Falafel
They look pretty authentic, to me
Time: 2 Hours 30 minutes + overnight soak
Ingredient Availability: 4/5
Difficulty: 2/5
I don’t typically eat falafel as an entree. I like to get it on the side along with some other protein, so I see it more of a side or a snack. In this case, however, I will be eating it as an entree, so I really hope this recipe from the Zaytinya Cookbook is a good one. I decided to make the tahini sauce to accompany it, but not the turmeric pickled summer vegetables.
Key Ingredients & Omissions:
There is no greek yogurt in this recipe
The only ingredient I think you may have trouble finding is chickpea flour. I had to go to Whole Foods to find it. I think just about any other flour should work about as well if you need to use something else. Other than that, everything else is fairly easy to find. The only things I omitted were the ingredients for the turmeric pickled summer vegetables.
Tools:
Food Processor/blender
Meat Grinder
Frying Vessel
Cooking Review:
Prep Chickpeas: 5 minutes + Overnight (21 hours)
To prep the chickpeas, I dissolved some baking soda in some water and added the chickpeas to the water. I filled the bowl with more water until the peas were submerged by about 2 inches. I let the peas sit out, covered, until the next evening.
Make Tahini Sauce: 30 minutes
To make the tahini sauce, I peeled some garlic cloves and juiced some lemons to be put in the food processor. After processing the garlic and lemon juice until the garlic was minced, I let it sit for 10 minutes before straining the garlic from the lemon juice and returning the juice to the processor along with some cold water. While the processor was on high speed, I slowly streamed in the tahini to form a thick sauce. I didn’t need to add any more water at the end, as the sauce seemed perfect. I will mention that the recipe says to use a blender to do this, but I don’t have a blender that would let me add ingredients while blending, so I used my food processor.
Prep: 16 minutes
To prep, I just got the rest of the ingredients ready to be mixed with the drained and rinsed chickpeas. So, I chopped the parsley, cilantro, celery, leek, and onion, peeled the garlic, and juiced more lemons.
Mix: 3 minutes
Next, I pretty much mixed all the ingredient except the lemon juice from the prep in a large bowl to prepare them to be ground together in the meat grinder.
Grind: 21 minutes
I passed the mixed ingredients through the meat grinder on speed 5 twice. Each pass took about 8 minutes.
Mix the remaining ingredients and from balls: 19 minutes
In a separate bowl, I mixed the chickpea flour with the seasonings before sprinkling it over the ground chickpea mixture. I mixed it together until just combined before using a teaspoon scoop to form balls, which were transferred to a parchment line baking sheet.
Fry: 30 minutes
After hearing the oil in my wok, I fried the falafel in 7 batches. Each batch took 3-4 minutes to cook through and brown up nicely. Once each batch was done, I transferred them to a paper towel lined tray and sprinkled them with salt.
Analysis:
The falafel had a very fresh, herby flavor despite being deep fried. They had a very crispy and crunchy exterior with a nice soft and moist interior. The tahini sauce paired nicely with the falafel, adding a creamy nutty flavor. One downside of the tahini sauce is that it has a slight bitter taste on the backend. I will also say that the falafel could probably use a little more salt on the inside to bring out more of the flavors, as the other ingredients are fairly light in comparison to the herbs. The tahini sauce helps a lot, though. Overall, I like this falafel, but it’s not perfect. With a few tweaks it could be really impressive. As is, I’ll give it a 7/10. It’s not too far off.
