breaking bread (and making it) with the bedouin

While we were out in the desert, the food that we had was not so different from anything else we had had elsewhere in Egypt – foul and shakshoka for breakfast, various vegetable salads for lunch (veggies and tuna, veggies with tahina and feta), baba ghanoug (though made using a campfire, a great practice and something I’d love to do while camping in the future). The cool thing to watch was the making of bread. First off, a pit fire was the only method of cooking, so an oil barrel lid was our cooking surface. The bread dough was made up, a splash of salt water was thrown on, then the bread was spun out thin – kind of like Italian pizza throwing in the cartoons – and put on the hot lid to cook, flipped over after a quick exposure.

It blackened quickly otherwise. While the bread was cooked like this on the top, the eggplants smoldered in the fiery ashes below: multitasking. After all the bread was cooked that way and the fire had burned itself down, the other bread was prepared.

See, bread made the first method was a little crispy and quite thin – good for grabbing pieces of tuna or meat or vegetable, but not so good for scooping up that last bite. So the ashes were scraped aside and a patted-out piece of dough was placed on the sand and covered by sand and ashes to slowly bake. Of course it took longer, so only one was made, but eight or ten minutes later the whole mess was swept aside and voila: delicious cooked bread. A couple of beatings against the flour sack and a little scraping to get any excess blackening off and it was ready to eat.

Surprisingly, there was no ash or sand that we found when we bit down – I’m sure you learn quickly how to work it enough to get both out!

It was a very delicious meal prepared in a very interesting way in a very gorgeous valley with very cool people. It was certainly a learning experience in many ways – I eagerly anticipate my attempts at campfire baba ghanoug now!

shish cooking

This one’s easy. Shish kebab is one food from this region that everyone knows. Spiced meat on a stick cooked up, straight up. Delicious. Pictured here they had removed the stick and arranged them all nicely. Great meat, kind of like meatballs in this place.

Shish tawook is the same idea, but with chicken. It’s the specific name for this dish – chicken by itself is farooj. Same idea, same great taste.

the building blocks of egyptian dining

Alright, it’s at the end, but I need to put in an entry on the basics available, photos or not. These basics are the ‘salads’ as they are often referred to on menus in English, though they can also be found under appetizers.

First up is our favourite, baba ghanoug, or as it’s known back home (from the Lebanese) baba ghanoush. Made from blended, baked eggplants and spices, it ideally has a nice smoky taste to it. We tried this all over and found two places where it really shone – the fancy hotel buffet we gorged at (pictured here with pomegranate) and Sofra in Luxor – but it was nice to have every time.

Hummus follows quite closely, mostly because Christine liked baba ghanoug more – they’d be a tie for me. Made of mashed chickpeas, tahnini (sesame paste), oil, and often a bit of lemon juice, it’s proteintastic and is wonderful with the pita bread you get everywhere. It’s best when it’s nice and creamy – good olive oil will give it the best consistency.

Tabbouleh isn’t terribly common here, being a Lebanese dish, but it can be found on a few menus. Parsley, tomatoes, cucumbers, and lemon juice make up this vegetable salad. It’s not my favourite, though when it’s done really well, it’s really good.

Foul is possibly the most basic food in Egypt. Made from smushed fava beans and spices (though sometimes it’s just the beans, really basic), it always comes with bread – either inside a sandwich (sometimes also with falafel) or on the side for dipping. If it’s on a plate, it often gets a dollop of olive oil for flavour. Sometimes it comes with a bit of spicy green pepper sauce/relish that gives it a great kick. We’ve only had this in Sinai in the east and in Jordan, but I like it a lot.

Ta’miyya (or as it’s known outside of Egypt, falafel) is fava bean paste with spices (or sometimes too much salt), rolled into a ball and deep fried. This is the other most basic food and has a long history. I think. I’d guess so, considering it’s made from the same thing as foul – beans! A cup of these costs almost nothing and, depending on where you go, fills you up in a delicious way. It’s the dish of a thousand variations, even though you don’t know what can be varied.

Lastly, we’ve got stuffed grape vine leaves. If you go to local markets, you can find grape leaves out for these little buggers. Spiced rice inside the leaves fills you up pretty quickly. They’re usually accompanied by labna, a delicious yogurt dip.

There are often other choices that can be found here and there, but they’re not always dependable. Coleslaw, potato salad, garlic tomato salad (really nice and garlicky!), and often different things with eggplant.

If you want to eat for cheap in Egypt, this is where you have to head. Healthy, tasty, and filling: there’s a reason they’re available everywhere.

sweet egyptian desserts, part iii

Unfortunately, I don’t remember the names of anything and didn’t make any note, so I’m just going to post pictures of these delicious creations and make comments from what I remember. More careful documentation will be done in Jordan, as they appear.

That’s coconut on filo dough pie in the corner, and it’s as awesome as it sounds. The others are a type of shredded-wheat-like dough used in a lot of pastries here.

The roll on the right is like apricot Fruit Roll-up with coconut in the middle. Again, as awesome as it sounds. The rest is filo dough and shredded-wheat dough stuff like above.

I remember that the cookie was rather dry, though it had pistachios in it, and the light coloured stick had fig in the middle.

Delicious filo dough sweets in the window.

Some kind of cakey confection. It may be the cornmeal-like cake I mentioned in the dessert post from Luxor, but that’s unconfirmed. Your choice – pistachios or chocolate on top!

tagin

Tagin, as far as I understand it, is a clay pot stew. It can have meat, fish, vegetables – pretty much everything. We saw it on menus all over, and due to its complexity and long cooking time, required preparation and expense. We found a decent place serving it in Luxor, however, and decided to give it a try. First off, it’s hot – temperature hot, as it’s usually kept heated on a griddle or something similar once it’s prepared. Once you get past that, however, it’s a delightful combination of flavours – spices, vegetables, meat, sometimes rice – that’s a bit like a slow-cooked stew. I’m glad we visited this place more than once.

mezze, version ii

We enjoyed a few dinners at a little restaurant in Dahab that served small dishes:

fuul (or foul) with a bit of tahini and a spicy relish on top

potatoes, both of the fried and mashed varieties

‘cheese’ and veggies, which I think may be feta cheese mixed with water to create a coating for the vegetables

mosakaa, with eggplants and potatoes and a tomato sauce

and shakshoka, which we also had at breakfast. It’s basically scrambled eggs, onions, and tomatoes, but as you can see, sometimes it seems very little like eggs. There are also spices, cumin and coriander and pepper, that make it taste like so much more. Like extra dimensional eggs. One of my favourite surprises in Egypt.

om ali & mahalabia – egyptian desserts

One of the first Egyptian foods we tried here was a dessert called Om Ali. Supposedly, it was introduced by an Irish wife of a ruler way back, it’s a bunch of filo dough soaked in sweet milk with nuts and baked. Healthy it is not. We tried a more street-local version our first night with walnuts in it that was good, then the next day we headed to a fancy hotel buffet and had the rich version of it with almonds (and it was much more well done to boot). The pastry becomes saturated and really soft, soft enough to cut through with a spoon. You spoon it out, along with some sweetened hot milk – the stuff is floating in it there’s so much – and sit down with a bowl of sweetness.

Mahalabia was, funny enough, the last dessert we were able to try in Egypt. It was at a tiny koshary place and was pre-prepared and stored in little cups, so I don’t think that we got the full extent of this dessert. It’s a kind of thick milk pudding, flavoured with rose water and coconut. What we got was good, but I felt like it could be even more. From doing a little bit of research on recipes, it seems that it’s just hot milk, sugar, and cornstarch with coconut mixed in, and even the coconut is optional. Rose water is usually used, though I also saw references to vanilla. It’ll be worth a try making, if for nothing else than for variety. Chris had high hopes dashed on this one, though I still noticed her cup empty at the end…

manna

Well, it’s unleavened bread, anyway, and it’s basically manna. It’s eaten at every meal, anyway, whether as a holder for a sort of sandwich-like quick bite or as something to be torn at and dipped into a sauce. It can also be used kind of like an edible napkin to pick something up. Either way, it is a very strong staple, at least as important as rice and noodles are in Asia and the potato in North America. I love it and I hope to find a way to keep it in our house as much as possible.

crunch and chew?

This reminds me of the Simpsons where they make a very quick joke in the Kwik-E-Mart: Gum ‘N’ Nuts – together at last. Why would you want both together?

john waler whisky

Ha! It was supposed to be 90 proof, but there was no way that was true. Still, it helped keep the cold at bay in the desert.