Chef Einat Admony named her restaurant Balaboosta for a reason.
“Balaboosta is Yiddish for ‘perfect housewife,’” she explains to me on a March morning at the restaurant. “It reflects a woman who can multitask, raise kids. It’s a woman who can deal; she can raise her family, she cooks all the time. It’s a hard-core woman.”
Admony herself is a hard-core woman. She wears an army cap (she served in the Israeli army for two years and then in the Israeli air force) as she commands her way around the kitchen. And when it comes to one particular subject, Admony is more than hard-core; she’s positively fierce. That subject is flavor.
“I hate when restaurant food is too fancy,” she says as she begins wrapping eggplant in aluminum foil for her wildly flavorful baba ghanouj. “I don’t get that. The most important thing is the flavor!”
She places the wrapped eggplant in a skillet and places another skillet on top. “Did you wrap the foil all the way around the eggplant?” I ask, trying to figure out the method behind the madness.
“You look like a smart guy,” she says. “You can figure it out.”
She turns up the heat and the eggplant cooks like that—wrapped in foil, sandwiched between two pans. When it’s unwrapped, Admony scoops the insides into a blender with lemon juice, garlic confit, raw tahini, honey, salt, and pepper. Needless to say, the resulting baba ghanouj is big on flavor, just the way Admony likes it.
When she plates it, she spreads it on toasted bread and tops it with a citrus herb salad with oranges, lemons, mint, scallions, and parsley. Despite the visual appeal, Admony shrugs it off.
“I put a lot more effort on the taste than on the presentation; it’s not as important to me,” she says.
So ignore the fact that her shakshouka—a traditional dish of eggs cooked in a tomato– red pepper sauce—is vividly red with flecks of dark green from Swiss chard, and focus on the big, bold flavors.
“I used to pass my sauces through a food mill,” she says as we dig in with toasted pita brushed with zaatar. “Fuck that! Some food is too labor-intensive.”
I ask if I can substitute a different tomato sauce to cook the eggs, maybe something with fewer ingredients.
“You can do anything,” she says. “Just don’t call it shakshouka.”
For the finale, Admony coats olives in flour, egg, and panko bread crumbs and deep-fries them. She serves them in a bowl with labneh cheese and a harissa oil, made simply by blending harissa with canola oil. The bowl is a sea of white with a ring of fiery red surrounding it, the fried olives at the center.
“It’s tasty,” says Admony. “Not pretty. It’s simple, and nobody cares if there’s a flower on top.”
We may eat with our eyes first, but in Chef Admony’s kitchen the eyes are second-class citizens behind the taste buds. It’s how food tastes that counts the most.
“I cook a lot at home. Most chefs never cook at home, but for me, I go home and I like to cook. It’s something I never get tired of.”
Serves 4
Frying doesn’t have to be an ordeal. In the case of these olives, it’s a simple matter of filling a pot one quarter of the way with oil, heating it until it’s at frying temperature (350°F), and then carefully lowering in the olives, which you’ve coated in flour, egg, and two layers of ground panko. A minute later you’ll have crunchy orbs of briny complexity that pair smashingly with the creamy labneh and fiery harissa oil. You can coat the olives ahead of time, store them in the refrigerator, and pop them into the fryer just when your guests arrive. Serve them with toothpicks so your guests don’t burn their hands.
FOR THE LABNEH
1 quart organic plain yogurt
½ tablespoon kosher salt
FOR THE HARISSA OIL
¼ cup harissa (either store-bought or homemade*)
¾ cup neutral oil (either canola or vegetable)
FOR THE OLIVES
1 cup all-purpose flour
3 eggs, beaten
Panko bread crumbs ground in a food processor (approximately 2 cups)
A mix of kalamata and manzanilla olives, pitted (about 2 cups)
Canola oil
Kosher salt
The night before you want to serve this, combine the yogurt and salt and place in a colander lined with cheesecloth* set over a bowl in the refrigerator. As the liquid drains out, the yogurt will thicken, and 24 hours later you’ll have labneh.
To make the harissa oil, blend together the harissa and the oil. That’s it!
Prep the olives by setting up three pie plates (or other shallow pans): in the first, place the flour; in the second, the beaten eggs; and in the third, the panko. Olive by olive, roll each one in the flour, then in the egg, then in the panko, then back in the egg, then in the panko one more time. Set aside and continue until you’ve coated all the olives*.
Now set up the frying station. Fill a small pot one quarter of the way with canola oil. Begin heating it to 350°F (you’ll need a deep-fry thermometer).
Carefully lower the olives into the hot oil (you may want to use a spider for this) and fry until deep golden brown, moving them around a bit as they cook. Use the spider to lift them onto a plate lined with paper towels and sprinkle gently with salt.
Meanwhile, pile some labneh in a bowl. Place the olives in the middle and spoon the harissa oil around the edges of the bowl. Serve right away; the olives won’t taste good cold.
Serves 2 to 4
Most of us don’t think about making eggs for dinner, but a dish like this is a godsend, especially when you’re feeling tired and lazy and don’t want to go to the store (assuming you already have a can of tomatoes, a red bell pepper, a jalapeño, and a carton of eggs on hand). Even if you do have to shop for this, it’s a cheap and healthy dinner you can whip up at a moment’s notice. Just make sure to have some good bread handy at the table for mopping up the sauce.
FOR THE SAUCE
¼ cup olive oil*
1 onion, diced
½ jalapeño, seeds and membrane removed, cut into a small dice
1 red bell pepper, seeded and diced small
1 cup Swiss chard stems, sliced thin (optional)
Kosher salt
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1 (28-ounce) can peeled tomatoes, crushed by hand
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon paprika
½ teaspoon ground turmeric
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon crushed caraway seeds
1 bay leaf
1 tablespoon sugar
TO FINISH
¼ cup olive oil, plus more for drizzling
3 links of Merguez sausage, cut into rings
⅓ cup washed and shredded kale or
Swiss chard
Kosher salt
6 to 8 eggs
Crusty bread
Start by making the sauce. In a pot, heat the olive oil on medium heat. Add the onion and cook until it gets a little color. Add the jalapeño, the bell pepper, and the chard stems, if using, with a big pinch of salt, and sauté until the peppers and stems soften. Add the garlic and tomato paste, cook for a minute more, then add the tomatoes and the rest of the spices, the bay leaf, and the sugar, plus another pinch of salt. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and cook for about 30 minutes, or until you have a smooth, flavorful sauce. Adjust for seasoning and remove the bay leaf.
To finish the dish, in a wide skillet with a lid, heat about ¼ cup olive oil. Add the sausage and cook until it starts to brown, 3 to 4 minutes. Add a good amount of the sauce*—enough to cover the sausage. Bring to a simmer, add the kale or chard, and season with salt. Crack the eggs into the pan, season them with salt, and put a lid on the skillet. Lower the heat and cook until the egg whites are just cooked through but the yolks are still soft.
You can serve this dish right in its skillet with crusty bread on the side. Or scoop individual portions into warm bowls with a final drizzle of olive oil.
Serves 4
There’s an aura of mystery about this recipe: How does wrapping eggplant in aluminum foil and cooking it in a skillet with another pan on top get it so smoky? We can leave that for the food scientists to answer. In the meantime, you can certainly serve the baba ghanouj by itself, but serving it on toasted bread with a citrus herb salad on top is a great way to bring color and vibrancy to the dish.
FOR THE BABA GHANOUJ
2 cloves garlic, peeled
Canola oil
2 regular eggplants, stems removed, sliced in half vertically
Juice of 1 lemon
⅓ cup raw tahini, well stirred
1 teaspoon honey
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
FOR THE BRUSCHETTA AND SALAD
4 slices of good sourdough bread
Olive oil
1 orange, supremed*
2 lemons, 1 supremed and 1 reserved for juice
1 small fresh red chili, minced
¼ cup parsley leaves
¼ cup shredded mint leaves
¼ cup sliced scallions
Kosher salt
Date molasses (optional)
To make the baba ghanouj, start by making a garlic confit. Drop the garlic cloves in a small pot and cover with enough oil to submerge. Cook on low for about 30 minutes, until the garlic is tender and slightly brown*. Remove from the oil and save the oil for another use.
Meanwhile, lay a sheet of aluminum foil in a cold skillet and place the eggplant*, cut side down, on top of the foil. Wrap the foil around the eggplant and then place another heavy pan on top. Turn the heat on to medium and cook for approximately 15 minutes, until the eggplant* is tender to the touch. Remove from the pan and allow to cool slightly.
Unwrap the eggplant* and rub the exposed skin with some lemon juice. Now scoop out the flesh into a food processor or a blender and add the garlic confit, another squeeze of lemon juice, the tahini, the honey, and a pinch of salt and pepper. Blend until you have a smooth puree. There you have it: baba ghanouj.
To fancy it up, grill the bread on a grill or under the broiler. Brush with some olive oil, then top with a good helping of the baba ghanouj. In a separate bowl, combine the citrus supremes, chili, herbs, and scallions with a splash of olive oil and lemon juice and salt to taste. When it tastes great, pile on top of the bruschettas and, if you have it, drizzle with date molasses.
