddamn falafel the last time I had a gyro plate from my local Mediterranean joint.

I ordered the gyro plate and it was goddamn killer, and the place offered you the choice of 2 of their side dishes. I had sides of hummus and falafel both of which they excel at but for some reason the falafel was particularly delicious this time.

Brain says “Dude, research this shit!” Research ensued, recipes were studied and brain responded, “I can make this motherfucker!”

Here we are.

You do know falafel yes?

Middle Eastern in origin, probably Egypt, but extremely popular in Israel as well. Falafel is a ground chickpea batter with onions, herbs, parsley and shit that’s rolled into a ball and fried.

Think hushpuppy with a Middle Eastern spin.

The falafels are then stuffed into a pita and dressed up for service with onion, tomato, sometimes lettuce and a sauce or two. Handheld, falafel can easily be eaten on the go. You New Yorkers know what I’m rambling on about here.

Oh yeah, this entire meal is motherfucking VEGAN! And if I used grape seed oil instead of canola it would also be kosher!

My idea was to make the falafel and place them in a pita.

Nope, no homemade pita this time too much other shit working.

But I did want to place some hummus as the bottom layer then add the falafel. I also knew I wanted to top with a garlic sauce. I figured I would need some acidity and bite to step this baby up a bit and came up with the idea of pickling some red onions. Holy fuck was THAT a good decision.

Got a bunch of goddamn shit to get after today so let’s stop babbling and get fucking busy. I’ll give these recipes to you rapid fire in the order that I made them.

Pickled Red Onion!

I red onion sliced VERY thin – I used a mandolin

1 cup of apple cider vinegar

1 tablespoon of sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons of kosher salt

1 peeled and smushed garlic clove

About 15 peppercorns.

Peel off the papery outer layer of the red onion and (carefully) slice it up using the mandolin. Place the sliced onion along with the garlic clove in a bowl.

Put a small saucepan over a medium heat and add in the vinegar, sugar, salt and peppercorns. Bring to a boil. Lemme tell yez, you got some serious motherfucking kitchen smells going today! Pour the hot vinegar solution over the onions and garlic clove in the bowl and allow to cool.

Next spoon everything into a mason jar, seal tightly and sock into your fridge. These onions can be used immediately or will last in your refrigerator for a good month.

These fuckers go GREAT on tacos or any type of Mexican food application. They can top a homemade pizza, top your morning scrambled eggs with some. Use instead of pickles on your sandwich or burger. Stupid easy, very tasty and versatile.

Toum! or garlic sauce!

This one is my Waterloo. I’ve tried this twice, here’s a link to the first effort and while it still produces a goddamn delicious result, I am just not successfully hitting my texture properly. Toum is an emulsion, like homemade mayonnaise and I guess my ass is going to have to keep on trying. I ain’t giving up because again it’s straight fucking delicious.

2 cups of chilled canola oil

about 10-12 garlic cloves peeled

1/4 cup of fresh lemon juice

1/4 cup of ice water

1 teaspoon of kosher salt.

Note: This recipe AND the falafel recipe are from Tori Avey. Her recipe work is outstanding.

Firstly, pour the 2 cups of canola oil into a container and place in your freezer. The cold oil is supposed to help with the emulsion. Tori explains it a lot better than I could especially since I fucked my texture sideways. BLAME ME!

You are going to need a food processor for ALL 3 of the next recipes! Plain and simple. I wore the shit out of mine.

Make sure your garlic cloves have the paper removed and split in half to remove the green sprout that you’ll sometimes find in the middle. Add all of the garlic, the salt and half of the lemon juice and half of the water to the bowl of your processor…

You know what?

Link to Tori’s website for the details.

I feel unqualified to give this recipe since the texture was wrong. Just know, mine was still delicious but my emulsion broke. I still have the leftover sauce in my fridge and I still use the piss out of it. I’ll keep working and give you the details when my shit works properly.

Now let’s get to the rest of the stuff that DID work.

Hummus!

We’ve done this one a couple of times. There’s a recipe in the aforementioned toum link that also has a hummus recipe, and here’s yet another.

1 15.5 ounce can of garbanzo beans

Juice from 1 large lemon

1/4 cup of tahini

1 clove of garlic. ONE CLOVE – minced

2 tablespoons of olive oil and some more for garnish

1/2 teaspoon of cumin

Salt to taste

Some of the reserved bean juice, it’s probably a little less than a quarter of a cup.

A sprinkling of za’atar for garnish

I’m gonna do this as a speed round since both of those links have the full hummus recipe in them.

Procure some garbanzo

The canned beans are for the hummus, the dried beans are for the falafel. We’ll get to that.

Remember the lesson of peeling the skins off of all of those canned goddamn garbanzo beans?

That shit still applies.

Get out the food processor and pulse the lemon and tahini, add the olive oil, some salt (about 1/2 teaspoon), the garlic and the cumin and grind away for about 30 seconds.

Pulse again, scrape the sides of the food processor and add in the beans, grind for 1 minute, scrape the sides of the bowl again.

Now add 1-2 tablespoons of the reserved bean juice and give another fucking 30 second whirl. Repeat as many times as needed until you get the desired consistency.

Look at this tasty motherfucker!

Give this a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkling of za’atar  as a garnish.

Holy fucking shit! This was PERFECT! So goddamn tasty too.

Here!

That’s what I’m talking about!

I made all of the above recipes the day before making the falafel so all I would need to do the next day would be to get after the main fucking event.

Let’s do that now.

Falafel!

I’m going to gratuitously grab the ingredient list directly from Tori Avey’s falafel recipe.

“1 lb dry chickpeas/garbanzo beans – you must start with dry, do NOT substitute canned, they will not work!
1 small onion, roughly chopped
1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley
3-5 cloves garlic (I prefer roasted garlic cloves)
1 1/2 tbsp flour
1 3/4 tsp salt
2 tsp cumin
1 tsp ground coriander
1/4 tsp black pepper
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
Pinch of ground cardamom
Vegetable oil for frying – grapeseed, sunflower, avocado, canola, and peanut oils all work well.”

Thanks Tori.

Now let’s show you how this fucker gets done!

See that picture up there of the dried beans in a bag?

Yeah, that one.

We’re going to sort through the beans, rinse them and fully cover them with about 3″ of water over the top.

Important note! These need to soak overnight!

See? I was busy as FUCK the day before I made the falafel.

Next day.

Since my girl up there prefers roasted garlic, let’s do that.

I did just a handful of cloves rather than an entire bulb but the same principle applies. Peel the excess paper from the garlic, brush with olive oil, add a little salt and pepper, wrap in foil and roast in a 400 degree oven for 30-40 minutes.

Jesus, I’m already way the fuck up there in word count, to the photos we go!

So we got them beans soaked.

Let’s go ahead and drain the beans.

Believe me, as someone who fondled an entire can of beans just the day before, there really is a big difference in texture and I can see why the canned beans wouldn’t work here.

Get your spices rounded up.

Got some straight up exotic shit working here! Blend them spices with the flour.

Chop up your onion and parsley.

Don’t have to get too fine here because these will be going in a, you guessed it, FOOD PROCESSOR!

I worked the everloving shit out of this poor food processor over these 2 days. Might have to give it a rest for a week or two.

Know the fun part about this recipe? You can just dump every fucking thing (except the cooking oil) in the food processor at the same damn time!

Important observation, if you have a small-ish food processor do this in two batches. I tried to shove every damn thing in and while it did indeed work, I had to stop and mix and scrape the mixture multiple times to make sure everything got pulverized. Break it into 2 batches for your sanity’s sake.

As Tori notes in her recipe, you don’t want to over mix because unlike yesterday we are NOT making hummus. You want this ground to a course meal texture.

Like dis here!

This texture was bang on.

Now, we are going to refrigerate the mixture for at least an hour and preferably two hours.

Yes we will eventually “hurry up and make these goddamn things!” A bit of patience is required.

Ready to get after the prize?

Grab a skillet, or pot and add in a couple of inches of oil. I used canola oil again.

Get the pan over a medium/high heat and get the temp up to around 360-375 degrees.

Yes, I did use a thermometer to check.

Working in batches let’s start rolling some falafels.

I did 6 at a time to avoid overcrowding the pan. One thing to notice here, the dough balls will sometimes feel like they want to break apart when you are rolling them but I found if you gave the balls a really firm squeeze…

fucking juveniles –

you will find that there is enough moisture in the dough to easily form a proper ball.

Into the oil they go!

Three minutes, then flip, 3 more minutes then remove and place on a plate covered with a paper towel to drain.

There truly is a stunning similarity to hush puppies here.

I placed the cooked falafels into a 200 degree oven to keep warm while I finished the batches.

Oddly enough my first batch looked the best. That never fucking happens.

Finish the batches and get with the falafel makings already.

All that crazy shit we did yesterday?

Get all them sides out.

The way I assembled was like this, grab a pita, cut in half and spoon some hummus in the bottom of the pita. Next add the falafels and garnish with the toum and top with the pickled red onion like so.

In addition I added some diced tomato to the second pita and it really worked here.

So what do we have here?

It’s crispy, delicious, the flavors of the cumin, onion and garlic really shine. You’ll notice a slightly green tint to the center of the falafel from the parsley but it’s the texture that really gets you. It’s incredible. Firm yet delicate, then you get the tang from the pickled onion, the smooth notes from the hummus and that kick to the balls of the garlic from the toum.

This shit is fucking MAGICAL.

Oh yes, we WILL make this again during the next NFL season. Oh yes.

What a fucking workout. Still worth every minute of effort. The whole family loved this stuff.

Did I mention this is VEGAN?!?

I did a quick poll at work and found out that well over half of the workers here have never tried Greek, Mediterranean or Middle Eastern food.

What the fuck is wrong with you people? These are some of the tastiest cuisines on the damn planet!

Get out there! Try new foods! Experiment!

Food is one of the true gifts of our lives, so live like you fucking mean it!

Thanks for taking the tour with me people.

I appreciate the hell out of you.

PEACE!