Takes: 30 minutes total, 15 minutes preparation time; at least 1-2 hours for the labneh
Makes: Enough for 4 people, with other sides
Slow-cooked broad beans and tomatoes on lemon labneh
Ingredients
Labneh
500 g greek yoghurt; zest of 1 lemon; 1 t salt
Broad beans
1 kg broad beans
250 g cherry or vine tomatoes
2 onions
4 cloves garlic
sunflower oil
2 T tomato paste
cinnamon stick (or 1/2 t ground cinnamon)
1/2 t smoked paprika
1 t ground cumin
juice of 1 lemon
salt and pepper to taste
olive oil to garnish
Method
Pre-heat the grill in your oven to a high heat.
First make the lemon labneh. Line a sieve with your oldest tea towel or a cheesecloth, place it over a bowl. Mix salt, lemon zest and yoghurt well, wrap the tea towel over and weigh it down with tins. Leave in the fridge for at least 1 hour, and up to 24 hours. Squeeze cloth out well and keep labneh in fridge until ready to use.
Slice onions and cook on a medium low heat in a frying pan with a lid, for around 10 minutes, until translucent. Slice garlic and add to onions, cook for 1 more minute.
Place cherry tomatoes under the grill and cook for around 10 minutes or until the skins are just beginning to char.
Remove broad beans from pods. 1 kg of broad beans pods is around 250 g of beans. Then add beans to the onions along with cinnamon stick (or 1/2 t ground cinnamon), 1/2 t smoked paprika and 1 t ground cumin, 200 g boiling water and 2 T tomato paste. Place lid on top of the beans and cook on low heat for 20 minutes, you should be left with a thick stew-like consistency.
Once labneh is ready, fold the grilled tomatoes into the slow-cooked broad beans, season with pepper, salt and lemon juice, to taste. Spread the labneh out onto a plate, making a hollow in the middle. Top with the bean and tomato mixture, either warm or cold. Drizzle olive oil over and a sprinkle of smoked paprika. Top with chopped fresh parsley if desired.
Serve with fresh flatbreads as part of a mezze spread.
The story behind the recipe…
Every time I am podding broad beans I think about the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, the tiny beans he planted and the magical vine into the clouds that grew from nowhere. If you ask me, the magical beans he planted were broad beans. Broad beans are giant’s beans, some of the pods are longer than my hands. They have three layers. The outer pods with the hidden, soft, downy white insides, cushioning the beans with their green-grey skins and the edamame-like bright green interior. The skins can be a little bitter, so they need extra cooking until they are soft and juicy, and for this reason they do well slow-cooked and then accompanied with some lemon juice and salt.
This week a friend visited from Tel Aviv, along with her brother. A dear, old friend who I have not seen for four years. So I decided to cook a Middle Eastern feast. It is admittedly a little gutsy to cook the food of a place for someone who comes from that place. But I wanted to pay homage to the amazing food that I had eaten when I had visited her there, eight years ago. They arrive early enough that we can go for a walk before we eat. All of the leaves are new, sparkling green, it is as if the world has acquired another dimension, the colours brighter and stronger somehow, the layers upon layers of leaves and light. It is a perfect evening of full sunshine. We leave jackets at home. A walk past the windmill, along the canal, through the park, past the palace, through the forest, back home. This was my corona walk, one that I sometimes did some variation of every day. Now I am here with a friend from far away, who has got on a plane for the first time in years, and it feels like magic.
When we get home I pull plates from the fridge and start laying the table. A hummus that started as a store-bought punnet, then I added a lot of fresh tahini, lemon juice, micro-planed garlic, half a can of chickpeas, ice water, a dash of dried cumin, and blended it up again. I reserve the other half of the can of chickpeas and mix them with lemon juice and olive oil, dried chili flakes and lots of chopped parsley. Once the hummus was smooth I made a tahini/water sauce to spoon over and then topped it with the chickpeas. After years of making my hummus too thick, I’ve finally got the hang of adding enough ice water to make it aerated, creamy and quite liquid. It thickens up in the fridge.
An Ottolenghi white bean dip from his cookbook Flavours, made with giant lima (butter) beans, soaked overnight and then cooked in the pressure cooker. It is mixed with confit garlic and its oil. I wasn’t sold on this recipe. If I was to make this again, I would not mix the base beans with raw onion (as the recipe requires). The taste was a bit strong for my liking.
Baba ghanoush, which must be one of my favourite dips in the whole world, made with tahini and water, microplaned cloves of garlic, the roughly chopped flesh of charred aubergine, lemon juice and salt. Topped with olive oil. I char the aubergine by placing them under the grill in the oven for up to 45 minutes until the skins are black and peel off easily when cool and the flesh collapses to the touch. Too much faff to do it over a flame and the result is the same.
There are marinated olives with bruised rosemary and preserved lemon, left out of the fridge to come to room temperature, with lots of olive oil. There are sourdough flatbreads, the dough is made much the same way I made the pizza doughs for the sourdough pizza, rolled out thin and cooked in a hot roti pan over the stovetop. Finally, the slow-cooked broad beans and tomatoes, served warm over the labneh. Add some chili flakes if you want it hot. The beans are fragrant and spicy, a perfect balance to the labneh though they would also go well over rice, or with lots of herbs. It’s not the first time I’ve made labneh in the newsletter, but I’m including a recipe again here because I find it so quick, creamy and delicious.
I have such incredible food memories from the two weeks I spent in Israel and Palestine. Going there is like coming home for a vegetarian. There was a profusion of vegetarian and vegan places and everything was served with so many incredible sides. I got addicted to hummus and ful, a brown, spicy stew made with dried broad beans (also known as fava beans). The combination is so good.
One day, my friend’s brother takes me to a small stall on a side street behind the markets in Tel Aviv, where we are meeting a friend of his for hummus with ful. This place is his regular. They know him by name here, bring him the same order every day. We are sitting on low, makeshift stools around a dented wooden table in the noisy alleyway, packed with locals. The guys behind the stall have a humming rhythm to their work, barely even looking at their hands as they throw the ingredients together, taking next orders, joking with each other and their customers. The bowls of hummus appear on the tiny table between us in seconds. Hummus, the spicy stew of ful, streams of olive oil so green and peppery it bites to taste. Tahini sauce, paprika powder. A chopped boiled egg, optional. Italian parsley chopped roughly and piled on top last. Then the sides. A pile of warm, fresh pitas that open at the touch. A plate with quartered raw onions, lemon quarters, olives. A green chilli sauce, blended chillies and lemon and salt and oil. A tahini sauce. Another plate, hot, hot chillies. Raw. They are famous for having the spiciest chillies in the market. I eat one of them whole with ease to the amazement of the two guys, it is mild and I feign nonchalance. Then I am emboldened to try another one and this time it is so hot I can feel the thin skin around my fingernails burning for hours afterwards just from having picked it up with my fingers. My friend’s brother touches his arm, wipes his forehead. Everywhere he touches burns, the Icarus touch.
After we have eaten no-one says anything. The guys have their eyes closed, their hands folded, they are leaning back in their chairs. I don’t dare to speak, I wonder if there is some cultural protocol here that I have missed, a meditation or a prayer after eating instead of before as it was in my house. We listen to the world continuing to move in the alleyway around us, feeling the burn from the chillies, beads of sweat forming on foreheads. Finally they begin to speak again and one of them explains. “You don’t have to be silent after hummus and ful, but if you talk I’m not going to listen. I have to savour it.”
I hope you can savour this week’s recipe and that you are inspired to create your own Middle Eastern table.
Peace and love.
Amelia.
PS a quick woodpigeon update. Both of the eggs have now hatched into tiny pterodactyl-look-a-like baby pigeons, around two weeks after the eggs were laid. With thanks to my Mum’s spot-on naming suggestions, we’ve christened them North and South, after the two biggest islands in New Zealand, and the two hemispheres that we each come from. North emerged from his egg first and we managed to snap a picture while the pigeons were away for a moment. Here he is.