Cardamom and Tea

We food bloggers are always trying to show you something new. Sometimes we want to tell you all about unfamiliar ingredients or flavor combinations, like the wonders of sumac or the lovely combination of grapefruit, fennel, and pomegranate. But other times we want to share a new technique that will change the way you cook something familiar.

A few months ago, I wrote about the way I learned to make lentils and rice from my mom. The recipe calls for very few ingredients—it’s just lentils, rice, olive oil, onion, and salt. And with such humble beginnings, its deliciousness is one hundred percent a product of the way it’s made, rather than the fanciness of the ingredients used to make it. These are no imported green puy lentils, but just a simple one pound bag from the supermarket, and you don’t need much more to get it just right.

Homemade lentils and rice can sometimes turn into something that resembles the gloopy, scummy afterthought served as the one vegan option in cafeterias. But to cook perfect lentils and rice, you simply need to approach the dish with an obsessive amount of rinsing. You par-cook and then rinse the lentils, then you rinse out the pot that they were cooked in, you rinse the uncooked rice, and then you steam everything together. Everything comes out perfectly fluffy, clean, and flavorful, and when you get the timing and measurements right, absolutely nothing melts together, and you end up with perfectly distinct grains, each cooked to the perfect doneness.

To do anything to the original recipe is to gild the lily, but sometimes it can be fun to use a standard as a template to come up with something new. So this recipe is another take on classic lentils and rice. It involves just as much rinsing as the original, but it also introduces some new flavors and colors. For herbs and spices, we’ve got turmeric, dried mint, crushed red pepper, and saffron. If you’ve never tried dried mint, I highly suggest that you make or find some because it has a flavor completely unlike fresh mint, and it’s an important ingredient in Middle Eastern and Mediterranean food.

The spices add a wonderful aroma to this dish, but it’s the tomato and lemon that give this version of lentils and rice its piquancy. I’m a big fan of whole lemons, so I like to leave a ring of very thinly sliced lemons on top of the lentils and rice, which get mixed in when you fluff everything right before serving. If you aren’t a fan of the sour-bitter combination of whole lemon slices, you can remove them before fluffing. In either case, they’ll impart a lovely fragrance and tartness while the lentils finish cooking.

piquant lentils and rice

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Prep Time: 15 minutes
Total Time: 40 minutes
Yield: 6 to 8 servings

Ingredients

1 pound lentils
1 cup basmati rice
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 1/2 cup onions
1 teaspoon turmeric
1 1/2 teaspoons dried mint
1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper
1 1/2 cups diced fresh tomatoes
1 pinch saffron (optional)
2 teaspoons kosher salt, or to taste
2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 1/4 cups boiling water
1 small or 1/2 large lemon, very thinly sliced

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Instructions

Rinse the lentils and sort through them for little pebbles. Cover with about 3 inches of water in a medium stock pot.
Turn the heat to high. Once the pot of water and lentils comes to a boil, turn the heat to medium and boil uncovered for about 10 to 15 minutes.
While the lentils are cooking, rinse the rice until the water runs clear and set it aside. *
Start testing the lentils for doneness around the 10 minute mark. The lentils are ready once they are unpleasantly al dente. You should be able to chew one (it should be somewhat soft), but it should still be gritty and mealy.
Once the lentils are ready, strain them and rinse them until the water runs clear. *
Use a damp paper towel to wipe down the sides of the pot that you cooked the lentils in until the scum is completely gone.
Add the olive oil to the pot, turn the heat to medium and add the diced onion. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the onion softens (about 5 minutes).
Add the turmeric, dried mint, crushed red pepper, and tomatoes, and cook for 1 minute.
Add the lentils back into the pot, along with the saffron, rinsed rice, kosher salt, lemon juice and 2 1/4 cups boiling water. Stir together and shake everything out into an even layer.
Turn the heat to high. Once the water comes back up to a boil, cover, lower the heat to low, and cook for 6 minutes. Do not open the lid while it’s cooking.
Once 6 minutes have passed, open the lid, do not stir the lentils and rice, and arrange the lemon slices on top.
Cook covered for another 6 minutes. Once 6 minutes have passed, turn off the heat and keep the pot covered for another 10 minutes.
After 10 minutes of resting, fluff the lentils and rice with a fork and serve.

Notes

* To do a more environmentally friendly version of the rinsing steps, you can rinse by adding water to the pot, swishing things around, straining, and repeating a few times. This uses less water than just rinsing in a colander over the sink.

While the smell of cardamom baklawa brings me back to so many childhood memories, date ma’amoul doesn’t tug at my heartstrings in the same way. I think this is probably because no one in my immediate family bakes it.

The kind of ma’amoul we would buy was mass-manufactured. You know, the kind where there’s nowhere near enough butter in the dough, and the flours didn’t have a chance to hydrate. So you end up with this gritty, dry exterior where every distinct grain of semolina tastes and feels like a grain of sand, and no amount of powdered sugar can fix it.

And the fillings. The fillings! The pistachios become hard little pebbles and the dates become a fibrous, gunky mess. Their sugary binder would stick to your teeth and you’d need a gallon of chai to choke them down.

So a couple months ago, I decided that I should probably write up a post about ma’amoul, but I wasn’t super thrilled about it, since all of my experiences eating it were so mediocre. That is, until I ran into my auntie Geeto at a Persian restaurant last month. We set a date to bake ma’amoul together, and everything changed. Geeto understands the secret to a crisp, chewy, buttery ma’amoul, and she was kind enough to let me share her wisdom with you.

The way Geeto prepares her ma’amoul date filling is different than most recipes I’ve seen. Instead of puréeing them in a food processor, she roasts them with butter for a few minutes, until they become so soft, you just need a fork to mash them up. They caramelize slightly, and the little bit of butter gives them this delicious taffy-like consistency.

Even if you have to settle for stale dates that have been sitting on the supermarket shelf, getting old and crispy (but not crispy in a good way), Geeto’s roasting technique refreshes dates and makes them like new (and if you try this with very good quality dates, you’re really in for a treat). As a total bonus, when you prepare them in this way, you don’t need to add any sweetener, because the roasting process highlights the dates’ natural sweetness.

But let’s backtrack a little bit, because the very first thing Geeto taught me is the importance of dough hydration. Semolina and farina are much coarser grains than all purpose flour, so you’ve got to give them time to soak up all the liquids. This means that you should first let the flours hydrate a bit overnight in a clarified butter and simple syrup dry soak, which gives everything a nice head start.

The next day, get ready for an emotional whirlwind. You’ll add half of the milk and mix it together, and it will seem like the perfect amount of liquid to bind everything together. You may even think you don’t need to add the rest of it and pat yourself on the back. But then you’ll let it sit for 20 minutes and everything will change. After it’s had a chance to soak, you’ll notice that the dough has lost its squishy consistency, and it will pull apart like cotton, rather than melted cheese. You’ll then add the rest of the milk, mix it together, and it’ll suddenly seem like way too much moisture, and you’ll worry that the cookies will never hold their shape. But after 20 minutes go by, everything will come together into a soft, flexible dough that pulls apart like slightly warmed mozzarella. The final, rested dough dough will easily release from the ma’amoul press and still hold its pattern.

Geeto impressively does all this without measuring and without a recipe. To try Geeto’s technique, add about 1/4 cup of milk to the flours (after soaking in simple syrup and butter overnight) knead the dough together, and continue to knead (resting occasionally), adding 1 or 2 tablespoons of milk at a time, until the dough becomes the perfect consistency. This will take about 30 to 45 minutes, but it yields nice results if you know what consistency you’re looking for.

In order to turn this into a step-by-step recipe, I’ve streamlined this technique and tested exactly how much liquid should be added for the perfect consistency. Feel free to stick to my recipe below, or try your hand at Geeto’s strategy if you have a little extra time and want to make ma’amoul like a real pro.

The one tricky thing about making this recipe is finding a ma’amoul press, which yields an elegant, professional-looking cookie. They’re hard to find in brick-and-mortar stores, although Middle Eastern markets often carry them. But if you’re willing to wait a couple days, you can easily find them online. There is a huge variety of ma’amoul press shapes and sizes, each corresponding to a different kind of filling, and date presses tend to be flat and circular, like the ones pictured here.

But I hate to ask you to buy special equipment or ingredients when it’s not absolutely necessary, so I’ve got a few suggestions for makeshift ma’amoul presses. Keep in mind that they might not look as polished as the ones made with a real press, but they’ll still be tasty and pretty.

My favorite makeshift ma’amoul press is a 3/4 measuring cup, which works well to form a uniform circle. Individual plastic yogurt containers (the short, squat ones) and small plastic cups also work. Just be sure not to fill the container all the way, but press the filled dough into the bottom and flatten it out as best you can. Once you have your flat cookies, use the back of a fork to make a design on the surface. You can also shape them by hand, which is actually quite traditional. When there’s a will, there’s a way!