Baba Ganoush
Backstory
I simultaneously love and worry about making this food. Love because it’s a great food: healthy, delicious when warm and fresh, but a wonderful cool counterpart to fresh-baked bread. I worry about it because the main ingredient, eggplant, is a member of the nightshade family (as are tomatoes), and hence a possible low-grade toxin. I sometimes react to it (itchy mouth), so I’m never sure if I’ll react to this yummy dish or not.
Ingredients
- One large eggplant
- 1/4C te’chi’na (see recipe here)
- 1 large or 2 medium lemons
- 1T ground cumin
Preparation
- Wash the eggplant and remove the green head leaves, then, with a fork pierce it repeatedly all over. Use a fork, if you want to be effective, or an awl if you like yelling ha-HAAAH repeatedly.
- Put eggplant on tin foil, then onto a baking sheet and place into an oven on the upper shelf on broil. You can put it directly on a gas flame on top of the burner, or in a BBQ grill.
- Burn, Eggplant, Burn! Let it go for about 20 minutes. The skin will blacken, it will smell burnt. Persevere. At 20 minutes flip it over (carefully: it’s HOT). Give it another 5 minutes. Then start checking the ends at 5-minute intervals for squishy softness.
- Remove from oven and let cool.
- Split eggplant open with a knife. With a spoon, scoop out all the meat, picking out any charred skin. Or any skin at all, for that matter.
- Toss into food processor, along with 1/8-1/4C tehina (depends on the size of the eggplant). Start with less and add more during the blending process.
- Add the lemon, first the juice, then the (seedless) meat.
- Fire up the food processor and add the cumin powder.
- Add more tehina until the baba ganoush is creamy, not stringy.