Chef Michael Solomonov in The Chef's Kitchen making Lamb Shawarma

[Music] [Music] [Music] welcome to the chef's kitchen I'm your host Nicole Gaffney and we're here today with Chef Michael Solomonov he's the owner of Zahav welcome thank you so much for having me it's always great to have you here what are we making today oh my gosh well okay so what we're gonna make is lamb shawarma yeah all right I do air quotes because everybody what's your association with shwarma a PITA a big messy sandwich and also like the vertical thing which you could never really build in your house without getting like without burning town quite honestly so no so what we like to do is we like to get the essence of the street food the soul that like that like roasted meat over charcoal thing going on which is awesome but we want to bring that spirit to the home right so we start with a lamb shoulder which looks honestly a little bit terrifying right it's not the prettiest pieces I've ever seen exactly but that's the beautiful thing about these like gnarly cuts of meat they've got the right amount of fat they've got like a bone or they taste like something like of course filet mignon is like much easier to cook you can slice it but there's not there's nothing really going on and for this we want spice we want to like slow roast and we want it to be like Oh show us and delicious all right and the beautiful thing about lamb shoulders is they're still actually very inexpensive right back in the day I don't know if like I sound like an old man but you would always say well you know I remember one likes Kate with cheap or muscles were cheap or what kind of meat hanger steaks skirt steaks oh my god skirt steaks are like so expensive we can't even use them at the restaurant they're so expensive so the beautiful thing about lamb shoulder is like most people are still terrified of them and there are probably the best cut in my opinion of any red meat really you've got everything going on at Zahav we do a lamb shoulder that is like our signature dish that we smoked confit and chicken fat and then glazed and pomegranate juice and it's like what has fueled our restaurant yeah it is so so what I'm doing is basically I'm opening it up and I'm trimming it up the reason I'm doing that is to get like some of the unnecessary pizza pieces of fat and there's nothing like super scientific about this too you just want to cut out a little bit like exactly exactly because you want to open them up so when when it's roasting it renders proper properly and when you slice it you don't get a big hunk of fat so we're just gonna do this and we want it to get it to sort of like something that is a little bit more flat because we're gonna end up rolling it up but more importantly we're gonna end up seasoning it and carrying it overnight a hundred percent and that is the way for us like we we have been trying to describe or like articulate Israeli cuisine right say you've done a really nice job I appreciate you saying that you don't have to say that because we're on camera but they do I do appreciate it well thank you very much thanks also for pronouncing my last name correctly that never happens but so we so what we're trying to do is basically describe a hundred different cultures in one restaurant in eastern Pennsylvania right and they way for us to do that to describe the Moroccan the Yemenite the Bulgarian is through spices and through different techniques right so spicing is of the utmost importance also back in the day spices were the sort of non-perishable right the spices went all over the world and they helped sort of define or recreate certain holidays different traditions throughout you know like a thousand years of cooking right so food is very important in Jewish cooking food is like obviously in the seasoning is very important in every culture and cuisine I mean think about some of your best memories well they were I mean it was like really like the great to be the chef that uses the cliche of the grandparents but it's true my grandmother would make maracas which are these weekly manger exactly they're sort of like what I grew up with what I fell in love with and what they do is tell the story basically of like Sephardic Jews coming from medieval Spain to the to the Balkans and then to Israel you know so it means oh and they're a delicious pastry right on top of it all so yeah I know you know on the drive back to Philly from the shoot I ate like 20 of them so here's what we're gonna do we're just gonna trim a little bit more of this fat off and then what we're gonna do is take our spices and we have sort of like a red meat shwarma blend okay although you can honestly do whatever you want we've got garlic onion pepper Rica cayenne and sumac which is like my favorite things you know about sumac I do it's real tangy yep it's got this sort of dried cherry sour thing going on and what's nice is that it's not actual there's no real acidity what we want to do is have all these spices permeate right so when you roast it you don't get that sort of like flat like you know under seasoned braised like there's nothing worse than that you're like wow the exterior tastes great and the interior tastes like just cardboard you know what we want to do is draw out some of the moisture and we want to really permeate this places so when you get into the center of the lamb roast or the shwarma you're really getting a bite that is like super flavorful we'll return with more from the chef's kitchen we are back with more from the chef's kitchen now I have a question for you how do you know when you've taken off enough fat you still left you know quite a bit yeah I mean I think that like the the fact that that is super hard and the fat that looks like it's really saturated that's almost looks like soap that's kind of what you want to lose you know so fat is super super important and if we didn't use a fatty cut of meat this would totally suck this is not good this is not like that is important you know we're gonna cut this as a roast we're also gonna do our like house warm-up without the fat it's not going to work all right and this recipe is in your knee thank you very much it is a really big deal this is our third we did a federal donuts book as well sort of in the middle we had to break up two Israeli books with the fried chicken and donut book super Rando but delicious all the same yeah and I feel like our is a huh book we were here we're here before it came out and so this is like part of our tradition I think is everything yeah so this book we took the whole Zahav team I mean the whole the whole team that worked on was a hot book and just said let's just fly to Israel and we're gonna we'll figure this out like well we'll figure out what this book is about because this aha book was Israeli food through our restaurant in Philly what we wanted to do was go to Israel and just eat and a shoot and we were there for eight days and had 82 meals yeah that's all pretty pretty serious business a lot of walking around after that a lot of water you know the beautiful thing is there are so many different you know there's so many different gastronomy and cultures right we went to all these little off the beaten path places and we ended up in this little town called Eau de sharone let me just like okay we went to this little town called Eau de Sharon and it's like this sort of one-horse town that is not known for anything it's like Tel Aviv or Jerusalem and there's this great falafel shop there that is like my favorite place ever basically nobody knows about it and I was like let's pull over the bus and we're gonna go get falafel here right so we get off the bus and we had we'd gotten off a block early and so instead of the one Shack that meets falafel there's one shock that makes Subic which is an Iraqi inspired dish it's fried eggplant with like hard-boiled eggs and tahina and a sandwich so I was like all right well we're here let's just let's have us a vehicle we'll shoot this and it's cool and it's Iraqi inspired and then we start walking towards the falafel shop and there is a place that does reflect oh and like the Tunisian tuna sandwich so I was like all right well there's the guy one guy that makes Tunis sandwiches here let's shoot that it's Tunisian and then we finally get to the falafel shop which is 200 feet ahead and I'm like we've hit three major cultures in a block and a half accidentally so we get to this falafel shop and we're shooting and the guy of course is super excited and my dad is always like that's the best falafel ever both of the honors both they drive out ease which is like you know that's the metric for success right and so we go there and the the owner is like sees a shooting gets really excited I know who you are absolutely not and nor does he care and so he comes out with this article that was like a New York magazine article and it was talking about his father's shop and he was saying oh there was a chef in the United States that wrote this and it ended up it was me yeah which is how you get free falafel right so um okay so my point is though is that you can't walk a hundred feet without hitting three different cultures you know it's fascinating so here we go we let this cure overnight in the fridge you could put this in the oven at low temperature just have something really really good if you want to be cool and we do and all right we do we're gonna we're gonna tie this guy up so it seems like it's firmed up quite a bit is that from the curing guys exactly so what's happening is it it's with the carrier you're basically removing some of the liquid yeah and you're also like the the spices are permeating and that's that's what you want I mean you can smell this already it smells astronomy right yeah it's awesome so I just open this up a little bit and then what we're gonna do is if you ever um butcher twine meat have you ever rolled up meat okay okay great so we're just gonna roll it up just like a like a burrito just like a burrito don't really 10 pounds of yeah and then you I'm just kidding okay so we're just gonna roll this guy up totally okay so we're going to tie this guy up such as regular old butchers twine regular old butchers twine that you happen to be having around I my buddy used to take a coat hanger and would take it apart and then rather really yeah all right so the tie this guy up now what you could also do if you wanted to do is just simply wrap like little ropes or yeah and kind of do it do you want to explain what the technique is I'm gonna show you actually the thing you're gonna be able to impress your friends ready pull it around okay and then you pull it and instead of self tightens so I when I worked at battery - this was like part of the thing because we would have to butcher our rib eyes to order Wow could I to this obviously because I might get a normal human and so mark would make me practice around a wheat that's really like rapping you see that alright so we're gonna wrap this guy up and we're just gonna throw it in the oven at 350 degrees for like two hours we'll return with more from the chef's kitchen we are back with more from the chef's kitchen school two hours that's all this really needs that's all it really needs now we're gonna do a couple things we're gonna roast this and we can eat it as a roast and then we're gonna slice it and make like a little bit of shwarma that's what I'm into so that's what it looks like when it's done and that is we've got this lamb shoulder now I what we refrigerated a little bit of this because I wanted to show you two things first of all we're gonna whack this up and we can eat this literally with rice like a roast or something um what I like to also do is let this rest chill it and then shave it with a knife and then crisp it in a pan and you get the sort of like I was just gonna say like an Israeli cheese steak which we made before Pat's yeah we done to me we made an Israeli cheese steak and I even got the owner who might be here in the audience might be to pronounce tehina Pina properly it took an hour and a half that I was really after after the hour and a half so so check it out like to me leftovers are amazing right leftovers are the best thing ever but for them exactly for our purposes they're great because you want to be able to throw in a pan crisp it up and we have this beautiful fat which is gonna help sear it okay so now would you use like a meat slicer at the restaurant you know I just use a knife any special technique here no basically the Oh like try not to slice your finger off technique but really just what I like to do is because it doesn't have to be super scientific right and it definitely doesn't have to be perfect especially with these big cuts of meat I feel like I like to almost cut like it angles you know because then you get nice sort of wafers and you don't you're not pressured to like slice through the whole thing you can see how the spice is all layered up in the middle exactly even some awesome like my favorite thing to eat ever is like porchetta cold you know it's just I think it's like amazing I feel like it makes a great sandwich but I think that the benefit of eating the meat cold it actually doesn't wake your palate up so like you can't cheat with it you know so we're gonna take this here and we're gonna use we're gonna use all this to doll up our sandwich I like it okay so we're just gonna put it on a pan and because we've got that like a beautiful season fat already even meat we actually don't need to add fat to it which is pretty awesome so that's all gonna exactly the winter and crisp all right and so while that is going we're just gonna let that kind of crisp up we can make a little too you know sauce great you didn't say it right that time I know I know you know well I don't want you to look at me and be like what are you talking about you're speaking like Klingon you know um so here we go so is this just the raw Tina yep exactly so that's the rock Tina and we're just gonna add a little bit of lemon juice to it and this is we use an amazing brand called zoom the seeds are from Ethiopia they process a now Zara and they happen to all be from Philadelphia really just Wow crazy that's super cool we're gonna add just like a little bit of ice water to that one second you can just like sink water it okay yeah that's the thing about inna it's like you can't you're like that doesn't look edible and then you keep Lipsey's up when you add the water to it because it's really it's all fat you know so it's like you it's like if you added just straight water to like butter it would not look pretty you know yeah we're just gonna season that great so that's just it lemon juice water yeah I know you do like your trick with the garlic we do the garlic and all that too but for these purposes we don't really need to you're not a little bit more water and then you're gonna end up actually with that alright so you end up with this yep yep this going now look what's happening here starting them really melt it is it's starting to melt down it's like sort of like set that bacon fat sort of situation going on and then we can start to assemble a little bit no I ask about the two different types of flat brow torpedo you have here of course so there actually one is PETA and then one is lava all office I'm diggin Israel it was basically brought that's the lava it was brought to Israel on by the Iraqi Jews in that early 50s okay and it's made in a taboo or like a be high oven similar to not all right the proximity to India and Iran take it on the side exactly the weapon on the side we've got lawful which is nice and flat and it makes a really good flatbread and then we've got pita which we can cut open to make the traditional sandwich we'll return with more from the chef's kitchen we are back with more from the chef's kitchen so what we're gonna do is heat up our law office I'm gonna chop up just a little bit of cucumber and tomato I do the Persian cucumbers are just like as good as it gets thanks Jay yeah and they're also super sweet you know now you have a falafel restaurant you should mention awesome yeah so we've got we I am wrapping it on my shirt and we also keep a future in the book as well Goldy which is an awesome falafel shop we do it's actually vegan even though we don't really call it a vegan restaurant per week tahini milkshakes a really sort of herbaceous well spiced falafels and french fries that are kind of briny and delicious so with the rooster we take all the bones that we use at federal donuts and we make sort of this big robust stock as broth and we end up using that and the restaurant is for profit but we donate a hundred percent of the profit it's a hungry philadelphians so we're like eliminating food waste we're using a great chicken at federal and we're we're we're providing hospitality to Philadelphians that like don't usually have that you don't usually have that kind of access and and then we've got a restaurant called Abe Fisher which is like Jewish food but like through North America and your own food essentials amazing like super talented yeah and I don't know better all teasing off a home Aesir mm-hmm a lot of restaurants everywhere I know I know we have a really great team all right so what do you like you like a little tuna yes but I want to know what all of the stuff is all right so this since we're talking about lava which is high rocky this is Amba which people know indian pretty exactly it's it's mango pickle with fenugreek but very very popular now in Israel because of the Iraqi Jews so Amba pina next to it is cuca yeah I've got just listing things that nobody's gonna be able to pronounce trust me they're delicious bad as mud pool exactly is a it's a North African the Moroccan and Libyan Jews brought it it's a good red pepper sort of condiment is really good similar to caponata oh really no these are shift got peppers they're Bulgarian peppers that are awesome they're like a genie they are delicious Yemenite pickles we're just gonna load this up now do service on the menu anywhere this is straight out of the cookbook this is made for the cookbook as well yes one of those is on and you can really like in terms of condiments you can really do kind of whatever you want I like to load it up with plenty of stuff we're gonna do a little bit of a mambo here which is and this was all shot in Israel so all of those shot in Israel and then we decided that we would come back and shoot it on the floor of my one-bedroom apartment in society Hill we wanted to make it accessible right so if it wasn't something we could do in my crappy and I know I have an awful kitchen which is ironic I know it's very and I was like if we couldn't do it there then it wouldn't be good for the boy because we want everybody to have access to it so you said this was made similar to caponata Dolce thing tons of garlic piece of garlic that is not oh yeah it is but it's slow-cooked that's good how do you keep that together well normally you don't put as much as I do in there but since you're VIP you know we're just good this so again we're back we started with a burrito finish for the burrito exactly it's dripping everywhere perfect do some paper pickles so the pickles really kind of go on the side rather than in it you can do in it you I sort of like to eat I like to eat the pickles on the side as well like take a bite of the sandwich take a bite of pickle all right I'm ready to dig in are you yeah so I I will so there's this great chef in Israel named climb Khan and he was like it Michael do you know why I'm Israeli men all have back problems and I was like I don't know is it like an IDF thing and he was like no no because all of the sandwiches that we eat are like this and that's it like when you're eating on the street that's kind of how it goes so no words but really it's delicious it's good the amount of flavor going on here is crazy it's a big it's like punch it's like balance but I mean we always like loaded up with lamb vegetables really tangy it's the spices like you said it's perfectly balanced you have the fat maybe it's crispy crunchy bread I'm easy we made it so good good well thank you so much for it thank you so much for coming tonight you yeah and enjoy [Music] so I feel like I have sort of grown up with a chef's kitchen is it aspiring line cook it was something that we were exposed to it straight past my mentor and chef friend Terrence fury was part of the show and it seems like every restaurant every cookbook every sort of milestone we end up back on the show to sort of celebrate it so I'm happy I feel like this is part about what it is that we do our book is coming out we've got a show and hopefully there'll be plenty of other things to celebrate on the show and future

Channel: The Chef's Kitchen

Views: 3,362

Keywords: Solomonov, shwarma, Chef Michael Solomonov, Michael Solomonov, The Chef's Kitchen, Lamb Shawarma, cookbook, Israeli Soul, Lamb, Michael Solomonov Steven Cook, Zahav, Philadelphia, James Beard Award, CookNSolo, Israeli cheesesteak, Israel, Middle Eastern Spices, oven roasted, Lamb Shawarma recipe, Lamb Shawarma sandwich, Lamb Shawarma wrap, lamb shawarma recipe Lebanese, Shawarma recipe, How to Make Lamb Shawarma, street food, pita, lafial, flatbread, tzatziki, cumin

Id: _3c4d0KRjQc

Length: 22min 32sec (1352 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 13 2018