After leaving Egypt (and allowing a suitable period of separation), I began to crave ta’amiya again, but since I have never lived anywhere with a significant Egyptian expat community it was impossible to find. Sure, I could find falafel, but it never tasted quite right — no doubt the result of blending fava beans with chickpeas, or omitting the favas altogether. With no restaurants around to satisfy my needs, the only option left to me was to make my own.

Luckily, I had the foresight to buy a cookbook in Egypt, which featured a good ta’amiya recipe. The basis of ta’amiya is fava beans, but a different variety of favas than those used for fuul. In fuul, it is crucial to get the round, brown favas that are about the size of pinto beans. For ta’amiya, you want the bigger variety that is a bit more commonly available. Ideally, you’ll be able to find the variety known as ‘fuul madshush’, which are already shelled and therefore white in color. Unfortunately, I’ve never actually been able to find such beans, so after an overnight soak I dig my hand into the pot and start shelling beans. You can make it a game: see how many beans you can shell in an hour, then try to double that amount.

With soaked, shelled beans ready to serve as the body of the ta’amiya, it is time to add in the flavorings. The dominant flavor in ta’amiya is dill. This was a bit surprising to me since I think of Middle Eastern food as being more about parsley and cilantro. I use a lot of fresh dill, and for good measure throw in a little parsley and cilantro. Next, a good dose of various allia: 10 cloves of garlic, an onion, and green onions or leeks. Finally spices: cumin, cayenne, salt and black pepper.

All of the ingredients are roughly chopped and tossed together. Great. But that won’t fry — you need a paste! If you were an Egyptian housewife of modest means you’d be reaching for your biggest mortar and pestle, but if you were a twenty-something lazy neo-orientalist you’d bust out the food processor. Because the beans need to be ground pretty fine for the patties to stay together in the hot oil, I grind them in several batches. After all is ground, I knead the mixture with my hands to make sure everything is distributed evenly. The mixture should hold together and have a pleasing green hue from all the herbs.

When you’re satisfied that the beans are as ground as they are going to be, it’s time to shape patties. The size of the patties in Egypt was rather small, maybe a couple of tablespoons, but to save time I make mine bigger, a rough handful. For frying, I use peanut oil heated to 375°. Reaching the right temperature is crucial — if the oil is too cold the ta’amiyas will break apart and you’ll be left with a big mess of oily crumbs. I learned this the hard way at least a couple of times.

The patties don’t need to fry long, just a few minutes until they are golden brown. I usually rotate mine a few times during the frying because it makes me feel like I know what I’m doing.

So you’ve got some ta’amiya. But as with fuul, at least half the fun of this dish lies in the toppings. Fresh pita goes without saying. Yogurt is also needed, preferably some kind of yogurt sauce with garlic and tahini. For vegetables, the classic combination is lettuce, cucumber and tomato. With the summer Farmers’ Market being my main source of produce, though, I have been going more seasonal: lettuce, radishes and spring onions tossed with sumac. I also had some rutabagas pickled with beets sitting in the fridge just for such an occasion.

I hardly need to explain what happens next. Put the ta’amiya in a pita (for authentic Egyptian style crush the patty a little), add topping of your choice, and enjoy. It probably cost more than 5¢ to make, but if you factor in the cost of a plane ticket to Cairo, you’re really coming out ahead.

Butternut squash kibbeh, from Ana Sortun’s Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean, is highly moldable for all your holiday novelty-dish needs. It’s also a great way to use butternut squash in the winter that is (Minneapolis restauranteurs take note) NOT butternut squash ravioli/pasta. For those not familiar, kibbeh is a Levantine/Middle Eastern dish of bulghur wheat mixed with meat (usually lamb) that is eaten raw, baked, or fried. I think it is best fried, but I have never eaten it raw. For this version, butternut squash takes the place of lamb as the principle binder of the bulghur. And while you can’t see it in the picture, this heart is stuffed with spiced feta. I am not a big fan of butternut squash because I think it is too sweet and too smooth-textured, but here the cracked wheat helps with both of those issues by giving the mixture a more grainy texture and diluting the sweetness of the squash.

Here’s the recipe:

Stuffed Butternut Squash Kibbeh

Kibbeh:

• 3# Squash
• 4 T beurre noisette
• 1 onion
• 1 green bell pepper
• 1/4 c olive oil
• 2 t paprika
• 1 t Middle Eastern five spice
• 1 1/2 c bulghur or cracked wheat

Filling:

• 1/2# Feta
• 1/2 t Middle Eastern five spice
• 1/2 t sumac (or more – the more sumac the better!)
• 1/2 t Aleppo pepper
• 2 T chopped parsley

Roast the squash until it’s soft, then puree it in the food processor until it is smooth and creamy. Season liberally with salt and pepper. Cook the onion and pepper in olive oil until softened and starting to brown, then stir in the paprika and five spice. Cook for a minute. Add the squash puree and warm through. Stir in the bulghur, cover, and turn off the heat. Let sit 15 minutes while the bulghur softens up.

For the filling, mix the (crumbled) feta with all the other ingredients.

To assemble, pack the kibbeh mixture into your desired vessel (for example, a heart-shaped cake pan). Hollow out an indentation and fill it with the feta mixture, then cover with more kibbeh as needed. Bake in 375° oven for 15 minutes. Turn kibbeh out on to a plate (I hope you remembered to grease those vessels, because I sure didn’t remind you!). Garnish with a bit of the feta mixture and maybe some chopped parsley.

We had this with muhammara (it’s red like hearts GET IT?) and pita. Not bad for a Valentine’s day.

The first thing I did in the morning was cover 10 grain hot cereal mix with boiling water as the starter for the multigrain bread that was featured in Cook’s Illustrated a year or two ago. This is my go-to basic bread to have around the house, great for toast and sandwiches. The crumb is not so dense as a lot of multigrain breads thanks to copious amounts of white flour and instant yeast makes for a predictable rising schedule. The flavor is earthy, as multigrained breads should be, and tinged with honey. This recipe is simple, not very time consuming and reliably produces a pretty pair of loaves.

With that out of the way, I went to the store to get more flour (3 lbs was not going to cut it). I had refreshed my sourdough starter the day before and left it out all morning to bubble and grow. I needed to make pitas for dinner and I also wanted to make a couple of european-style breads. I like a loose crumb so I was aiming for about 66% hydration, and I wanted to use a pound of my starter, mostly to facilitate storing the rest of it in the fridge. I was figuring I wanted about 3# of final dough for my european breads and at least 2# to be able to make 8 four ounce pitas. Math time!

A pound of starter was 8oz water and 8oz flour. I wanted to end up with about 80 oz of dough and I was going to have 2/3 as much water as flour (and I like round numbers that my scale can handle) so I planned to add 40 oz of flour. That gave me 48 oz of flour total, 66% of which is 31.68, which I rounded to a nice even 32 (which meant I would add 24 additional ounces).

With my formula figured out, I proceeded to mix and knead the dough, adding a good amount of salt. With wild yeast rising times are pretty unpredictable, and salt inhibits rising, so I had no idea when the dough was going to double in size. I set out to work on some other things.

Around 5 p.m. I got tired of waiting and decided to weigh and shape my dough. I recently discovered that weighing individual dough pieces so they are the same really helps with the uniformity of the final product (durh) so I got out my scale. 1.5# of dough went to a boule which I left to proof in a heavily oiled and floured glass bowl. Three .5# pieces got rolled into baguettes and placed on my couche to grow. The remaining 8 4 oz pieces (plus a small leftover piece) I shaped into small boules to rest for pitas.

Mostly because we were hungry I rolled out the pitas within an hour of shaping the dough even though they had not grown much at all. Apparently, that is not very important with pitas. Here they are in the oven:

That is what we like to call pocket-city. Below you’ll see them in a nice little stack (wrapped in a towel to keep them warm and chewy):

After dinner I decided it did not make much sense to wait up till all hours for the rest of my breads to proof in the meantime wasting all that heat in the stone in my oven, so the baguettes were transferred to a floured peel, scored and baked. For the record, they were underproofed, but I think they turned out fine.

Lastly, the boule. I apparently did not flour my bowl enough because this bread stuck to the sides and did not want to land on the peel. When it finally did, it was horribly deformed. It is pretty annoying to spend this much time on a piece of bread only to have some stupid mistake destroy everything you worked and fought for; much can be learned about life from bread baking, evidently. I made a feeble attempt at scoring this bread artfully to make the mistakes look intentional and then slid it onto the stone. I was surprised by a good amount of oven spring, but upon eating the bread the next day found dense areas that suggested underproofing. Great crumb for the most part though thanks to the relatively high hydration!

And so passed another Saturday.