Conan! What is best in life?
May. 26th, 2011 05:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
st_aurafinaMaking your own yiros at home. That's what is best in life.
I literally leapt out of bed with this purpose yesterday.lilacsigil was all "Breakfast? Coffee?" and I was "Can't stop, gotta buy a leg of lamb." Then, while the lamb roasted, I made the bread and like a beautiful symphony, it all came together by lunchtime. And there is nothing like bread warm from the skillet, with lettuce you just shredded a minute ago, lamb straight off the joint and drizzled with tzatziki.
You can probably buy better, but we'd have to drive four hours to get that. This was a pretty damn fine substitute, though I make no claims to authenticity.
This is how it is done:
Lamb
Buy a leg of lamb. (Ours was partially boned, but still had the joint in it, and a good layer of fat over the top.) You can do fancy stuff with marinades and so on, but I just coated mine in olive oil and stuck it in the oven at 150 Celsius to roast. Time depends on the size of the leg. Mine was a couple of hours.
Tzatziki
This is probably the only ingredient that would be best left for a couple of days to mellow. I happened to have a big pot of it in the fridge. But if you wanted to make your own, this is what you need:
Pot-set Greek yoghurt, 500ml.
Two cloves of garlic, crushed.
1/2 a lemon
salt and pepper
1 or 2 cucumbers, the little Lebanese kind.
Scrape the seeds out of the cucumber, and grate the flesh. Squeeze that stuff, get all the excess liquid out of it - leave it to drain in a colander if you have time - and dump it into the yoghurt. Crush your garlic straight into the yoghurt, add lemon juice, salt and pepper. Stir. Add more salt and pepper if needed. Store. First day tzatziki is a bit sharp. It mellows after a day or two.
Yiros (or any flatbread type recipe)
3-4 cups of flour. The plain/all-purpose kind. I use bread flour.
2 sachets of instant active yeast. Mine are 7g sachets.
2 teaspoons of honey
1/2 cup of nigella seeds (you can leave these out, but I love them.)
2 tablespoons olive oil
1.5 cups of milk
1 teaspoon of salt
Warm the milk in the microwave to slightly hotter than blood temperature. I start with it hotter than I would put yeast into, and let it cool down to blood temp. Dissolve the honey in the milk, stir it (with a spoon) until it's the same temperature as your (clean) fingertip. Add the yeast, stir, and put in a warm place for about ten minutes. It will go foamy.
Add the olive oil, the salt, the nigella and about three cups of flour. How much of the fourth cup you use depends on the feel of the dough. I stir first until the dough comes together, then knead. You can tip the dough out onto a flat surface; I knead in the bowl. (It's a big bowl.) Flour your hands and get them in there. You want to knead until the dough is smooth and elasticky in texture. Add more of that last cup of flour if the dough feels too sticky, or if it's sticking to your fingers. Knead and knead, for about ten minutes. (I guess you could use a mixer? Or a bread machine? I like kneading.) When the dough is smooth and feels oddly flesh-like, it's ready to sit and rise. Cover it with oiled plastic wrap, put it in that warm place for about two hours.
When the dough is doubled in size, punch it down, and tip it onto your board. Cut it into twelve pieces, more or less, of about the size of an apple. Take the plastic wrap you had over the bowl, and cover those twelve pieces, let them rest for five minutes. Meanwhile, let your skillet heat up on the stove top.
(If you're making yiros, now is a good time to shred up the lettuce and put it in a bowl for handy construction-line work. Also, take the lamb out and let it rest for ten minutes before slicing it up. You'll be having lunch in about fifteen minutes.)
Roll out a piece of dough to about half a centimetre thickness. Chuck it in the skillet, and get going on rolling all the others out. Stack the uncooked flatbreads in a pile, keep them covered with the plastic wrap so they don't dry out. When the bottom of the bread in the pan is nice and speckled brown, flip it and cook the other side. Continue in this fashion, until all the bread is cooked or until you can't stand the amazing smells any longer.
Putting it all together
Take bread. Put a generous layer of lettuce on. Throw on some bite sized pieces of lamb. Drizzle on a few spoonfuls of tzatziki. You can put stuff in like tomatoes or red onion. We stayed simple, because tomatoes are out of season right now, and raw red onion is a bit strong for me. Fold up the bottom, fold in the sides. Cram in mouth. Chew, swallow, repeat. Die of how good this tastes. Then make another one.
(The skillet in question is the cast-iron pan. Still haven't washed it. Slowly becoming awesome. I love it.)
In other news, the big bang is pushing 30K. I think it's going to be finished in a couple of days. (It is possible that spending four hours cooking may be some sort of diversionary tactic.)
I literally leapt out of bed with this purpose yesterday.
lilacsigil was all "Breakfast? Coffee?" and I was "Can't stop, gotta buy a leg of lamb." Then, while the lamb roasted, I made the bread and like a beautiful symphony, it all came together by lunchtime. And there is nothing like bread warm from the skillet, with lettuce you just shredded a minute ago, lamb straight off the joint and drizzled with tzatziki. You can probably buy better, but we'd have to drive four hours to get that. This was a pretty damn fine substitute, though I make no claims to authenticity.
This is how it is done:
Lamb
Buy a leg of lamb. (Ours was partially boned, but still had the joint in it, and a good layer of fat over the top.) You can do fancy stuff with marinades and so on, but I just coated mine in olive oil and stuck it in the oven at 150 Celsius to roast. Time depends on the size of the leg. Mine was a couple of hours.
Tzatziki
This is probably the only ingredient that would be best left for a couple of days to mellow. I happened to have a big pot of it in the fridge. But if you wanted to make your own, this is what you need:
Pot-set Greek yoghurt, 500ml.
Two cloves of garlic, crushed.
1/2 a lemon
salt and pepper
1 or 2 cucumbers, the little Lebanese kind.
Scrape the seeds out of the cucumber, and grate the flesh. Squeeze that stuff, get all the excess liquid out of it - leave it to drain in a colander if you have time - and dump it into the yoghurt. Crush your garlic straight into the yoghurt, add lemon juice, salt and pepper. Stir. Add more salt and pepper if needed. Store. First day tzatziki is a bit sharp. It mellows after a day or two.
Yiros (or any flatbread type recipe)
3-4 cups of flour. The plain/all-purpose kind. I use bread flour.
2 sachets of instant active yeast. Mine are 7g sachets.
2 teaspoons of honey
1/2 cup of nigella seeds (you can leave these out, but I love them.)
2 tablespoons olive oil
1.5 cups of milk
1 teaspoon of salt
Warm the milk in the microwave to slightly hotter than blood temperature. I start with it hotter than I would put yeast into, and let it cool down to blood temp. Dissolve the honey in the milk, stir it (with a spoon) until it's the same temperature as your (clean) fingertip. Add the yeast, stir, and put in a warm place for about ten minutes. It will go foamy.
Add the olive oil, the salt, the nigella and about three cups of flour. How much of the fourth cup you use depends on the feel of the dough. I stir first until the dough comes together, then knead. You can tip the dough out onto a flat surface; I knead in the bowl. (It's a big bowl.) Flour your hands and get them in there. You want to knead until the dough is smooth and elasticky in texture. Add more of that last cup of flour if the dough feels too sticky, or if it's sticking to your fingers. Knead and knead, for about ten minutes. (I guess you could use a mixer? Or a bread machine? I like kneading.) When the dough is smooth and feels oddly flesh-like, it's ready to sit and rise. Cover it with oiled plastic wrap, put it in that warm place for about two hours.
When the dough is doubled in size, punch it down, and tip it onto your board. Cut it into twelve pieces, more or less, of about the size of an apple. Take the plastic wrap you had over the bowl, and cover those twelve pieces, let them rest for five minutes. Meanwhile, let your skillet heat up on the stove top.
(If you're making yiros, now is a good time to shred up the lettuce and put it in a bowl for handy construction-line work. Also, take the lamb out and let it rest for ten minutes before slicing it up. You'll be having lunch in about fifteen minutes.)
Roll out a piece of dough to about half a centimetre thickness. Chuck it in the skillet, and get going on rolling all the others out. Stack the uncooked flatbreads in a pile, keep them covered with the plastic wrap so they don't dry out. When the bottom of the bread in the pan is nice and speckled brown, flip it and cook the other side. Continue in this fashion, until all the bread is cooked or until you can't stand the amazing smells any longer.
Putting it all together
Take bread. Put a generous layer of lettuce on. Throw on some bite sized pieces of lamb. Drizzle on a few spoonfuls of tzatziki. You can put stuff in like tomatoes or red onion. We stayed simple, because tomatoes are out of season right now, and raw red onion is a bit strong for me. Fold up the bottom, fold in the sides. Cram in mouth. Chew, swallow, repeat. Die of how good this tastes. Then make another one.
(The skillet in question is the cast-iron pan. Still haven't washed it. Slowly becoming awesome. I love it.)
In other news, the big bang is pushing 30K. I think it's going to be finished in a couple of days. (It is possible that spending four hours cooking may be some sort of diversionary tactic.)
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Date: 2011-05-27 04:20 am (UTC)You're welcome!
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Date: 2011-05-27 12:16 pm (UTC)That bread recipe looks very tempting. I've only recently started to get the hang of making bread without a bread machine. So far I only make garlic pizzas by hand, and use the machine for sandwich loaves. I think some sort of flatbread (whether Greek or Turkish) would be an excellent next step.
Where on earth do you get nigella? I've never seen it in a supermarket here, and I doubt your supermarkets are better stocked. I could put sesame seeds in instead, but still.
When I try this, I will also be making babaganouj from scratch. One whole eggplant probably costs about the same as a 300g tub of commercial babaganouj, but would presumably yield more dip?
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Date: 2011-05-27 12:58 pm (UTC)If you're making pizzas, this is pretty similar kind of recipe except you start with milk instead of water. I've also had good success with Turkish pide, which has yoghurt in it, and has a really nice texture.
Our green grocer has a spice stand up the back, they have tiny sachets of nigella seeds, but for larger quantities, we go to eBay. Ebay is great for bulk lentils and spices and so on. And they mail them out to us, which is great.
I think you'll need a few eggplants for baba ganoush, they shrink up a lot as they lose water in the oven. I haven't made that dip, but just from roasting the vegetable in the oven, you probably wouldn't get 300g of flesh from one eggplant. I don't think you could make it affordably in comparison to the supermarket product without growing your own eggplant (I've tried; we're too cold out here.) Home made would certainly be nicer, though, and you can control the ingredients. Maybe bulk it out with chickpeas? I'm planning on trying this beet hummus, because beets are fun to roast, and the colour is gorgeous.