Tsibele Kikhlekh, Cholent, Pizza Ebraica and Sweet & Sour Salmon: Four more items from the 1000 Foods to Eat Before you Die
This Sunday we had our “Second Chance” 3 pm adventure at the Clopine house which gave me a great excuse to try to cook a few more of the 1000 things. I picked foods from the Jewish list and made four. The first was a sweet and sour salmon. This is not my flavor profile-the onions are caramelized in brown sugar, raisins are added and then the fish was poached in this with only lemon juice, water and bay leaf added. What was most interesting about the dish is that it was to poach for 17 minutes. Not 16, not 18 but 17. I will say, 17 did seem about right. The dish was then refrigerated for at least 5 hours and served cold as an appetizer on crackers. I am not likely to LOVE sweet and sour but this one was good. Go to Food52 for the version I made exactly (what, no substitutions?). I really did follow this one exactly.
So number two was something called tsibele kikhlekh and is a poppy seed/onion bread that is rolled out, cut into shapes and is sort of a very, very chewy cracker. We found that microwaving them so they were warm did allow us to eat them and I have since cooked them longer and made them really crisp.
I followed the recipe in the 1000 Foods to Eat Before you Die book. Tsibele Kikhlekh taste like the shredded onions that are in the dough and I liked eating them with a dollop of dill infused sour cream. I would eat these is someone else made them but they were too much work for me to make again (they had to be kneaded 20 minutes which is too long or me). If you look online they describe this as a Jewish cookie or cracker from an old Eastern European recipe. Hmm.
Next I made Cholent. Typical cholent is made from beef but ironically I had pork that I wanted to use up and since there are also chicken cholent recipes and I have nothing against eating pork, I made my Jewish cholent with pork. Cholent is a potato, bean, grain, onion, carrot stew that along with the chunks of browned meat, is allowed to cook in the oven at a low temperature for 15 hours. This was a hit and not a huge amount of work. I would make it again as the flavorings of turmeric, cumin and paprika along with the vegetables, beans and grain made a hearty, tasty, one pot meal. One very interesting tidbit is that whole, raw eggs (in the shell ) are nestled into the dish and baked with the other ingredients. When it comes time to eat, they are fished out, peeled and eaten as part of the meal. The recipe I used for this is Tori Avey’s “Ashkephardic” Cholent. I didn’t add the bone marrow, I did add carrots and I used pork.
While cholent is delicious, recipe #4 was, by far, my most favorite. This is called Pizza Ebraica and is an Italian dessert (bar cookie) that for some reason is called a Pizza. This is a rustic bar cookie that has wine infused cherries and raisins along with pine nuts and almonds. It can also have candied fruit and other nuts if desired. The dough is mixed, shaped into a log and baked on a parchment-line pastry sheet. Once cooled, the bar is sliced. OMG. I LOVE this. This might be my new favorite holiday cookie. It is not an overly good looking cookie but it is delicious. I used Saveur’s recipe but took out the candied citron which I don’t like so added additional cherries to make up for the absence of citron. This one is a winner. Interestingly enough, while it does not have yeast, when it is baking it does smell like pizza.
