[Smashy the Hammer] [An Aspiring Luddite]
I carry no phone
An aspiring Luddite
In a wired world.
Mastodon Verification Link
[Jeff Berry]
Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he migrated to the Fediverse. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance. He hates cell-phones.

Not Quite Falafel
20 April 2014
[Almost Falafel]

For one of our Lenten feast days, we indulged ourselves in delivery pizza. The menu, as seems to be fairly common, at least in this part of the UK, contained not only the usual pizzas, calzones, and so forth - the things one would find on a menu in NYC - but also donner meat, falafel, and, of course, the ubiquitous chips - although without the 'fish and.'

Now, we like falafel pretty well, but since it was a feast day, we opted instead for meat and cheese. Still, it put the idea in my head, and since I've usually got chickpeas around, we decided to have a homemade version a few days later. There was a complicating factor, though. I'd recently been messing about with a medieval recipe for 'Frytour of erbes,' which says, essentially, mix ground herbs with flour, water, salt, and yeast, and fry them. I used sourdough starter, and it was pretty good, but that's neither here nor there. What is here, or possibly there, is that I though that mushing the two concepts together might have a positive result or results.

And so it did.

[Lots of pictures]

Not Quite Falafel
or
Fauxlafel

If you are using canned chickpeas, you can probably just drain them and be done with it. If you are working from dried, then soak them for a few hours, or overnight, then simmer them for about forty-five minutes, until they are fairly soft, but not completely without crunch. If they are too soft, so will the end result be. Let them cool, if necessary, then reduce them to crumbs. If you have a food processor or food mill, by all means use it. I did not (although, serendipitously, we found a manual one at the charity shop the next day), therefore, I used a potato masher. It must have built character.

Dice, mince, or chop your onion as fine as you may. If you have a food processor, a quick blitz might not be amiss. If the bits are too large, the fauxlafel will tend to fall apart while cooking. Add it to your chickpea bits. Add the spices.

Take your greens and chiffonade them, again as finely as you may, for the same reason. You could use herbs, fresh or dried, instead of leafy greens, if you prefer, or omit them entirely. I like the contrast of colour, flavour, and texture, myself.

Add the gram flour and a tablespoon or so of water. Mix everything together with your hands and try to form it into a ball that holds its shape. If it's too dry, add a tiny drizzle of water; if it's too wet, add a bit of gram flour. If it falls apart completely, it may need quite a bit more flour to give it some structure. If you don't have gram flour, wheat flour would probably work, many recipes call for a few tablespoons of such. Some also call for an egg as a binder, but that would make it non-Lenten and non-vegan, which may matter to you. It's also not needed, since the gram flour works perfectly well on its own.

If you've got a deep fryer, deep fry them. If not, shallow frying them in small batches will work. If you are going that route, form your fauxlafel into patties or fritter shapes rather than balls, so that more of them will be under the oil at any given time. They shouldn't take long to cook, perhaps a minute on each side. It will depend on how hot your oil is and how large your fritters are, of course. If you got the spicing right, you should be able to serve them as-is with no extra salt or what have you, although some sort of sauce or garnish, perhaps tahini based, is not a bad idea.

We served them with some marinated scratch-and-dent mushrooms from the farm shop, and the acid of the marinade made a lovely counterpoint to the rich, fried fauxlafel.


© 2014 Jeff Berry
The Aspiring Luddite