POV Menemen (Turkish Eggs with Peppers and Tomato)

everyone I'm here at home I'm about to make one of my favorite breakfast it's a Turkish dish called minimun very easy so it's basically it's sort of like if you if you're familiar with shakshuka which is a Middle Eastern Israeli dish of eggs cooked in a spicy tomato sauce this is very similar so it's peppers tomatoes and eggs and those are the basics of it some people will insist that onions are a part of the dish and the central part of dish other people will insist that onions don't belong in the dish at all today I'm going to make it without onions I just got half of an Anaheim pepper here you can use a Hungarian wax pepper if you don't want any heat at all you can I've used two I've used poblanos before I've actually found shishitos are really nice in this dish as well it's very difficult to find the actual correct pepper to use here but really any pepper any pepper that's green and has that sort of grassy green flavor will do so we're just going to dice it up you see I took out the ribs and the seeds you can leave them in if you want it doesn't really matter and it'll have a little bit more you know if it's a spicy pepper you've got leaving the ribs and seeds in will add a little bit more heat to the dish so it all depends on how hot and you want it Billy okay so we got our pepper diced we go this little thing is called a sahaan um dish I picked up in a in Istanbul it's white you would typically see this too this minimun made and served in it's just some extra virgin olive oil this one is actually not that I think I was using that Kirkland stuff before this one is actually uh from California I think it's Seca Hills just one of my favorite olive oils and semi reduces in arbequina sacred Hills it's se ka H I ll s how widely available it is outside of California's but I think it's available I think it is I think they might even sell it at Costco these days are not positive though so we're gonna let those kind of slowly soften up a little bit I mean while we're gonna get our tomato pulp you can do this with canned tomatoes but we're gonna use some fresh tomatoes because I they looked decent at this remark the other day um easiest way I know to get pulpy Tomatoes it is to cut them in half hold your hand kind of flat against them like this and then just great I'm on the large holes of a box grater and what happens is the flesh will go through what the skin won't and the skin kind of acts as a it's a safety glove for you so your end up with this just this wave of skin under there you get the pulp and do that with a couple of ripe tomatoes you don't really have to go for those you know paste tomatoes the tomatoes up to it normally he's doing sauce for this only really works with any kind of tomato this by the way this method is also how you would do Tomatoes if you're making Spanish tomato test sorry Catalonian tomato juice pennilyn tell my cat basically just toasted bread with olive oil and tomato is also really good to stick an anchovy on there stick some allioli on there probably only being the the Spanish form of cattle only inform of Io ly the garlic and olive oil which if you're asking and you're probably not but I know some people are my opinion is it still can be called IO Lee or alioli if it has an egg yolk in it they're just two different forms of the same dish very very traditional version old-school version has no egg yolk in it just garlic and olive oil salt and pepper actually I have some I made laughs I was I was in the mood to make aioli last night so I pulled out the mortar that's what this mortar and pestle is doing you I don't know so I pulled it out and I made some other yoli's so this is just garlic and olive oil you see it forms a nice emulsion okay this is a big longest side forms an emulsion even without egg yolks so you get this kind of nice rich sauce broke a little bit in the fridge just a little bit runny that's okay still taste still gonna taste good mmm deliciously garlicky hmm all right peppers getting a teeny tiny bit Brown and that's sort of where I like to start where I like to take him and I had this tomato pulp in there oh you know another thing people ask me is why I always use a dish towel when I grab pots and pans on the stove even if they're cold and the answer is you know I think any cook anybody who's ever cooked professionally will at some point early in their career until the experience of grabbing a pan that had recently been in the oven now is now sitting on the stovetop grabbing a pan by the handle without a debt without a dish towel and melting off your fingerprints I did that a couple times earlier in my know once I did that once very early in my career in a professional restaurant I think that was also at number-9 Park in my first sort of real restaurant job we were cooking I was cooking a chicken breast Marylyn chicken breast for lunch service one day I mean that did she start by searing the breast skin side down in a skillet and then you take the skillet I mean you transfer it you flip the chicken over you're trying to take the skillet and transfer to a 450-degree oven and when the chicken breast is done cooking you pull it out put it back on top and then you grab a bunch of sauce ingredients because you're gonna make this pan sauce in there and so I put the chicken back on top I turned around I grabbed some stuff and then very stupidly I just grabbed the pan handle my fingers kind of stuck to it and I lost all my finger prints and also as any professional cook will tell you the most painful kind of injury you can get in the kitchen when you're working on the hot line is a burn because then every time you turn around and have to go towards that sauté station or the flattop or whatever you know it's like 100 1520 degrees back there and every time you get your hand near it that burn just comes back as sting sting stains and you can't it's also the kind of injury that you can't really leave for you know like if you get a huge cut you can you know you're probably go to the emergency room and hope that you have workers comp but with a burn you just got to keep cooking through it and it is extraordinarily painful anyhow that's the kind of mistake you only make once and so from then on I as every cook I know got into the habit of using a towel anytime you touch anything anytime you grab a pan you use a towel no matter whether it's hot or cold because you never know oh hang on a second I think my daughter's waking up I'll be back oh sorry my daughter is a week now and is watching her Daniel Tiger's neighborhood so that means I got about 22 minutes and 30 seconds before breakfast has to be on the table but that's no problem because we're we're almost there Turkish breakfast by the way is usually a quite a large meal I'm not going to do the full thing but I'm going to do some of the essential parts what I consider the essential parts tomatoes olives cucumber sliced cucumber mm-hmm and then the other thing one of my favorite favorite favorite things turkish foods eat is um it's called Chi Mok it's a buffalo milk cheese the fresh buffalo milk cheese that's sort of somewhere between somewhere between like mozzarella and butter so very very creamy and rich and soft and it's typically served as a slice with honey on it and it is so so incredibly delicious it's unfortunately one of those things that you simply can't get outside of Turkey or at least certainly can't get in the United States the closest stuff that I can find is Kasich I said other queso fresco a Mexican style white cheese that's also what I'm going to use in the inside my minimun okay all right so our tomatoes are cooking down season with a little bit of salt essentially you want to cook this down not until it's like a super rich paste you know like I'm not like a super thick sauce but you want to cook it down just so that raw tomato flavor is out of there and it kind of darkens in color just a little bit but you still want it to be quite quite saucy because we're gonna pick this up with bread sort of scoop it up as we eat oh speaking of which and this live of Turkish bread I made the other day I'm just going to reheat it in the toaster oven that bread if you want to know the Baker's percentages it is 100% flour I used I used pizza flour like a hot kind of high-protein bread flour double o pizza flour so like finely ground high-protein bread flour but what honestly any any kind of flour will work I use pizza flour and I used about 50% water by weight to the flour and another 15% I added kaffir but you don't have to do keV here I just used it cuz I had it you could use butter milk yogurt milk but you want about 15% dairy in there and that's what that kind of helps it stay soft and gives it a little more richness and then I did a no need method so I let it a mix ingredients and let it rise overnight oh speaking of which I have this other no need bread I'm working on them doing another video this is from last night I started making this dough I'm gonna bake a loaf of bread later hmm I let that bread rise overnight form it into a ball roll it out put it in a night I put it in the 12-inch pan stretch it out and then I brushed the taught you well you can dock it you can there's a little pattern you can make if you're doing like a Ramadan style Turkish bread where you poke your fingers all the way around the outside and then make a diamond pattern then you brush it with egg wash which is an egg mixed with water beaten brush that on and then I sprinkled it with black sesame seeds and kosher sea salt kosher salt Multan sultan crunchy salt but typically you would do sesame seeds and Nigella seeds but I don't have any Nigella seeds on me right now so I didn't let's get a few slices of this I don't put that right in here some decent honey [Music] right over the top honey and cheese delicious if you've had like you know southern style biscuits with honey and butter you know how good the combination of dairy and honey is together my restaurant we do honey butter with black pepper cracked black pepper for our server with the pretzels which i think is also delicious all right here's a little spread breads gonna breads gonna pop down there actually let's do it on the bigger board so that I've room for the bread and and the minimum all right let's go check on that minimum I'm in a minute doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo I'm a man it could use a touch more olive oil minimum is also very very you know infinitely variable very very very variable you can add a common addition would be sajuuk which is like a Turkish sausage or Buster bond which is the a beef cured beef that's qualms with the root of the word pastrami but stirred about it some yeah cured beef cured raw beef you can slice it up and out in here you could add some ground lamb you could add dried mint more fresh mint I'm actually gonna take a little bit of the cheese and sprinkle on the top at the end alright that bread is looking close to done so now I'm gonna start adding my eggs I got here a couple different types of eggs so by the way people have asked me about eggs brown eggs versus white eggs the only different of brown egg and then white egg is the dura at the species of the breed of chicken that it comes from generally brown chickens lay brown eggs and white chickens lay white eggs I'm you know they're exceptions there's some chickens that like green eggs you know some people also notice that some of my eggs are very very dark yellow like that one these are ones that I get from the Japanese market and here's one I think oh there's another dark yellow one those are both from the Japanese market and I know I'm pretty sure one of these is just a standard organic egg from cow bones from Petaluma there you go that's a sort of standard supermarket egg the color comes from the feed of the hens so if they eat things that are rich in carotenoids generally that means some kinds of insects or more typically it'll be like flowers marigold Bayer gold leaves in particular the coronoid pigments give the eggs a orange color it doesn't really have an effect on flavor in a completely blind setting I've done I've done many more I've done multiple taste tests on this where we've taken various types of eggs and fed them to people blind in some cases I've done the test with you know people fully blindfolded and other ones I did a test if you read my book there's a section at the beginning where I did a test where I took eggs and I colored them green before scrambling them and then had people taste them and the things when you take color out of the equation almost all eggs taste the same it's very difficult to tell one get one egg apart from another one but that said we usually don't eat blindfolded and we certainly don't dye our eggs green before eating them typically so color actually is you know it does play an important really important role in flavor because flavor is not just something we sense on our tongue or something we even it's not even just something that we sense on our tongue or that we sense you know in our soft palate in our nose from the aroma flavor is something that we synthesize on our brain so it's it takes a combination of all these all these different elements what we sense in our tongue will be sense in our eyes the texture of food the mood we're in can have an effect on flavor and color certainly has an effect on fun unflavoured on what we taste so you know when people say oh like all the eggs are the same Kenzi proved it in this test like well that's only partially true that's only true if you're literally eating blindfolded if you're ever looking at your eggs while you're eating them then color is gonna have an effect on their flavour and the dark of the yolk generally the better eggs taste to people even even if it's not really making a big difference on their actual tongue all right so now we added the eggs I stir them a little bit just you don't want to break them up too much you know this is not like a scrambled egg dish you want to leave kind of largest chunks of largest sections of white and yolk gives the dish some interesting texture and flavor throughout and then you want to kind of stop cooking similar to a lot of these desserts dishes you want to stop cooking when the egg is still a little little bit runny and a little bit longer than that because it'll continue cooking as you bring it to the table and by the time it's done hmm by the time I runs down and ready to eat it will be perfectly safe okay that's better than reheated bread by the way that's hot the process of scaling when bread starts to get stiff it's not just about dehydration what it actually is is that the starch that has been gelatinized in fresh bread as it cools down it starts to recrystallize and forms a more rigid structure and that's what makes stale bread firmer and that's the reason why well first of all white bread can stale even if it's wrapped well and loses no moisture and it's also the reason why reheating well-fixed bread that has gone stale to degree reheating will read gelatinized those starch starch molecules no just another aside if you uh if you've ever tried reheating a tortilla or anything that's corn based corn unlike wheat the starch and corn it undergoes undergoes you know retrogrades in the same way but it's not as easily reversible so a fresh corn tortilla one of the reasons the the the tacos that you have in Mexico are so much better than the tacos you'll typically get here in the US is because there you can get tortillas fresh virtually everywhere French meaning they have never been cooled down from the time they were made until the time they're served whereas in the u.s. most the time you're gonna find tortillas that have been made at a factory packaged sent to the supermarket or sent to whatever even the Latin market and cooled down before serving so then even when you reheat them because corn starches are not as easily reversible after retrogradation they're still going to be a little stale anyhow I keep talking let's get our minimum let's finish it off with another little bowl a little drizzle of olive oil I get out throw this on here oh I had this feta out because if you don't have this um queso fresco there's fresh sort of cottage cheese type thing you can use feta or you can use no cheese at all so got a little cheese on top of there I'm gonna go out a little go ahead and add a little bit of chilli as well all right let's go into our spices I'm gonna add a little bit of era Bieber chili which is uh hmm if I can find it if I can find it I think this is actually yeah that's it mislabel era Bieber chili this is labeled spicy sumac I don't know why but ever Bieber chili is a is a type of dried chili from from Turkey and it it has a kind of smoky spicy sweet flavor it's sort of like it reminds me a little bit of ancho but with a little bit of smokiness to it it's it's delicious we use it in our we don't actually we don't use it anymore when we were doing a sort of a kebab with our impossible meet our our vegan meat at at worst hall when we used to use or phobia chili to flavor it now we do a different dish and meatball so and you know here we go this is minimun minute dude I mean let me take it over to the window so I can get you some good light again doesn't that look good wait a minute let me let me turn a little piece of bread here I had this in bread for breakfast in Turkey I mean we were there for a few years ago we were in Istanbul for mmm is symbol in a couple other places for about 10 days I think and I think we had this 12 times hmm all right I'm a little easier finisher downhole tiger then we're gonna have breakfast and I will see you actually just in a little bit because I I'm gonna be making that bread student right I'm sorry Shabba would you like a little bit of would you like a little bit of bread you have been waiting patiently here sit wait wait wait wait wait wait wait no a little bit too hot for you all right give it a rest first all right see in a bit

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 777,281

Rating: 4.9207692 out of 5

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Id: uFxXw0eSSC0

Length: 22min 57sec (1377 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 13 2020