Muhammara (Red Pepper and Walnut Spread)

Reading recipes from other cultures shows me just how fat-aversive Americans have become. When I looked at this recipe for muhammara (red pepper and walnut spread), I was strongly drawn to the basic flavor profile, but greatly put off by the inclusion of five tablespoons of olive oil.

I like olive oil and am okay with some fat in my food, but this seemed like it was turning into a fat-based spread that contained walnuts, spices, and peppers rather than a walnut-pepper spread. Realizing full well that I was gutting the authenticity, I made one modification to the given recipe and used only one tablespoon of olive oil. The amount was based mainly on how strongly I wanted the olive oil flavor to come through. I did plan to do the drizzle of pomegranate molasses and olive oil at the end to put those flavors back into greater prominence.

In terms of the ingredients, getting the pomegranate molasses was the hard part. I live in a small, rural area right now and exotic ingredients are literally hours away. Given how important the commenters said this component was, I didn't want to substitute it. Fortunately, I got extremely lucky and was offered a free jar of this particular type of molasses to review. Fate was encouraging me to try this recipe.

I toasted the walnuts in the toaster oven and roasted my own fresh red bell pepper on the stove top. I used the red pepper flakes that I had on hand as I wasn't going to go out and buy fancy brands for such a tiny portion. For the bread crumbs, I used panko because it was what I had. Because I didn't use four of the five tablespoons of oil, the smaller amount of breadcrumbs were sufficient to firm up the mix.

My spread looked like this:

I wished I had had some sort of fresh bread on hand, but I didn't so I ate it with flatbread crackers. I figured a bland carb base is a bland carb base, though I'm sure that lovely, warm, soft, fragrant bread would have made this an overall more amazing experience. As it was, this was really tasty. It was impressively complex with all of the individual elements finding a little time to linger alone on my tongue. I used a chopstick to speckle it with pomegranate molasses and olive oil and I think that the molasses really mattered in enhancing the flavor. It has a vinegary hit to it that off-sets the cloying sweetness of the molasses as well as a citrus-like tang.

I can say for certain that this did not suffer in the least from the limited amount of olive oil. The texture was nice and the thickness very good. It spread well and stayed together. It really does not need so much oil and is nicely flavorful as is. I also skipped the second half of the hot pepper flakes and only used the 1/2 teaspoon in the spread. I love hot food, but I don't like heat to overwhelm all of the other flavors and I think more would have done so. I think the crackers actually went well with this as they gave a textural contrast between the soft spread and the crispy flatbread.

This is exotic, but approachable and is exactly the kind of new recipe I like to try. The only problem with it is that it's a good deal of effort for relatively small amounts of food. It's the sort of thing that fits well with special occasions and I'd definitely consider doubling it and taking it to a potluck or a party. For my own purposes though, it's a very special lunch treat that I'm likely to try again, but not often due to the complexity of preparation. 

Puree of Chickpea Soup

The internet is full of lies. I know this comes as no surprise, but there is no greater concentration of lies than in recipes. Bloggers offer gorgeous galleries of food porn and gush about the deliciousness of their recipes when the results are often quite terrible. They lie to your eyes as well as your ears.

This is something I have known for a long time, but I still am occasionally suckered in by a certain picture. Such was the case with this recipe for puree of chickpea soup. While looking over the ingredients, I couldn't help but think, "this looks like nothing more than hummus in soup form." I don't mean that anything with chickpeas is going to be like hummus. This actually duplicates a lot of the ingredients in hummus (garlic, olive oil, cumin, coriander, lemon juice, salt) and doesn't add much that hummus excludes. Red onions are pretty much the only deviation. Of course, there is also the method of preparation, but I was still drawn in by the gorgeous picture of a snowy white puree with golden droplets of olive oil and bits of fresh mint.

I don't know where the author got her chickpeas or how she got them to be so incredibly pale, but I'm guessing more than a little Photoshop trickery played a part. After all, you've got red onion, brown cumin, and coriander, and off-white chickpeas. How does any of that add up to a creamy pile of whiteness? At any rate, my soup looked like what it largely was, a bowl of slightly runny hummus:

I followed the recipe faithfully for this including going out of my way to purchase a red onion for the dish.  I even went so far as to pass the soup through a fine mesh sieve to get a super smooth texture and it is very velvety if you do that. I'd say it's worth it for the finer texture, but I'm sure it's very good chunky as well. The only thing I did not do is garnish it with olive oil and mint. I don't mind adding in the oil, but this is a delicately flavored soup and I found that stirring in the olive oil at the end of making the soup had already made it taste too strongly of olive oil. I didn't want this to be overwhelmed by more olive oil flavor and I frankly don't care for mint so I had it without the accouterments. I will note that you have to salt this very heavily to bring out the flavors.

In terms of how this tasted, it was very good if you like hummus, and I do. My only disappointment with this was that it wasn't unique enough nor did it provide the visual appeal of the pictured recipe. I may make this again, but, if I do, I'll likely make it in a pressure cooker as the dry chickpeas took forever to soften and even then they weren't super soft.