Lebanese for dinner: chicken shish taouk and toum, served with saffron rice and naan
Just up-front, I'm gonna say this post came out a lot longer than I expected. I was getting kinda bummed because I felt like I didn't have anything to post about, and I've been a good little blogger posting pretty consistently. But all of my beer, ferments, and pickles are either done or in progress. Just about every container I can ferment in is being used right now. Things should be getting done within the next few days, primarily my bell pepper and habanero hot sauce, my IPA beer, and it'll be time to transfer the wheat beer to secondary (in theory, have to get the gravity readings to be sure) but just yesterday and today, I didn't feel like I had anything worth writing about. Then I decided to make a pretty involved dinner, and typed up this post as I went. And it came out long. So without further adieu, let's dive in!
My wife isn't what most people would call a picky eater. She definitely has her preferences, like everyone, but she's not so pigeonholed in those preferences. With some encouragement, she'll try new things. She doesn't like seafood, but has tried it repeatedly because she thought her opinion might change. If you knew how much she hates seafood and the way it effects her to eat it, you'd feel she was brave for continuing to try it -- I sure feel that way. While she isn't picky, she's not as adventurous as I am. That's fair; most people aren't. I had raw horse sashimi in Japan. Not because it was served to me and I was trying to be polite, but because I knew I'd likely never get a chance to try it again and therefore ordered it. I had shiokara there (fermented fish viscera) and asked for seconds -- but not because I liked it, this time it WAS because it was offered to me, by a chuckling group of Japanese who felt certain I'd hate it and be upset upon trying it. I did hate it, and I was upset, but I put on a brave face and asked for seconds. They furnished my drinks for the remainder of the evening. Do not underestimate my stubbornness. You won't win that one.
What happens when you have someone who is willing to try new things but definitely likes what they like is when you go to a new restaurant and they find a dish they like, they never divert from ordering that dish ever again. Me? I'd try the whole menu given the chance. I'll absolutely order something new each and every time. My wife? I can go to any style of restaurant and tell you immediately what she'd order. Chinese? Chicken Teriyaki. Indian? Butter Chicken and Samosas. Middle Eastern? Gyro with Greek salad (hold the feta). Whataburger? A-1 Thick & Hearty, 1 spicy ketchup, 1 regular ketchup, diet Dr Pepper. Mexican? Cheese enchiladas, hold the beans, double rice and a horchata to drink.
All our favorite restaurants in San Antonio, I could order for her any time and be right 100% of the time (of course, she's a grown-ass woman so I don't order for her; but I could in a pinch if I needed to). She simply finds what she likes and doesn't deviate. Know what sucks when you find what you like and don't deviate? Moving to another city. For me, this is a foodventure; a chance to discover new and interesting flavors and restaurants and styles than I'm accustomed to. It can be disappointing sometimes -- we've yet to find a good Guadalajara or Jalisco style Mexican restaurant. But we did find an amazing ramen place that is closest to competing with Ramen Tatsuya (in Austin - we couldn't even get good ramen in San Antonio) we've been able to find yet.
One of Bre's favorite dishes at one of her favorite restaurants is Chicken Sheesh Tawook (or Shish Taouk, depending on who you ask) at Pasha's in San Antonio. It's marinated chicken thighs, skewered and cooked over an open flame. They serve it with amazing naan bread, a mediterranean salad and toum (an amaaaaazing garlic condiment). We ate at Pasha's often and while I did explore their menu a bit, I kept coming back to the shish taouk because it is just SO GOOD. Of course, we don't have a Pasha's here - it's local to San Antonio. In lieu of trying to find a restaurant that served it (though we probably will do that in the future), I decided to make chicken shish taouk and toum. I had been perusing that recipe website - Shamishiri Cafe - and stumbled on their version of shish taouk and got so excited to try it, I ran out and got the ingredients that day. I am just as excited about the toum as I am the chicken. At first glance, toum looks like mayonnaise, but it's not just mayonnaise, it's an aioli. An emulsification of oil and lemon juice with a billion garlic cloves as well. It's concentrated garlic flavor, Garlic Incarnate, if you will and it's AMAZING. I had wondered for some time how they got a sauce to be so very garlicky only to find out that's because it's comprised almost entirely of garlic. Makes sense.
So, my menu for the evening looks like this:
-Chicken shish taouk
-Saffron rice
-Naan
-Toum
The spice mix in the taouk is really tasty. I didn't take pics of me making it, I was in a rush to get it marinating this morning before work so it would be ready by dinner tonight, but there are plenty of pics of this bright, delicious sauce on the recipe linked above. Tomato paste, peanut oil, smoked paprika, salt, pepper, allspice, mint and fresh garlic sauteed in a pan until fragrant. It smells divine. Added to yogurt and fresh lemon juice, this becomes our marinade. This dish is a great example of salt, fat, acid and heat. Salt (from the salt, obviously), fat in the form of yogurt and oil, acid from the lemon juice (and I daresay some of the spices), and heat in the form of open flame on my grill.
I decided to get started on my naan bread. I'm not much for making bread, so I let our trusty breadmaker do the grunt work. I used a naan recipe from my breadmaker cookbook. If you're making naan by hand, you'll want to use a regular recipe. The dough that came out of the breadmaker was soft, warm, and had a nice firmness/elasticity. I rolled them out, let them rise for another 20 minutes, pressed into the dough with my fingertips to get that signature naan texture, then baked them at 450F for 6-8 minutes (until parts of the bread started to brown and the bread had puffed up nicely).
I think the bread turned out pretty good; it's resting under a clean dish towel for now, once the rest of the food is ready I can throw the naan back in the oven for just a minute or two to reheat it, brushed with some butter and then sprinkled with some fresh parsley.
Onto the toum. As mentioned before, Toum is an aioli. This is not like the aiolis I'd become accustomed to, that were mostly mayonnaise with a hint of something else. This sauce is a powerhouse of flavor and is so different from "aioli" I'm used to that I didn't even think it was an aioli at all. But really it's the original aioli and all others merely walk humbly in its shadow.
I got my 2.65 oz of garlic:
Put the garlic, salt, cold water and lemon juice in the blender:
I thought I'd got a pic of the blender at work but I'm not surprised I didn't because it simply wasn't working. Had I read the entire recipe, I'd have found solutions for lack of emulsification, but it seemed so simple I wasn't worried about it. The small garlic chunks were getting stuck on the sides and no matter how often I paused it and pushed them down, they weren't getting finely chopped. So, though I had added all the oil by this point and emulsification wasn't occurring, I transferred to my Magic Bullet to try to get things working.
On pouring the sauce, I felt pretty good about it. It seemed to have attained the right color and consistency.
But after just a moment, it seemed to kind of separate out. Couple of theories, my primary one being I put the oil in too quickly while the garlic chunks were still too large, so it didn't emulsify properly. I think temperature played a big part here as well, as the blender had ran so long the sauce was quite warm. Oil stays liquid at warm temperatures, so I'm not surprised the emulsification didn't seem to work quite as well as I'd hoped.
Nonetheless, I popped this in the refrigerator. My thought was that cooling it down may change the texture, and if it didn't, it would still taste amazing. I also decided if it didn't come together as it should, I could add it to some Greek yogurt and it would still be a perfect condiment to accompany dinner tonight. So while I was a little disappointed, I also wasn't giving up on this little sauce. Plus, I sampled it and HOLY GARLIC BATMAN. This sauce is not for the weak of heart. This sauce is for the person that snacks on raw garlic while chopping it up; the person who automatically doubles or triples garlic in a recipe without even thinking; the person who thinks pickled garlic is a great snack. I can't describe the garlic flavor, it's INCREDIBLY sharp. I mean, it's just raw garlic in an emulsification (ideally, anyway). I would bet you could make this sauce with roasted garlic and it would be toned down but still delicious. May try that next time, I think it'll come together easier too since the garlic will be soft and squishy, and have that sticky garlic juice too.
The good news is, after only 30 minutes in the refrigerator, the sauce was cold enough I felt confident trying again. I put everything back in the magic bullet, added about 1/2 tbsp ICE COLD water and got it going. Within just a few seconds, everything emulsified beautifully. Never give up, guys. Well, never be afraid to experiment and see if you can't fix mistakes. Just look at how it came out, it couldn't be more perfect. And holy forking shirtballs is it garlicky.
By this point, everything was ready for dinner tonight except the rice and cooking up the chicken. This was a pretty labor-intensive dinner for me, I usually go much simpler. Last night we had nachos. Literally just threw a bunch of chips on a cookie sheet, threw on some shredded cheese and black beans, baked 5 minutes then threw avocado chunks and chopped onion on top. Laaaazy. But good! This meal has a bit more love and care in it. Knowing I was going to be grilling chicken kebabs later, I put my wooden sticks in water to prep them so they wouldn't catch fire.
The chicken got skewered and tossed on the grill at medium-high heat until internal temperature was 165F.
The rice was no big deal, just throw it in the rice cooker. Plated it all up and it disappeared so quickly. Everything turned out great. It was a lot of work but I'm glad I did it.
