How to Make Falafel | Kenji's Cooking Show

everyone its Kenji and today we're making falafel so if you've ever tried like I have making falafel from canned chickpeas what probably happened is you ground up the chickpeas maybe by hand or maybe in the food processor you made your little balls you seasoned them and then you fry them in oil and they just completely fell apart that's because you can't make falafel with canned with a precooked or canned chickpeas and can't chickpeas are cooked it's because the starch that you need to bind the falafel together in in canned form it's already been cooked and deactivated so it won't actually bind the falafel properly and what ends up happening is that the falafel falls apart it's it's a full awful experience um so dried chickpeas soaked in water overnight at room temperature that's what these are so these are this was about 2/3 of a cup of chickpeas that I soaked in water overnight you want to put enough water that it can at least triple in volume because that's what they're gonna do they're gonna triple in volume and then well actually first I'm going to put in some herbs so these are this is parsley cilantro and mint about a couple ounces of it maybe an ounce and a half that I have simply washed picked washed and spun in a salad spinner you don't have to use a ton of herbs but I like a ton of herbs are my falafel and then you're gonna put your chickpeas in the same salad spinner you wanted to be real nice and dry if you don't have a salad spinner you can do this like on a on a tray lined with paper towels but you really need them to be super dry and they're gonna go right in and we're also going to do some cumin and some coriander it's about a teaspoon cumin seed and a teaspoon of coriander seed I'll link to a recipe I did a recipe written written recipe for this on Serious Eats comm I'll link to it in the description I'm not following it exactly but I am following sort of the rough ratios and definitely I'm following the same procedure this is a this falafel recipe the technique I learned from my friend ina odd money from Taim which i think makes the best falafel in New York all right we're gonna make this falafel and then we're also going to make to go with it a tahini sauce I'm using a technique that I learned from Michael Solomonov there we go alright so ground cumin coriander and it goes I was gonna add a big pinch of salt I've got those other chickpeas cooking back there just for the fun of it I feel like if I'm gonna soak chickpeas I'm gonna soak enough to make falafel and enough to cook to have them aside either for either to make hummus or to just have for salads all right so now we're gonna pulse in a food processor if you don't have a food processor you can do this in a meat grinder you even a manual meat grinder like a you know like one of those $30 things that stick in the counter it'll come out great you want to open it and scrape down the sides a couple times as we go just to make sure that there's no that we're getting all the chickpeas down into there oh you know what we forgot is we forgot a garlic I want forget the garlic at the bottom that guy's little let's get rid of that part you can use a garlic press for this or a microplane I'm just using the smashing rock method doesn't need to be super fine because it's all gonna get chopped up a little bit more inside the food processor anyway okay so you want to grind this until it's about the texture there like a wet meal kind of like that and you want to be able to pick it up and if you squeeze it it should just barely hold together in little balls like that it's going to a tiny tiny bit more so by the way these chickpeas are just to confirm they are completely raw all that all that I've done with them is took dried chickpeas and soaked them overnight in plain old water they do all their cooking inside the oil all right so now that the ground up what we want to do is we want to put them into a bowl and as they says it's it's starch that you've sort of released from bursting you know come cutting open some of those cells some of the starch is going to start to seep out and so right now it's super loose and it barely holds together I'm a kind of crumbles but as this sits for about 15 minutes in the fridge it's gonna become much easier to then form into little balls so in the meantime I'm gonna make our tahini sauce and I'm gonna heat up some oil this is just grapeseed oil that we're going to use to fry it all right so for our tahini sauce we get our blender we want a fine mesh strainer now this is the real trick that I learned from Michael Solomonov of as a hob that's his restaurant so what we do is we take a head of garlic or most of a head of garlic dump it in their skins and all most of it's in the fridge while we while we do that this is basically like his exact recipe so I'm not I'm not claiming any kind of credit for this one mm-hmm lemon juice and again you can go ahead and put the seeds right in there because we're gonna strain this all out afterwards were tamiya so lemon juice a couple lemons worth now the trick here is that garlic is a garlic it contains these precursor chemicals that once you rupture cells open and I've said this many times on this channel but once you rupture the cells open they combine and undergo a chemical reaction to form a thing called allicin which is what gives garlic that sort of really hefty bite now bite can be good some amount of bite is good but I want in my tahini I want a lot of garlic flavor and just a mild bite so not like a ton a ton a ton of bite to it and the way we achieve that is by pureeing the garlic with lemon juice so the the reaction that forms Alison this by the way I'm adding about a teaspoon of cumin seeds the reaction that forms Alison doesn't take place as readily in acidic environments so by pureeing the garlic directly in lemon juice you're able to extract a ton of garlic flavor while inhibiting the form of Alison you know it doesn't completely prevent it so you still get some bite but it comes I'm much much more mild than if you were to incorporate the two separately if you were to puree the garlic first and then add the lemon juice so we're gonna start out slow on the blender slowly increase the speed I we can add a little bit of water actually loosen this is pretty tight we're gonna end up adding quite a bit of water to our teeny sauce anyway so it's alright to add a little bit to the blender if it's uh if it looks like it's not gonna flow out perfect so now I just push it through for this match Allah leave all those garlic skins whatever on ground cumin there was and the lemon seeds behind and then this has just prepared tahini sesame paste I'll never use this brand before I hope this looks good it looked fine so we want to go for about about a cup of this now this is already well emulsified so when you put this in it's going to immediately sort of seize up because that's what happens because the sesame paste tahini has very little liquid in it it's um it's a fat emulsion and so when you add water to it it usually starts to seize up and become yeah you can see it there you see how it's becoming kind of chunky and the emotion kind of breaks now what you got to do is you got to get the ratio of fat to liquid right so we're gonna add more water in here few tablespoons at a time until it gets to the right consistency and then it should you'll see it it's sort of like kind of like magically just kind of smoothes out as you go as you whisk if you've ever worked with chocolate chocolate does a sort of similar thing if you had em for the same reason if you add liquid to it and if you had water to melted chocolate it'll seize up and it's really hard to get it smooth again hummus or sorry tahini fortunately is easier to get smooth again where we're aiming for is a texture that sort of falls off the whisk in ribbons and slowly slowly flattens out so that's about right a nice light sauce now we're gonna season this with seen that with some salt until it tastes right oh man that is delicious I'm the double-dip it's so good mmm yeah all right so at this point our falafel should be a falafel mixture should be ready to go mmm a little big I'm gonna use a well I like making nice small balls so tablespoon by the tablespoon heaping tablespoon at a time and you want to kind of gently for me you're not gonna be able to kind of roll it the way you would be able to do say like cookie dough you can't roll it in your hands it's gonna fall apart if you do that it'll just sort of barely hold together like that see all right I think my camera stopped recording for a while I don't know how long it's been but maybe you missed me putting these in here basically all I did was I got the oil about an inch of oil or maybe about three-quarters of an inch of oil up to around 400 degrees and then I carefully picked up these balls and drop them in and the trick is you want to put them in and once you put them in you don't move them until the crust starts to set up so you don't move them for the first minute or so and then after that you know the oil temperatures gonna drop down to around 300 I might even go below I think mine went down to around 275 you want to adjust the flame underneath to try and maintain a temperature of around you know 325 300 to 350 325 is good if it goes up to 350 that's fine actually I'm at around 300 and that that's fine anywhere around that range I'm as long as it's not you know doesn't dip below like 250 or 275 you know they'll cook and these are gonna cook for about 4 minutes total I let him cook on the first side and then I flipped him over with a fork which is the I think the best tool for flipping falafel because it gives you a little control you can kind of cradle underneath them this is a cast iron pan by the way you can use nonstick you can use cast iron you can use carbon steel you can use a deep fryer if you'd like you know one of the things that's great about falafel is the how much variance you can have in the flavors so this one you know it's obviously lots of herbs in this one but you could also do something like black olives so you just add them into the food processor you know a couple ounces of black all pitted black olives you can add them into the food processor has your chopping up the chickpeas you can also add a tablespoon or two of harissa paste some zatar would be great in here really any anything that you think would go well with chickpeas and is not too wet we'll work in this mixture and you don't have to go I didn't mince cilantro and parsley you don't have to use all three herbs you can you know you can use just one if I was gonna do just want to probably do just parsley or perhaps just cilantro but I do like doing that mix like that all right so these are gonna cook for about four minutes total total and once they're basically you know you can sort of feel them getting nice and crispy as you poke poke them around and once they're crispy well they're they're done this is one that fell apart some of them you are gonna probably lose a couple of them I lost actually only one it only just a little chunk of it fell off but as long as they're you know relatively tightly packed when you when you uh when you drop them in they're gonna hold together all right and this is just a couple paper towels on the plate well that is crispy so if you've ever made falafel from a mix or if you've ever done it you know like I have I mentioned I've tried making it out of canned chickpeas and in order to make it work with canned chickpeas you have to add some flour to get it to bind you have to add some raw flour because it needs that raw starch to bind if you've ever done that or if you've had it from a not-so-great restaurant you know the inside comes out kind of pasty when you do it like this made with dried chickpeas they come out super fluffy and tender inside I'll show you you see that that textured nice and fluffy and light super crispy on the outside hmm hmm all right I'm gonna be my wife's lunch I got some tahini on the bottom of the plate we're also gonna have a beet salad which I'm not going to show you how to make but it'll be similar to the one I made the other day and I'm gonna just steal one more for myself some tahini and I'll take a little bit for the dogs to have something for me no I'm not pretty brash up here sit good girl here's some for you come on all right falafel and tahini vegan and delicious I'm gonna call my wife for lunch and I'll see you guys gals and non-binary pals next time right you

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 337,458

Rating: 4.9458103 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: F9RczIcY_1c

Length: 18min 59sec (1139 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 08 2020