Now that we’ve gotten kibbeh, kubbeh, and kasha out of the way, it’s time to visit a little-known corner of the Jewish culinary world: Ethiopia. For all intents and purposes, Ethiopian Jewish cooking is indistinguishable from Ethiopian Christian or Muslim cooking – none of the staple grains, plants or meats of Ethiopia are unkosher by nature, so Ethiopian cuisine never had to be ramrodded through the strictures of Jewish dietary laws like the cuisines of other regions in which Jews found themselves. In fact, the Ethiopian Jewish community, which was largely unaware of the developments of Rabbinic Judaism, continues to this day to allow the eating of chicken with dairy, prohibited for the rest of world Jewry long ago as one of Judaism’s charming moats around the wall around the fence around the Torah. But that’s neither here nor there. I learned to love Ethiopian food while living in Israel, so I’m calling it Jewish food.

I’m starting this series within a series with a primer on the basic building blocks of many (if not most) Ethiopian dishes – all of which you’ll need before you can think about making a full Ethiopian meal. First off is berbere, the piquant orange blend of chili peppers and fragrant spices used by the fistful in all those atomic bowls of wat. There is nothing subtle about berbere. It is a sucker punch straight to the sinuses. Naturally, you can’t do without it.

A note of warning before we begin: African birdseye peppers are hot. I don’t mean hot like your homemade pico de gallo when you’re feeling frisky and chop up a third jalapeño. I mean that the process of pulverizing dozens of them will produce invisible yet highly potent clouds of fine pepper particles which will spread quickly and thoroughly throughout the house, and you will essentially be mainlining 170,000 Scoville units with every breath you take. I have a high spice tolerance, so an afternoon of standing in the eye of a capsaicin hurricane only caused my eyes to water and nose to run, and also gave me a weird adrenaline rush, but when one of my roommates and her friends came in – up a flight of stairs from the kitchen – they immediately began gasping and coughing. I am not bragging; I am cautioning. If you can’t handle spice – and I mean spice, not Tabasco – don’t make berbere. You won’t survive the grinding, much less the eating.

On we go:

INGREDIENTS

• Several fistfuls of dried African birdseye (piri-piri) peppers
• Several fistfuls of dried de Arbol peppers
• 1 green cardamom pod
• 1/2 nutmeg seed
• 8 – 10 long pepper catkins
• 8 – 10 cloves
• 1 tbsp whole fenugreek
• 1 tbsp whole ajwain
• 1 tbsp whole pimento berries
• 1 tbsp whole cumin
• 1 tbsp whole coriander seeds
• 1 tbsp black peppercorns
• 2 tbsp dried ginger pieces
• 2 tbsp dried basil
• 5 – 10 tbsp paprika
• Salt

A few notes on the ingredients:

CARDAMOM: Cardamom is very strong, and in large quantities gives off an overpowering, somewhat soapy flavor. More than one pod is too much.

Green cardamom is not strictly a traditional berbere ingredient. In Ethiopia, a relative of cardamom called korerima in Amharic is used instead. Korerima is very difficult to find in the States unless you live in a city with a large Ethiopian community.

LONG PEPPER: This is an unfamiliar ingredient in Western kitchens, but was a common spice in the classical world. It’s related, and tastes similar, to black pepper. Indian stores should have it. It looks like little cattails.

FENUGREEK: Also rare in Western cooking, but crucial to Ethiopian, Indian and Yemeni cuisine. Has an interesting butterscotch aroma. Called “methi” usually in Indian stores, which is, once again, a good place to find this stuff.

AJWAIN: Also known as bishop’s weed. Small black seeds, somewhat like thyme. Indian store.

PIMENTO BERRIES: Also known as whole allspice.

You’ll notice that my measurements aren’t very precise. Eventually I’ll figure this out by weight, but trial and error works just as well. I usually wind up with about 300 grams of finished product, so if you’re uncertain, just use a kitchen scale and the spice measurements I’ve provided, then add peppers until you hit 300 grams. That’s the cool thing about grinding spices – you don’t add or lose any weight during the process.

INSTRUCTIONS:

1) Toast all of the whole spices in a skillet on high heat for a minute or so until they darken and become aromatic. Don’t burn them. Burned spices are not tasty.

2) Select the vessel you will use for grinding. For small amounts, I use my (massive) mortar and pestle. For larger amounts, you have several options. I find that my coffee burr mill does a bad job grinding dried peppers. Same with my food processor. The best method I’ve found so far is to use a blender on the highest setting, frequently stopping and starting so the mixture keeps moving. I usually grind the peppers in several batches. Whatever you decide on, fill it with the toasted spices, the untoasted spices (basil, paprika) and however many peppers you can fit. Grind until fine and uniform. Repeat with the remaining peppers if you need to until all peppers are ground, then combine well. It should look like this:

3) Now start adding salt and mixing well until the berbere tastes, well, salty enough. Berbere pretty much replaces salt in a lot of Ethiopian recipes, so don’t be shy on mixing plenty in.

That’s it. You’re done. Store it in a covered bowl or jar in the fridge. It will keep for months. And stay tuned for further instructions on how to use it…

This is the beet generation.

This is red kubbeh soup.

Remember how I taught you how to make Israeli-style kubbeh for soup? Now your kung-fu is ready. Now you can defeat soup!

My red kubbeh soup recipe is based on Harry’s, with a couple of tweaks. Harry loves kubbeh. Harry loves kubbeh with an almost intimidating fierceness. A man once came between Harry and a bowl of kubbeh soup and Harry killed him and made his skin into an ascot (he calls it his “soup-eatin’ tie”). Harry always kept a thermos of kubbeh soup warming on the engine of his Merkava, and for every shell fired, he would eat one kubbeh. This remains a Chativa Sheva tradition to this day.

I believe that soup should always be made in ridiculous quantitites and last for days, and my recipe reflects this. There is no better comfort food for the winter. And I have several friends and acquaintances who regularly clamor for “that red soup.” So be forewarned. Making this soup is like going all the way in high school: you’ll have fun and be more popular. Let’s get to it:

INGREDIENTS

• 2 medium onions, diced
• 5 – 6 beets, chopped into large dice
• 1 bunch green (Swiss) chard, chiffonaded
• Other vegetables of your choice (see below)
• Chicken stock
• 1 small can tomato paste
• 1 – 2 tbsp sweet paprika
• 2 – 5 tbsp sugar
• 1 – 2 tbsp lemon salt (citric acid)
• Salt and freshly-ground pepper to taste
• Olive oil
• Kubbeh

That’s actually only about half the amount I call for pictured, but you get the idea…

A few notes on the ingredients:

CHICKEN STOCK: Use real chicken stock. Not from a can. Or use water. Don’t be an Israeli and use Osem powdered parve non-chicken “consomme” to flavor everything. It’s lazy and it makes what would be great food just that much worse. Every spoonful of Osem is another year the Messiah tarries.

VEGETABLES: Your choice of sweet potato, carrot, celery, pumpkin, squash or zucchini.

SPICES: You may have noticed my spice measurements are vague at best. I find that it’s mostly useless to give exact measurements when it comes to soup. Water varies, stocks vary, paprika varies, vegetables vary heavily in flavor depending on season and origin; and it all conspires to render exactitude futile. Season as you go. When it’s right, you’ll know.

LEMON SALT: A somewhat less unnerving name for citric acid in its crystalline form. This stuff is highly concentrated sour; it’s wildly popular in Mediterranean cooking, but for some reason uncommon in the West. Note that, name aside, this is citric acid (C6H8O7), not salt (NaCl) with lemon flavoring. It is not that “sal con limon” you find sometimes, it is not Giada De Laurentiis’ “Sicilian Sea Salt with Fresh Lemon Zest” (yeesh), it is this right here. Buy online or head to a Mediterranean market or health food store.

INSTRUCTIONS:

1) In a 12 quart stockpot (or, you know, whatever), heat up several tablespoons of olive oil. Saute the onions until translucent.

2) Add the beets. Stir mightily. Dig that neat color the beets turn the onions. Cook a couple minutes more.

3) Add the carrots and cook for another minute or two, then add tomato paste. Stir more. Cook another couple minutes, making sure not to let the paste burn.

4) Add enough chicken stock to fill the pot. If you don’t have quite enough, you can top it off with water. Not the end of the world. Don’t fucking add any stock powder or bouillon cubes.

5) Add all your seasonings, the chard, and long-cooking vegetables (carrots, celery, etc.) Save quicker-cooking root vegetables (like sweet potatoes) for a bit later. Simmer uncovered until the carrots are nearing doneness. Keep tasting and seasoning as you go. It should be sweet, sour and savory in about equal measures. Sort of like tomato soup but…you know…Jewish?

6) Once carrots are nearly cooked, add the quicker-cooking root vegetables. Continue simmering. Usually, I wind up simmering for a couple hours, give or take, from beginning to end. You want the liquid to reduce a bit to further concentrate the flavors.

7) Once all your vegetables are at their appropriate level of doneness, it’s time to add the kubbeh you worked so hard to make. However many you want:

They float. Cool, huh?

Continue simmering with the kubeh for another twenty minutes. Make sure the seasoning is how you want it.

8) After the twenty minutes of kubbeh-simmerin’, remove the soup from heat and let it cool. Then refrigerate it overnight. The flavors develop and the kubeh get a chance to become completely saturated through-and-through with the broth, making them ridiculously delicious. Texturally, and flavor-wise, they’re more like massive meatballs than dumplings. Once the next day rolls around, reheat the soup and savage it like you want to.

Sure, it’s lurid, but that’s just how you know you’re in for a good time.

Kubbeh: not to be confused with kibbeh, despite being a variation of the same word for a variation on the same thing. Like kibbeh, these are made from ground meat in a chiefly bulgur shell, but they hail from the northern regions of Iraq rather than Syria, and instead of deep frying, they’re treated to a simmer in broth, making them more dumpling than mezze. In Israel, the word “kubbeh” is applied indiscriminately to both the fried and simmered variety (in Arabic, pronunciation differences between dialects leads to the discrepancy in names for the same thing), but for the sake of clarity, I’m calling these Kurdish-style dumplings “kubbeh” and the fried and raw versions predominant in the Levant “kibbeh.”

Anyway. Kubbeh are a specialty of the Jews of Kurdistan, who once formed large percentages of the population of now-infamous cities like Mosul and Arbil before immigrating to Israel en masse along with the rest of the Iraqi Jewish population in the 1940s and 1950s. My old hood in Jerusalem, centered around the Machane Yehuda market, was heavily Kurdish, home to a Kurdish-Jewish community organization that never seemed open, and dozens of restaurants, social clubs and backgammon parlors that never seemed closed. Several of the restaurants (most notably, Mordoch) specialize in kubbeh-based soups, ranging from the crimson marak kubbeh adom to the sour, green hamousta. So between Jerusalem’s Little Kurdistan and the frozen sections of Israeli supermarkets, kubbeh were never far off. But like edible hummus, Zohar Argov, responsible M16-bearing teenagers and the Divine Presence, we don’t have any here in the far reaches of Exile.

Until now.

INGREDIENTS

SHELL:

• 1 cup coarse bulgur (AKA #3 bulgur)
• 1 cup fine bulgur (AKA #1 bulgur)
• 1 cup semolina
• 1-2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp salt

FILLING:

• Olive oil for frying
• Roughly 2 pounds, or around 800-900 grams, ground beef
• 4 cloves garlic, crushed lightly and chopped
• Freshly ground black pepper to taste

A few notes on the ingredients:

BULGUR: That’s right, two kinds of bulgur. Here’s the size difference:

Head to a Middle Eastern market, or order online (fine and coarse are available at Tulumba.com).

BEEF: Lean ground beef. 90/10, perhaps. Don’t be an idiot and get 95/5. That’s not meat. That’s seasoned Boca tofu crumbles. Get out of here and go back to sucking at the partially hydrogenated teat of Snackwell’s.

INSTRUCTIONS:

1) Mix the two types of bulgur together and add water to cover the bulgur by about an inch and a half. Let sit for 45 minutes, making sure that the bulgur remains covered by water the whole time.

2) Meanwhile, slowly fry the beef in olive oil on low heat. When the meat is very well-browned and dry, add the garlic and black pepper and continue cooking a few more minutes, then remove from heat and set aside.

3) Remove the bulgur to a strainer and squeeze it with your hand until all the excess moisture is pressed out.

4) Put the bulgur in a bowl and add the semolina and salt. Stir. Then add the flour and knead by hand until you get a nice stiff dough. It will look like this:

Put out a hand bowl of cold water and prepare to stand in one place for an hour or two. Maybe give yourself a little pep talk. You are a Kurdish grandmother. You are a Kurdish grandmother. You were born in a village outside of Mosul. You came to Israel in 1952. You went through a stint in a ma’abarah. You grew up in Rishon. You are disappointed in your no-goodnik son for waiting until he was thirty-five years old to give you grandchildren. You don’t particularly like the grandchildren, either.

Now, you are ready.

5) Wet your hands with the bowl of water. Your hands must be constantly moist throughout the kubbeh-making process, or the dough will crumble.

Take a piece of bulgur dough the size of a small egg, or a little smaller than a golf ball. Squeeze it (with your moist hands) into a roughly round shape.

Use your thumb to create a deep indentation in the ball, then use your thumb and (MOIST) fingertips to turn the ball into a bowl. Smooth over any large cracks in the dough that appear. You can paste a little extra dough onto particularly resilient cracks.

Fill the bowl with a tablespoon or so of your seasoned ground beef. Remember, you’ll never catch a man with thick-walled, filling-poor kubbeh.

Pinch it closed and smooth the surface so you have a perfect ball.

Now keep at it, savta. You’ll probably get 30-something kubbeh out of this. Just put them in a freezer bag and keep them frozen until you have a soup that can be aided and abetted by the presence of kubbeh (which is any soup, essentially). Drop them in frozen and let those bad boys simmer for twenty minutes.

“But Michael,” you say, “I want to know how to make an authentic Kurdish-Israeli kubbeh soup.”

Yeah, yeah. Shut the fuck up and meditate on the notion that good things come to those who wait…

Mmm. Childhood food. I don’t think anyone ever acquires a taste for kasha varnishkes as an adult; for the dish to be truly appreciated, the earthiness of the kasha and the fleeting sweetness of the caramelized onions have to be augmented by recollection, by the sense memories of your grandmother’s kitchen as experienced from your below-the-countertop vantage point. Eating kasha varnishkes without ever having had an Eastern European Jewish grandmother is like eating hummus without tehina.

Kasha varnishkes is a heavyweight of Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine in America, familiar to probably every American Ashkenazi with roots in Eastern Europe. I grew up eating it in my Baba Larisa’s little apartment, where it was usually followed by her airy, moist apple cake, but until not so long ago, I was under the impression that it was a Russian dish. My mother’s parents, from the Austro-Hungarian/Romanian/Ukrainian/Romanian/Ukrainian/Russian/Ukrainian city Chernivtsi (isn’t 20th century European history fun?), had their Jewishness, or at least their willingness to talk much about it, effectively beaten out of them by the lightning jab and cross of the Nazis and the Communists, which is why it took me so long to realize that many of the foods I had grown up identifying as Russian, kasha varnishkes among them, were actually Ashkenazi Jewish.

Kasha is the Slavic word for any kind of cereal porridge, a basic staple of Eastern European cuisine – but in Yiddish, which adopted the word from the Slavic languages, and in English, which adopted the word from Yiddish, it refers pretty much exclusively to buckwheat groats. The etymology of varnishkes is murkier. It means “bow-tie noodles,” but it appears (to my knowledge) only in the context of this dish. It’s a Yiddish word, at least in structure and phonology, but the Yiddish word for “noodles” is the unrelated lokshn. Obvious cognates don’t appear in the main source languages of Eastern Yiddish (medieval German, classical Hebrew, and the surrounding Slavic tongues). The Italians, who probably invented bow-tie noodles, call them farfalle (butterflies), so much as in World War I, they’re little help. I couldn’t even find a consensus on how to spell varnishkes in Yiddish. I was beginning to think, after much research (even, vey is mir, reading Yiddish newsgroups), that like General Tso, tikka masala, and the global success of Domino’s, varnishkes would have to be consigned to the great realm of culinary mystery. But then I asked my mother, who knows everything.

“It’s from vareniki,” she said. I was skeptical. Filled dumplings seemed a fairly far cry from bowtie noodles and kasha. But then she started making sense: she explained that “varnishkes” was a Yiddish corruption of “варенички” (varenichki), the diminutive of vareniki, and that the dish arose as a quick and easy version of those significantly more arduous stuffed pasta dumplings. Those lazy Jews. It makes sense; varnishkes sounds pretty damned close to varenichki. Reigning lady of Jewish cooking Joan Nathan mentions a kasha varnishkes recipe dating back to 1925 that was “basically a kreplach-type noodle stuffed with kasha, buckwheat groats, and gribenes” – which implies that, at some point in its history, kasha varnishkes was literally kasha vareniki, that is, noodle dumplings stuffed with kasha. So there you have it: a mystery even the Internet had no answer for, solved in thirty seconds by my mother. And they give Joan Nathan the million-dollar ethnic cookbook deals. Feh.

But for now, less inherent unfairness of life, more kasha varnishkes recipe. Read on:

INGREDIENTS

• 1 cup whole kasha
• 2 egg yolks
• 1 large onion, chopped fine
• 8 oz. bowtie noodles (that is, half a standard 16 oz. package)
• 2 cups water (or stock)
• 3 – 4 tablespoons butter
• 1 teaspoon salt
• Oil

Makes enough for a few people as a main course or a few more beyond that as a side dish. The recipe doubles easily.

A few notes on the ingredients:

KASHA: Whole grain kasha, people. Medium grain, coarse grain, small grain, that shit’s for Cossacks. Only whole grain kasha will give you Jewish strength, the kind of strength that allows you to survive millennia of oppression, garnering enough esoteric booklearning to one day break free of your chains and invent the atomic bomb. No, go ahead, call us weak. We have the bomb. What do you have, medium grain kasha?

To clear up any confusion, whole grain kasha looks like this:

NOODLES: Bowties are traditional, but a noodle is a noodle is a noodle. I personally wouldn’t use any 3-D noodles, like penne, or anything long and thin, because that’s just bizarre, but hey, I’m a traditionalist.

BUTTER: Traditionally, kasha varnishkes would call for schmaltz, but as my mother explained to me with a certain wistfulness, you can’t get real, yellow chicken fat out of American grocery store Frankenchickens. You may be able to score some from your butcher if you have one, but if you don’t, use butter. Butter, goddammit. Margarine or 70% hydrogenated oil spread what-the-fuck isn’t food. Remember those commercials the Butter Lobby (ahhhh, America) put on in the early ’90s wherein groups of rosy-cheeked Protestants encountered butter in various settings, invariably responding, “Mmmm, butter!”; all culminating in a proud mother laying before her family an enormous plastic turkey while the announcer cheerily intoned, “When cooking your best, nothing tastes quite like butter”? They weren’t lying. Can’t believe it’s not butter? I sure as fuck can.

If you’re doing kasha varnishkes up kosher-like and you want to serve it as part of a meat meal, I would recommend tracking down some schmaltz. Anything but kosher non-dairy margarine.

INSTRUCTIONS:

1) Separate the eggs. Beat the yolks. The whites you don’t need. Do what you will with them. Scramble them and feel, for a brief and terrible moment, like a health person. Or add sugar and whip them into meringue and bake that up nice. Or just pour them onto the ground in honor of your boys who got taken out by cholesterol. Up to you.

2) Heat on high a large skillet. Once it’s good and hot, toss in your kasha.

Stir constantly so the kasha doesn’t burn. You want to toast it for between two and five minutes, until it darkens a bit and yields its delicious kasha smell.

3) Pour the kasha from the skillet into a bowl.

4) In a pot, bring the aforementioned 2 cups of water (or stock) and 1 tsp salt to a boil.

5) Pour your beaten egg yolks into the bowl of toasted kasha and start stirring quickly and vigorously. You want each kasha grain to receive an egg coating, and you don’t want the yolk to set and create little clumps of kasha.

6) Heat up a large pot or dutch oven. Once it’s hot, add the kasha and toast it a minute or two more. Then pour in the boiling water from step four. Cover and reduce heat to low. Cook until the kasha absorbs all the water and gets all tender-like, about ten minutes. It should look like so:

If for some reason the kasha becomes tender without absorbing all the water, pour out the excess. Either way, once the kasha is done, remove the pot from heat and leave covered.

7) While all that business is going on, heat up a healthy splash of oil in a skillet. Toss in your onions…

…and cook them until they’re browned and getting crispy:

8) Start preheating your oven to 400°.

9) Boil a pot of salted water to cook the noodles. Once it’s boiling, throw in the noodles and cook ‘em until they’re nice and al dente. Drain.

10) Remove the lid from your pot o’ kasha and stir in the onions and noodles. Try a bit. If it needs more salt, add some. Cut up your butter into small chunks and distribute them more or less evenly over the top of the kasha varnishkes.

Cover the pot again and move it into the oven. Bake for 10 minutes. If your pot isn’t oven-safe for some strange reason, you can do this in a casserole dish or a baking pan covered with foil.

11) Remove the pot from the oven. Stir well. Eat. It shouldn’t need any gravy. Well-made kasha varnishkes speaks for itself – and I know this is a solid recipe, because it tastes like being six all over again. But I’ll let you in on a strange and terrible secret: if you’re looking for some unprecedented fusion cuisine, kasha varnishkes goes surprisingly well with Sriracha. It shouldn’t make sense, but somehow, it does.

Now I just need to figure out how to make that damned apple cake…

Once upon a time, when men were men, and women were ostensibly women (but who knows since nobody ever talked about them), bread was leavened not with packets of Fleischmann’s but with sourdough, a sinister froth comprised of wild yeasts and bacteria kicking it symbiotic in a mix of flour and water. Yes, in those heady days of yore, yeast was not something you bought, but rather something you dearly cultivated, giving it far more love and attention than all those children you put to work at six and married off at twelve. We’ve lost something since then, and it’s not just an uncomplaining pool of nimble child workers: it’s the taste of our bread. In this era of pre-sliced uniform bread product, we’ve forgotten that bread should be rich and complex, nourishing and fortifying, the staff of life and not the densely wadded ball of Wonder. Take my hand (briefly, because I don’t much like being touched) and let me guide you to the old school flavor.

First, to lay some background: a sourdough starter is a symbiotic colony of wild yeasts – microscopic fungi which can be found zinging about everywhere, from the air on down to the nether regions of Monistat users – and a certain strain of bacteria, the lactobacilli. In an active starter, water breaks down the starch in flour into simple sugars, which just so happen to be a yeast’s favorite food. The yeast digest the sugars, and subsequently poot out what just so happens to be a lactobacillus’s favorite food. Nature: gross in tooth and claw. With regular additions of fresh flour and water, the starter will chug on indefinitely, denying access to any nastier microorganisms, and happily leavening all your bread.

I should also mention that sourdough in this context does not refer to the actual flavor of the dough, but rather to the entire category of naturally leavened bread. Technically, what I’m talking about here should probably be referred to as levain, after the French, but that strikes even me as too pretentious. In short, you shouldn’t confuse sourdough the concept with its most recognizable application: San Francisco sourdough. San Francisco sourdough gets its flavor from a particularly gnarly local lactobacillus and a long fermentation time. The bread you make with a sourdough starter can range from not sour at all to sourer than any San Francisco loaf, depending on how long you allow the dough to ferment before baking – and depending on the particular bacteria in your starter, which vary enough to give each starter its own unique flavor. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

So, to get back to the topic, how do you start a starter? Read on.

There aren’t many pictures to go along with these instructions, partly because I wasn’t planning any type of cooking blog tomfoolery when I first began cultivating a starter, and partly because this is so fucking easy that if you can’t do it you shouldn’t be anywhere near a kitchen. If you get hungry, Taco Bell stays open late.

But no, really, you can’t mess this up. All you need is patience. People have been leavening bread with sourdough for millennia. People who forecast the weather by way of goat entrails made and used sourdough. You can do it. Here’s how:

INGREDIENTS

• Flour
• Water

And that’s it.

The strains of yeast and bacteria that become active in a starter are generally already present in all those sacks of pure-seeming flour. You just need to coax them out. However, some kinds of flour are more microorganism-laden than others. Rye flour is popular for cultivating starters, but I recommend using organic whole wheat flour. Its lack of processing leaves it chock full of your yeast and lactobacilli buddies. I’m a great admirer of King Arthur’s various flours, because they bake like a motherfucker and you can order them online, and their Organic Whole Wheat flour is what I used to get my starter going. Just between you, me, and everyone else, though, you can probably get a starter going with nearly any unbleached, unbromated grain flour. I wouldn’t try it with self-rising, but you’re good with just about anything else – it simply might take a bit longer.

Additionally, if you read around on the topic of sourdough, you may see people recommending the addition of stuff like red grapes, potatoes, and fruit juice to your infant starter. If you have some potatoes you have it in for, go ahead, but frankly, it’s not necessary.

And before I finally get into the instructions, remember that the amount of time it takes for your starter to activate depends on a great number of variables – the flour you use, the temperature in your home, the hardness of your water, the local microorganisms – and that all the durations I mention in the recipe are estimates. Fortunately, starter is pretty forgiving.

INSTRUCTIONS

1) You need a generously-sized non-metal container, preferably with a lid. Metal reacts over time with the contents of a starter, so avoid it for long-term storage. I used one of these, but you can use anything. Tupperware. Pyrex. A jar. A takeout Chinese soup container. All it needs is to be large enough to allow the initial flour and water mixture room to triple in bulk. It probably won’t triple in bulk, but extra room is always good.

2) Add 1 cup flour and slightly less than 1 cup water (somewhere around 7/8 cup) to your container. Stir well.

3) Leave the container on the counter, loosely covered, for, oh, about three days. During this time it may puff up dramatically. Success, you think. No. What you’re seeing are the death throes of another kind of bacterium found in flour. Unfortunately, these bacteria, in their dying spite, don’t stop at mimicking yeast. They also turn in a pretty good impression of the smell of vomit, which will not endear you to your housemates or significant others. Persevere, though – you can reward them for their lack of faith by denying them the delicious bread your starter will eventually produce.

4) After three days, stir the starter and pour half of it out. Don’t shed any tears over the wasted flour. It died doing a noble deed. Add to the remaining starter 1/2 cup flour and slightly less than 1/2 cup water and stir well. This is known as feeding the starter. Get used to it, because you’ll be doing it once every twelve hours for more than a week, until the starter is fully active.

5) Every twelve hours, repeat step 4. Toss out half the starter, and add 1/2 cup flour and slightly less than 1/2 cup water to the remainder. You’re trying to maintain the same basic amount of mixture that you started with. If you work normal hours, the best schedule is a feeding before you start working and then one in the evening.

6) After a day or two (more or less), that unlovely aroma left behind by those bitter, dead bacteria will start being replaced by a smell familiar to anyone who’s ever had a slice of San Francisco sourdough. Your yeast are waking up. Keep shoveling food down their little microscopic throats.

7) After a couple more days (more or less), the sourdough smell should be replaced by a distinct alcohol smell. Congratulations. You have just made booze out of nothing more than flour and water. This skill will serve you well should you ever face incarceration. Alcohol, both what’s now brewing in your starter and what’s sloshing about in this bottle of McEwan’s I’m drinking, is nothing more than yet another metabolic byproduct of yeast. Your yeast, the ones you’ve raised in your starter from infancy, are now growing up and making bad decisions. But you love them anyway, so keep feeding them.

8) After a couple more days (more or less), your starter should be bubbly and frothy, and every time you feed it, it should double its bulk in the space of a few hours and then subside. The alcohol smell will recede and make room for the return of the yeasty sourdough smell. Your starter is now ready. It should look like this:

The entire process should take about two weeks. You may have an active starter in a week’s time, but I recommend keeping up the daily feedings for a total of two weeks to strengthen the starter. Starters like to be fed.

So you have a starter. Now that it’s alive, you should put it in the refrigerator. A starter will only last a few days outside the fridge without regular feedings. In the fridge, though, where the action of the yeast is dramatically slowed, it can go without feedings for a month. Still, to make sure it retains its full strength for baking purposes, once every week you should take it out, let it warm to room temperature, and feed it. And now that it’s fully active, you can feed it with whatever flour you want. No need to drop the extra coin for expensive organic flour. It will happily eat anything. When you take it out of its frigid prison for a feeding, you may notice a layer of boozy-smelling liquid has floated to the top. That’s more alcohol, and in this context it’s called, fittingly, “hooch.” Don’t worry about it. Just mix it right back in.

But what to do with it? Check out some sourdough recipes online to get an idea of the process. You can use sourdough to make any bread that calls for commercial yeast – it just takes a bit longer to rise. But me, though, I’ve got a plan for your new starter, and it’s probably not what you think. Stay tuned…

Le Cordon Jew (GET IT???!!!!1!!) is my new cooking series. I’ve been cooking regularly since I was about ten or eleven, and along with music and not leaving the house, it’s one of my favorite hobbies. When I lived in Israel, I had neither the money nor the equipment in my one-burner, no-oven apartment to do much of it, so when I descended into Exile, I threw myself back into the world of sauté and shallots with the kind of intensity and dedication I usually reserve only for scorn. My culinary passion, fostered by all that time in Zion, is Middle Eastern and Mediterranean food, but I get a kick out of cooking just about everything. Le Cordon Jew, as its name implies, will focus on my epicurean fascination with all the facets of Jewish cuisine, from the old-fashioned Yiddishe Iron Curtain poverty food I grew up eating to the heady culinary fusion I encountered in Israel, where hummus, shakshuka and mesir wat shared city blocks. I plan to break down proven recipes step-by-step and augment them with plenty of images for you visual learners. And we’re starting out with kibbeh.

Kibbeh are ubiquitous in the Middle East, appearing in dozens of different forms, the most popular of which is the deep-fried torpedo. The Lebanese consider this version, sometimes called kibbeh nabulsiyeh (Nablus kibbeh), their national dish. The Syrians do too, but given that they also consider Lebanon their national property, that’s not entirely surprising.

Making kibbeh is not for beginners. It’s one of those dishes, like couscous or risotto, that serves as a test of skill within a particular cuisine (in this case, that of the Levantine Arabs), requiring several uninterrupted hours of delicate, tedious work. It’s worth it, of course, especially since you can freeze kibbeh essentially indefinitely – but it ain’t everyday food.

My recipe is derived from the one in the Sephardi cookbook A Fistful of Lentils. I’ve made some modifications and omissions based on my own experimentation, and judging by reactions, I’ve hit on a fairly successful formula. So read on…

INGREDIENTS

SHELL:

• 3 cups bulgur, fine or No. 1
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 1 1/4 tablespoons cumin, whole
• 2 teaspoons paprika
• 4 – 6 tablespoons cold water

FILLING:

• 16 oz ground beef
• Olive oil for frying
• 1 medium onion, chopped fine
• 1/4 cup pine nuts
• 1 tablespoon allspice, whole
• 1 inch-long piece of cinnamon stick
• 1 teaspoon cumin, whole
• 1-2 teaspoons peppercorns
• 1 teaspoon salt

MISCELLANEOUS:

• A lot of vegetable oil for deep frying
• Lemon wedges

Makes between 30 and 40 kibbeh.

A few notes on the ingredients:

BULGUR: Bulgur, parboiled and dried wheat kernels, comes in a few standard grades: fine, or No. 1, and medium, or No. 2, are common, and you may occasionally see extra-fine and coarse. No. 2 bulgur is the workhorse of the bulgur world, and thus the most widely available (they have at in the foot-wide Mediterranean section of my grocery store, and Arrowhead Mills’ bulgur, available on Amazon.com and probably your local hippiery, is basically No. 2). But kibbeh requires fine bulgur. If you don’t have a Middle Eastern market near you, I heartily recommend Tulumba, a Turkish/Middle Eastern online market. Their selection is comprehensive, their prices reasonable, and their shipping fast. I buy my chickpeas and coffee exclusively from them. They have a whole page’s worth of bulgur by the kilo (2.2 lb), and what you need is the köftelik bulgur, or if you want extra-fine, the çiğköftelik bulgur. Alternately, if you want to buy in bulk, The Indian Food Store, a reliable merchant I get my ajwain from, sells a 5-pound sack of fine bulgur through Amazon.com. It’s from California, as opposed to Turkey – I prefer to buy imported shit for Middle Eastern food usually, but hell, I don’t know, maybe you’re a Cypriot or a Kurd.

MEAT: I use 80/20 ground chuck for the beef, but only because it’s the easiest to find. To be honest, the beef in kibbeh is cooked to several inches past its life. We’re not talking about juicy, rare hamburgers here. The grade of beef is not terribly important. Traditionally, kibbeh uses lamb, which you can swap pound-for-pound with the beef in this recipe if you’re so inclined.

SPICES: You may have noticed I call for whole spices. I have this preference for buying whole spices and grinding them only as needed, so they taste like spices and not must. Bizarre, right? You don’t have to be so stringent. Use those powdered spices you’ve had kicking around since new jack swing. They’re just for color anyway. Don’t waste your money on a useful, aesthetically appealing and affordable Thai granite mortar and pestle. Wallow in mediocrity!

INSTRUCTIONS:

1) Grind the cumin for the shell mixture. I use a mortar and pestle, but the ladies of delicate constitution out there can use a spice grinder. Set the ground cumin aside.

2) Grind all the spices and the salt for the meat into a uniform mixture. Set aside.

3) Heat a few healthy glugs of olive oil in a heavy skillet. Once the oil is heated, throw in your onions. Cook them until they start to become ever-so-slightly caramelized, somewhere south of ten minutes.

4) Set the heat somewhere around medium. Add the ground beef. Stir, squish and break it apart constantly with a spoon. You don’t want any large clumps of beef. When all the beef has turned from pink to brown…

…add in your spice mixture…

…stir, and cook until much of the moisture is gone. How long this takes depends on the fat content of the beef. Maybe twenty minutes, maybe more, maybe less. Eyeball it. It will turn a darker shade of brown.

5) Pine nut time. You need to cook the pine nuts in a little bit of oil. You can do this in a fresh skillet, or you can just do what I did: move the ground beef over to one side, skip the oil, and cook the pine nuts in the grease left behind by the meat. If you do, make sure to occasionally stir the beef some so it doesn’t cook unevenly. Cook the pine nuts until they brown, a few minutes.

Turn off the heat and remove the pine nuts to a cutting board. Chop ‘em up into nice little chunks…

…and return them to the skillet and mix well. Or move the beef to a bowl and mix in the pine nuts there. Don’t matter. Congratulations. Your kibbeh filling is complete. Reward yourself with a spoonful.

6) Pour the bulgur into a strainer with fine mesh. Run it under cold water for a few seconds, making sure that it all gets wet. Squeeze the excess moisture out with your free hand. It’ll look like this:

7) Transfer the bulgur to a large mixing bowl. Add in the remainder of the shell ingredients (flour, cumin, paprika, salt and water). Mix everything by hand until it forms a dough. I should note, the amount of water is an estimate. You want a dough that won’t crumble, but also isn’t too waterlogged. When you sculpt it, it should retain its shape. This is how it should look:

8) Here’s where the fun begins! You’re gonna be standing in one place, doing extremely repetitive work, for a couple of hours. Spin up some soothing music. I was rocking some Stan Getz, Luiz Bonfá and Maria Toledo last time I made kibbeh. Here’s “Saudade Vem Correndo.” Hip-hop heads may hear something they recognize…

Alright. Onto making the kibbeh. I’ve tried to illustrate the process as best I can, but you’ll have to figure out the way that works best for you through trial and error.

First, fill a bowl with water and keep it close at hand. You need to keep your hands moist at all times when you’re working with the dough. It dries out quickly, and without the extra water, it’ll crumble on you.

Take a piece of dough. You’re shooting for a ball of dough a bit smaller than a golf ball. Squeeze it a few times, so the moisture from your hands mixes with the dough, then roll it into a ball.

Next, create a depression in the ball with your thumb and then pinch the sides into a deep bowl shape, smoothing out with a moist fingertip any fissures.

Fill that bowl with a tablespoonful of the meat mixture.

Pinch the kibbeh shut and smooth over the newly-closed area. You’ll have a ball again (but this time, it is full of delicious meat).

Now is the time to demonstrate your skills. Squeeze the ball to elongate it, making sure none of the filling ruptures the crust, and then carefully form it into the classic kibbeh shape, tapering to a point at both ends. Again, smooth out any fissures.

Okay. Got it? Now do it thirty more times.

Set aside however many kibbeh you want to prepare immediately, and put the rest in a tightly-sealed container and freeze ‘em. Their shelf life when frozen is longer than your ability to resist eating them, so don’t worry.

If you have any leftover meat, mix it up with some rice and spices. Good for an easy meal the next day.

9) Pour several inches of oil into a pot. Make sure you leave a few inches between the surface of the oil and the lip of the pot, because the oil bubbles aggressively when the kibbeh are added and you don’t want it to go all Kuwait 1991 all over your stove. Also keep in mind that you can filter the oil through cheesecloth after it’s cooled, pour it into a container, and use it again. Turn the heat on full blast.

Kibbeh often suffer from a certain dryness. The trick to retaining moisture in the meaty interior, I find, is to fry them in oil hotter than the standard 375° – I heat my oil up to around 390°. The longer they fry, the drier they’ll get.

Once your oil hits the right temperature – use a cooking thermometer, don’t just guess – lower the kibbeh in. Each one should have some room to breathe. I use a six quart dutch oven, and that’s good for six or so kibbeh at a time, which is plenty. They only need a couple minutes, even if you’re using frozen. Once the crust has turned a deep brown, they’re done. Transfer them to a plate covered with a paper towel to drain and cool down from “thermonuclear” to just “hot.”

Meanwhile, slice a lemon into wedges. The best way to eat kibbeh is with a lemon wedge in hand, squeezing lemon juice onto each bite. You can also mix up some tehina sauce (tehina, lemon juice, minced garlic, salt and water) and dip away. They’ll be gone before you can say “alhamdulillah.”