Can Sohla Make a Meal Out of String Cheese? | NYT Cooking

i got really excited about dessert and then like nothing else happened in my brain [Music] hello sola here and welcome back to my kitchen and once again i'm gonna have one hour and one secret ingredient to make a dinner and dessert if you saw the last episode i made a korean barbecue spread using oreos from that experience i learned that an hour is really fast i ended up going overtime so my goal today is to stay in time but you know who knows what happens when i see the ingredient [Music] you said it's not breakable right candy bars otter pops hot dogs oh this is a fantastic ingredient string cheese i mean i love i love string cheese i already know what i want to do for dessert immediately so i want to make kanafe or kunafe ham what's the proper pronunciation for kanafe kunafa that's what we're going to have for dessert string cheese whoa this is a good one so dessert we're going to make kanapha so the the the dough that it's made with is called we we need to have pop-ups for people pronouncing things properly so you've got you mix this dough that's like really shreddy and fine with key and then you press a layer of it into a tin then you add your cheese and then you press another layer of it and you bake it and then it comes out you flip it over you cover it in syrup and pistachios and it's so delicious okay so dinner should we just make a cheesy gordita crunch let's make like a a shawarma-ish inspired thing but instead of the chicken we'll sear the string cheese in a cast iron so like one side gets crispy and the other side is chewy i think it would be cool to smear the sticks of cheese in the yogurt marinade and then load it up in a warm pita with some pickled veg and some like cucumber sauce that sounds really tasty right can i do this in this amount of time so grocery shop is going to be really quick i think that the challenge here is we're going to eat a lot of cheese do they not have cucumbers just one pickle let's get one pickle they have something called arabic seven spice okay it has black pepper paprika cumin clove nutmeg cinnamon cardamom you think i can use this yeah you can use that we just got back from the store didn't need too many things couldn't find cucumber at the bodega so we went with one dill pickle that's great this is what we're going to use to season up our shawarma-ish thing and uh we needed to meet the minimum at the bodega so we have some soft licorice three two one go so my goal with this episode is to finish in 50 minutes to make up for the last episode let's do some eyeballing so when you make key you simmer the butter to cook out all of the water and then you pour off the clarified fat leaving the milk solids behind okay i think everybody is nicely coated let's divide this in half top and bottom oh yeah we're cutting the cheese okay 10 minutes have elapsed feel a little smooshy smush oh syrup you don't want it to be just like a simple syrup one to one you want it to be cooked down so that it's nice and thick and most of the moisture has cooked out of it let's work on a tahini sauce tahini lemon juice garlic water if you want to get crazy you can make green tahini sauce put in the blender with some herbs should we do that blender's in the closet see it's just like chocolate it like thickens into a paste when you add a small amount of liquid which is confusing because you're like wait but i added liquid and then it thins back out again it's pretty good yeah i think that's good okay when i grate ginger i don't bother peeling i feel like the grater takes care of it okay let's marinate our string cheese i think i have too much yogurt on here whoops and in the meantime i guess we make our salad oops [Music] string cheese is delicious it's better than just mozzarella it's got a little bounce little spring a little string in its step how much time do i have fifteen seventeen you trying to short me on my time this is for the 50 minute limit right yeah okay all right maybe this is the only way to get me to finish in an hour [Music] i know clementine let's get our one pickle [Music] okay salad done that looks good doesn't that look vibrant not brown yet oh syrup cheese interesting we shall turn that off oh oh i forgot we'll do a combo orange blossom caraway if you go overboard with that stuff it tastes like soap let's flip finish syruping this add a little pistachio [Music] how do i make that stop oh fancy i've got some gold leaf should we bust it out i have this leftover from my pastry chef days so now we're going to assemble our sandwich let's shove our sticks in here we freaking did it we're on time maybe i shouldn't make 10 things our pickley salad tahini sauce they are hot and sloppy the little pita pockets huh huh okay i'll guess i'll clean up hang out with us yeah join the tasting this is our string cheese meal okay so we have a string cheese shawarma whoa you know shawarmas are my favorite food i know and we have a salad made with one dill pickle from the bodega and we got a little tahini sauce all in a warm pita what more can you ask what more can you ask for more can you ask for i think it tastes delicious i just wish i could get it in my face easier or i could get more of it in my face at the same time my assembly was not good sauce should have gone in first after hard sear and the cheese ended up being good it worked it kind of feels like more meaty i think it's a good vegetarian alternative it's it's really good it's really really good no one's gonna believe this this is one of those things though once you pick it up you can't really put it down you gotta just keep eating oh you put it down and see what happened so this is my try cheese salad sauce you nailed it and now the main event the real main event and then this is also true to photo wow exactly the same stuff with the stuff on top i even went a little wild with the gold leaf he went crazy so as soon as i saw string cheese this was my first thought i mean this is the greatest cheese dessert on earth it surpasses any kind of cheesecake oh yeah cheese come on it makes it look silly cheesecake is silly next to this and cheese plates for dessert it's a great way to disguise string cheese you can't even tell i would totally do this again but i wouldn't use string cheese i would just use part skin mozzarella ideally or kawi cheese oh yeah yeah ideally yes i didn't think about how long it would take to open the packages yeah if you don't have a child they're better cheeses for adults to eat than string cheese you

Channel: NYT Cooking

Views: 321,368

Rating: 4.9643755 out of 5

Keywords: cooking, cooks, recipes, recipe, how-to, how to, kitchen, new york times, new york times cooking, nyt cooking, nyt, nytimes, Sohla El-Waylly, sohla, ham el-waylly, string cheese, shawarma, pickle, how to make shawarma, dinner, dessert, club sohla, mystery ingredient, one hour challenge, middle eastern, middle eastern food, pita, kataifi, cast iron skillet, bodega, how to cook with string cheese

Id: nVthJVXH8yo

Length: 8min 45sec (525 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/breakupbydefault]

I love Kunafa! I'm inspired. This video is a bit short though.

Throughout the entire video, I couldn't stop thinking... who sells just ONE dill pickle? It looks bigger than your average pickle but just seems like a waste of packaging.

[u/LV2107]

I know she's good at this, but can't they make poor Sohla cook normal food for once? She's a great cook. Enough with the weird challenges. Just give her a channel and let her do her thing. I feel her talents are being wasted on these gimmicks.

[u/ohnoitslubu]

The Dark Souls of chefs