Recipe of the Month: Shish Andaz

This month, for a change, Brian and I did not wait until the last minute to squeeze in a Recipe of the Month. In fact, I discovered this recipe at the end of January, and Brian deliberately held off on making it until last Sunday so that it could serve as the Recipe of the Month for February. 

It comes from a website called (for some reason) Hermann, which was featured in my One5C newsletter. Run by chef Julius Fiedler, it showcases "traditional vegan recipes from around the world." This one, called Shish Andaz, is an Iranian stew made primarily from eggplant and walnuts. It caught my eye because we're always looking for new eggplant recipes, particularly ones that pack a good dollop of protein. And we just happened to have everything on hand required to make it, with one notable exception: the pomegranate molasses. Not only did we not have it, I'd never even heard of it before. 

A quick trip to Wikipedia informed me that "molasses" is a misnomer: this "Middle Eastern, Caucasian and Balkan condiment" is actually made from concentrated pomegranate juice. It wasn't something we could whip up at home, and I wasn't even sure where we could buy it—or if we'd want to, since we didn't know of any other ways to use it besides this one untested recipe. Fortunately, someone had already asked in the comment section if there was a reasonable substitute for it, and Fiedler proposed "a tablespoon of sweet molasses of your choice and then 30-40ml of lemon juice." With this substitution, we had everything we needed to make the dish.

The recipe offered two alternatives for preparing the eggplant strips: pan-frying and roasting. Brian opted for roasting, which he'd found from previous experience to be the best way to bring out the flavor of almost any veggie. And since a single big baking sheet can hold all the eggplant at once, it didn't take appreciably longer than frying it, a job that would have needed to be done in two batches. It's not a quick recipe either way, about 80 minutes from start to finish, but about half of that is just simmering time.

The finished dish could not by any stretch of the imagination be considered pretty. It's an amorphous, brownish mass, broken up only by vague blobs of eggplant and gritty particles of walnuts. But it tasted much, much better than it looked. The author said it "might be the richest plant-based stew I’ve ever made," and I'd say that's a fair description, but there was a lot more going on than just the rich, nutty texture. It had hints of all five major flavors: the faint bitterness of the eggplant and walnuts, the acidity of the lemon and tomatoes, savory onion, salt, and a touch of sweetness from the molasses. Layered over that, there were the fragrant, spicy tones supplies by the cinnamon, pepper, and turmeric, all combined into one complex, flavorsome whole. I didn't enjoy looking at it, but I certainly enjoyed eating it, as did Brian.

This dish has just about everything we could ask for in a recipe. It's tasty, healthful, and reasonably easy to make with ingredients we nearly always have on hand. With all those walnuts, it's not particularly cheap, but since Brian only made a half recipe, the 150 grams he used (about a third of a pound) is only $1.44 worth, which certainly isn't going to break the bank. The only downside is the lengthy preparation time, which might make it impractical for a weeknight. But, as I'll discuss more in next week's entry, Brian is about to retire from his job, which means he'll soon have the leisure to cook a slow-paced dish any day of the week. So I think we can count on this Persian stew to become one of our go-to recipes, particularly for cold weather like we're having right now.