I’ve got another shakshuka question.
One of my great regrets is that I have a tremendous aversion to eggs. I really wish I liked them, but I just can’t eat them. I’m sure I’m missing out on a lot of great dishes this way.
Shakshuka looks like one of them. So here’s the question. How deficient would shakshuka taste without the eggs on top. Would it be just less good or would it actually be bad?
shakshuka without eggs is literally just fairly concentrated tomato sauce with middle eastern spices. It’s fine, but i wouldn’t call it a dish really.
I’ve googled quickly some recpies in Hebrew for vegan shakshuka and other than basic stuff like Tofu I saw one suggestion for polenta circles. Sounds interesting, i guess it came about for the visual similarity.
May give that a try. Based on the photo alone, I’d look forward to eating that.
I don’t think cheddar works well with smoked paprika and cumin, which are my main spices for Shakshuka. Feta cheese is usually the preferred diary addition. But at the end shakshuka is just eggs poached in tomatoey sauce, so whatever you like in your tomato based sauce is fine i guess. This is 'murica.
I feel like maybe you could poach fish in a shakshuka sauce. Or a porkchop, there’s an Italian recipe I do where you cook a pork chop in a simmering tomato sauce.
I have basicaly done this with rockfish I caught from the Chesapeake. Confirmed tasty.
(Would also probably work w/cod or haddock. But fresh rockfish GOAT )
Pork shakshuka is absurd on many different levels. It’s like a culinary hate crime.
Just get cod or a light fish and poach it in your shakshuka sauce.
I feel like chicken would be a better protein than pork. I could also see adding sausage (like andouille is used in gumbo).
Wikipedia mentions a version made with lamb and also “shakshouka made with a kosher version of Spam (called loof) that was added to IDF army rations in the 1950s.”
wtf is kosher Spam?
Many Israeli soldiers insist that Loof uses all the parts of the cow that the hot dog manufacturers will not accept, but no one outside of the manufacturer and the kosher supervisors actually know what is inside.
Loof anecdotes are ubiquitous and diverse. A personal favorite that emerged while researching this topic was a current 20-year-old Israeli soldier who was handed a can of meat dated 1988. “It wasn’t bad,” the soldier said. “It just felt weird eating something that was older than me.”
lol, it’s beef? How did they miss the obvious lamb layup so they could call it Spamb?
Isn’t Spam precooked? You don’t need to poach Spam. That’s the whole point of Spam, you can just eat it out of the can without cooking it.
Just because you don’t have to cook it doesn’t mean it won’t taste significantly better if you do.
I’m only just now remembering that the Italians have a dish I heard about a while back that’s very similar to shaksuka which has the fantastic name of “uova in purgatorio” (eggs in Purgatory). You make a fiery tomato sauce with red pepper and basil and poach some eggs in it. Different spice profile, but the same basic idea.
Fish poached in tomato-based sauce is another Jewish North African dish I wrote about here. I have not been able to perfect it (its kinda like soul food where the ingredients and technique are pretty basic, but it’s all about getting the feel for the exact ratios).
I wrote it here before but I think the absolute best addition to Shakshuka are Merguez sausages.
While looking stuff up for this topic, I came across the Mexican equivalent, huevos ahogados.
Here is Rick Bayless preparing some.
Catching up on some food.
Sous vide pork belly
Reducing the marinade and steaming some buns.
Broiled
Glazed
Finished
And tonight, a Spanish dinner.
I’m off to a lake house for a week soon and got yelled at for only packing 5 bags of chips. I sneakily went to remove 2 from my luggage which is when I found out that she had sneakily put an extra one in there.
In terms of food prep I sterilized a couple jars and am making wild garlic pickles I found growing in the yard, and some pickled kraut. I have a side of salmon in the freezer for a week hopefully killing parasites so that I can eat it raw. Cottage trips are predominantly about cooking for me.
I have a ton of rhubarb, and I’d never used it for anything other than dessert. I was watching this year’s Top Chef, and a couple chefs used it in savory dishes, and I thought why hadn’t I ever tried it.
I found this recipe for Skillet Chicken with Rhubarb and took a shot at it - my wife is not a big sour person so I tried to limit that a bit. It still turned out pretty solid and my wife actually asked for more sour next time. I should have crisped up the chicken skin better, too. The rhubarb sauce looks like baby vomit, but it tasted good.
Did steak yesterday too. I wanted MrsWookie to pick up a couple thick cut tomahawks for Father’s day, but Costco didn’t have any. But I wanted a thicker steak so that I could smoke it for a non-trivial amount of time over low indirect heat without overcooking it. So, I figured I could just tie a couple regular together, and it’d be close enough, even if we didn’t get the bones to gnaw on. Turns out that I also didn’t have 4 rib eyes in the freezer, so it was to be two rib steaks and two NYs, both prime. I also didn’t have any butcher’s twine, so I had to call another audible.
I didn’t get a pic of searing the steaks on a grill set right over a hot chimney. I separated them and started with the unexposed surface.
Grilled corn and a salad for sides
MrsWookie did the poofy Japanese cheesecake with strawberries for dessert. It kinda got deflated
