Traditional Greek salad. I also want to make socca, but that won't happen tonight. Hm, or maybe it could.
Also, I feel like a hipster--but goat milk kefir is flippin delicious.
That first picture seemed broken without socca so I fixed it.
Rosemary-thyme socca with hummus and traditional Greek salad (except forgot olives). Also wine, 'cause Mediterranean diet night :-)
@Goldie I had to look up "socca" 'cause I never heard of it before. Interesting. I wouldn't have thought you could make flour out of <del>chickpeas</del> garbanzo beans. I'd expect mush, not flour, though one could dry them before grinding, of course.
BTW, I always feel like I should write "chickpea" in some really narrow font, and "garbanzo" in something wide and florid. I just love the word "garbanzo"---I usually pronounce it in a big, rolling voice. P.T.Bridgeport is what I'm aiming for.
As 'gram flour' chickpea flour shows up a lot in Indian cooking.
Peas in bread also show up in medieval horsebread. There's a whole article about it here - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/250977320_English_Horse-bread_15901800 - which I hope is publically available. And it cites a 14th century London ordinance to the bakers - no “horse-bread be made except of pure beans
and peas, without mixture of other grains or bran”
@AspiringLuddite
@BasilDragonstrike
The rosemary and thyme smelled amazing out of the oven and the stuff was tasty. But I don't have a cast iron skillet and didn't want to fire the broiler for it, so it wasn't street-food yummy, I s'pose. I'd like to compare with a version from the better-equipped sometime.
I would think you could do it in any reasonable skillet, the trick would be getting a thin layer. I may have to have a play with this. I tend to keep gram flour around.
@AspiringLuddite Yeah, mine was thick-ish in glass pan. Consistency heavy and moist, but it's also 50/50 flour and water with plenty of olive oil. That with that thickness and less heat intensity... I don't want anything to smoke up with a bird in the house, though. I did find a good non-fake olive oil, bit of a peppery taste
@AspiringLuddite
Less pan oil and less time in, maybe
@Goldie
So, I had a go at this ... I kept the idea of 'crepe' in mind, and made a thinnish batter of gram flour and water, with just a splash of oil. (And some salt and oregano.)
Hot skillet, but not hot enough for the amount of batter I put in - so I got a little sticking. Little oil in the skillet, too.
I'm pretty happy with it, though.
@AspiringLuddite
Niiice. How hot was your oven? My recipe called for 450, pan pre-heated in that. Batter sizzled on the pour. Then 12 - 15 minutes. At 13 I turned off the oven and let it sit just a bit before it came out. Got sticking and edge-toasting only.
Stovetop - no oven at all. Nice thin layer, cooked 'em like crepes in just a couple of minutes. I got greedy, and tried to flip it before it was ready which is why the picture isn't of a perfect circle.
@AspiringLuddite
Hm, a cast iron griddle isn't as expensive as I expected.
I see various advice about which oil to season with. I've an urge to use olive oil since that's the stuff I'll cook on it, but maybe it's all almost one after the chemical transformation.
The griddle I'm looking at is pre-seasoned but someone suggested to do it again anyway.
Have you had good or bad experiences with certain oils for this?
@Goldie
I pretty much always use olive oil. And you'll certainly need to season/re-season it at some point, so if you want to practice on it new, might as well;-)
Oh, and as an aside/follow up on the socca - I think leaving the batter to sit for a while to fully hydrate before cooking may be important. The fritters I made a while ago were painfully dry, and these were not.
@AspiringLuddite The batter had a half-hour sit. Bit too heavy and moist rather than the opposite.
Hmm. Weird. More experimentation is needed. For Science!
@AspiringLuddite
Also, given the quantity of oil I slid around the pan (besides the 2 tbsps in the mix), I was surprised it stuck to the pan. I'd like to dry it a bit with less oil but don't want to dig it out. So I guess the other route is thinner, but this thick pancake was the thickness I wanted, so not sure which thing to tweak.