This delicious vegetarian dish comes from Yotam Ottolenghi’s book Plenty. The chef is much better known in the UK where he runs a chain of “deli” shops that serve a huge variety of creative dishes, both vegetarian and non-vegetarian. He also has a weekly column in the Guardian newspaper. The website has a lot of his recipes and the book is actually a collection of these recipes. Plenty has quickly become one of my favorite books for recipes and inspiration. All recipes are vegetarian, very creative and full of Mediterranean (mostly) and exotic flavors.
This dish combines a rich stew of barley and mushrooms with quick flatbreads made with yogurt. The dish is topped with Greek yogurt and -my addition- sour plum paste. The barley mushroom stew is done by separately cooking the barley in plenty of water until tender but still a little chewy. Then I cooked a bunch of fresh mushrooms (brown, white button) with a handful of soaked porcini mushrooms and their soaking water. To that we add thyme and white wine and let the whole mixture cook and meld. Then the barley is tossed in along with chopped parsley, lemon zest and lemon juice.
The flat breads are done from start to finish in about an hour. The dough is a quick bread, meaning it is not a proofed bread dough with yeast. Instead it uses a chemical leavening agent, specifically baking powder. The dough consists of whole wheat and white flour and is flavored with a little chopped cilantro. After leaving it to “rest” for 30-40 minutes, I divided it up into 6 pieces and rolled them into rough circles. I cooked those on my cast iron griddle using a little clarified butter.
After plating the bread and the barley-mushroom stew I topped it with a heaping spoon of Greek yogurt and that aforementioned plum paste. The paste is such a unique and delicious condiment from Barbara Massaad’s book about Lebanese traditional Mouneh. I bought her book when I was in Lebanon a month ago and it is really an amazing piece of work filled with Lebanese pantry items, preserves, pickles, fermented and dried items. It’s the type of regional food that all grandmothers used to put up for winter and some still do. It’s great that Barbara went through the painstaking trouble of recording these procedures and recipes. This is the first recipe I’ve tried from it just because it looked interesting and new to me and because there are a bunch of plums in the market now. It’s really the equivalent of tomato paste but made with plums that are cooked down with nothing more than salt. The taste is tart, fruity and deep. It was great on top of this dish and I’m sure it will add an excellent dimension to meat stews and vegetable dishes.
