This week protagonist: United Arab Emirates
Wow! What an interesting suggestion, generator. We definitely weren’t expecting this one!
While searching Emirate recipes, we realized (we knew it but never really realized its implications!) that the Saudi Arabia peninsula is not too far from the Indian continent with its characteristic Pakistani and Indian cuisine. When going through some articles, we surprisingly found some more Mediterranean influences like Lebanese falafels and some Indian influences like biryani rice. It’s already so much fun to realize the deep cultural and traditional connections in typical foods!
We are not strangers to Indian tastes and dishes, so we opted for something middle eastern with some of our favorite ingredients: eggplant and tahini sauce!
Fatteh
In its simplicity Fatteh simply blew us away! It’s a typical vegetarian (actually quite common in middle eastern tradition) option that combines some very simple flavors and ingredients for which the final result definitely surpasses the sum of the individual parts!
Fatteh is a layered dish with baked pita breads chunks at the bottom, tasty eggplants in the middle and a yogurt+tahini sauce on top! We followed this recipe to carry out our cooking, and we couldn’t recommend it any less!
First we didn’t have too much time that evening, so we opted to toast and fry all the ingredients instead of baking them in the oven (our oven is also particularly slow). This not only sped up the timing but also boosted the flavors and made the dish overall more hearty and fulfilling.
We bought hand-made pita bread from an Arab supermarket that sells it by the piece baked in a Tandoori oven (yes it tastes and smells fantastic)! What we had left from our purchase (it was too good to resist ;)) we cut in little chunks and we toasted it with some olive oil and sumac in batches not to overcrowd the pan.
We simply fried the eggplant in olive oil, paprika, salt and more sumac until golden and soft. Finally, we decided to add some leftover veggies on top to add more vegetable ingredients to the recipe: we opted for some pan-fried green and red bell peppers and some raw cucumber slices.
The star of the dish, however, was clearly the sauce: a mix of natural yogurt, tahini sauce (basically crushed sesame seeds), garlic and a bit of lemon. What a wonderful thickness and flavor! It perfectly coats all the ingredients in the dish, it prevents the pita bread from being dry, and it makes the dish so much more filling!
The ingredient of the week: Sumac
To conclude let’s talk about the elephant in the room: what the heck is sumac? Well for what I understand it is a mix of crushed berries that are not very typical in the European continent. It tastes and smells a bit like tamarind but much less strong and impactful. Overall it has a very pleasant taste, but we weren’t able to feel it too much in the complete dish (despite having used a lot of it!).
Conclusions
Unfortunately we only try one dish from this country, but trust me, it was enough! Overall we really enjoyed it, and it was surprisingly easy to prepare. It had a lot of familiar ingredients, but enough new ones to make it surprising and interesting. When all together the taste is unbelievable, you will have to try to really understand what we mean :)
So let’s keep going! Where do we go next?? Somebody tells me we will remain on the east side of the World…
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