KC 238 - Koshary
Why hello there, and welcome to Kitchen Catastrophe, where one man sifts through the sands of lost luncheons to find that damn punchcard for a free ice cream. I’m your man in Tehran, Jon O’Guin, and that old reference might be mistaken for a bad understanding of geography, because today, we’re talking about Koshary/Koshari, the national dish of Egypt. If you just want the recipe, here’s the link you need, while the rest of us can dig in on some Nile nosh.
The Forgotten Empire
I find my own attitude about Egypt to be kind of fascinating, because, as a fairly avid student…I legitimately just have a 1500+ year span where I have NO IDEA what was going on there. And it’s not at the start, or the end, but in the MIDDLE: I can name probably…12-15 Ancient Egyptian deities. I can name pharaohs and cities of the Nile, and then, right after Julius Caesar dies…nothing. I have no idea what happens to Egypt between 33 AD, and like, the 1860’s, when the Suez canal was built, and it was in a weird “not a colony, but financially controlled by England” situation.
Which is why only ONE of the main characters in The Mummy was actually Egyptian.
Well, that and how movies worked in the 90’s.
Then it pops out of my knowledge AGAIN until like, the 50s or 60’s, when Nasser takes over, since that’s part of the Cold War. It’s a weird thing, and I’m going to make it a little political here, but it really fits like, the Western-centered lens of America. Stick with me here: America prides itself on being a Democratic Republic. So it makes sense that our histories tie back to Ancient Greece and Rome, because, you know, Democracy and Republic. And we’re a former British colony, so sure, tack that Empire on as well, and the Cold War had only just recently ended when I was a child, so it’s kind of obvious that I really only know the points where it touches on those stories…but it’s also a little weird, in the academic “what do you mean you forgot about Egypt for 1500 years?” sort way.
I bring all this up because historians believe that it was during that second window where my knowledge comes back that the dish Koshary (which can also be spelled koshari, kushari, and kosheri thanks to the difficulty of taking Arabic vowels), first shows up, as a regional take on Khichdi or khichri, an INDIAN dish of Lentils and Rice. I WONDER WHO INTRODUCED THE INDIAN DISH TO EGYPT AT THAT TIME.
WHO COULD IT BE?
Also, there’s something very weird about seeing Jack Russel Terriers in the same room as that mustache.
Although, weirdly, a lot of EGYPTIANS don’t become aware of the dish until the 50’s, that third window of my knowledge base: they say “I never had it until I left Egypt…but it’s entirely possible it’s just more popular in some part of the country I didn’t go to.” Like if you went to Korea, and learned that their understanding of American food was centered on Midwestern Hotdish.
Technically, I should say that Koshari is probably a result of a culinary mash-up: Indian Khichdi, while possessing a great many varieties, is typically more porridge-like than Koshari, which shares some culinary DNA with Mujadara, a middle-eastern dish of Lentils, rice, and onions. However, it’s also different than BOTH dishes in interesting ways…which I was going to say “we’ll get into later”, but actually, I have no reason to not do it now, other than it kind of messes up my half-planned flow in the cooking section later.
So, basic summary: Koshari is both complicated, and very simple, and I want to call out first that, since it IS the national dish of Egypt, everyone makes it…and almost no one does it exactly the same. Thus, my recipe (which is my own fusion of 4 different recipes I found) will certainly probably offend SOMEONE. Hell, according to Wikipedia, mine is already NOT authentically “Egyptian”, because I used the wrong type of rice, despite MULTIPLE recipes I consulted suggesting it. We’ll talk about that later. With all that out of the way: Koshari is a dish made by layering rice, lentils, and pasta together, spreading over a tomato-sauce, and topping with fried onions. In Egypt, it’s also often topped with chickpeas, and seasoned with garlic vinegar.
It’s a fascinating dish, because you can really see a lot of the various influences involved: Mujadara, for instance, literally translates to “pockmarked”, because you’re supposed to stir (or even cook) the lentils and rice together, mixed into a pale mass with dots of color from the lentils, with sautéed onions on top. Meanwhile, the bustling trade from the rest of the Mediterranean at that time meant that tomatoes, which were really taking off in Italy at that time for various reasons, were more available, especially at the tables of the wealthy. This leads to one of the places people believe the dish originated: as a sort of catch-all for left-overs. Egyptians working as servants/staff in Wealthy British homes would get the left-overs of posh dinners, including pastas in tomato sauce. Take some mujadara (a common dish for the relatively poor, given the cheapness of rice, lentils, and onions, and the amount of energy you get from them) toss the re-heated left-overs on top, boom. Except…by that point, the sauce would have lost a lot of acidity and garlic flavor, since both of those compounds oxidize fairly quickly. So it wouldn’t taste quite right to the people who knew what the sauce originally tasted. So…why not add some acidic garlic flavor, in the form of garlic vinegar? And, since the dish is soft rice, soft lentils, and soft pasta, let’s add a little texture by taking the sweet sautéed onions we normally use, and crisping them up. Boom!
Here’s a picture of some Koshari FROM Egypt, for context.
You can even suggest that maybe the move to layering the rice and lentils comes from mimicking the original dish, since cooked lentils DO look somewhat like ground beef. Or perhaps that’s just an economic outcome: as the dish became more popular, it was served out of food carts and restaurants, and since rice and lentils don’t cook for exactly the same amount of time, and customers may want more of one than the other, maybe the layering came from the idea that professional servers started cooking the starches in different pots, and ladling out the ingredients to order, creating a layered effect. That’s just a guess on my part, but in cooking it, it’s how it naturally played out. (Indeed, one of the main differences I saw between recipes is “which of the starches do you cook more of, and how do you layer them?”)
That’s all we have to discuss with the dish itself, so I guess it’s time to cook it, BUT FIRST: The reason we’re talking about Egypt at all today because this is our monthly PATREON TIE-IN POST. That’s right, this week, at some point, I will write up my family’s experiences trying an assortment of Egyptian snacks over on the site’s Patreon. I will give you this spoiler which I gave our Patrons last week: this is the first box where we liked certain items so much, we got online to order more of them. (In fact, we are STILL trying to figure out how to re-order some of them. If you or someone you know has a reliable and reasonably priced connection on Gero Dark Chocolate Coconut Bars, please contact me.) The booklet that came with our snacks actually suggested trying Koshari, something forgot completely until writing this post. Damn it, I could have had a FIFTH source to synthesize from! Anyway, check out our Patreon, where for as little as $1 a month, you can get insights into what I’m planning to cook soon, posts about foreign snacks, and, started just a month or so ago, an extra mini-Catastrophe every month! (mini in the sense that I try to keep it under 1500 words or so, while I typically aim for 2000 pre-recipe on these ones) The money you give helps cover all the technical costs for the site, and may one day allow Jon to do this as a legitimate source of income!
FIND IT, AND YOU WILL BE REWARDED…Well, not “richly”. “Middle-class-y”.
There, now I don’t have to mention the Patreon for the rest of the month. Nice.
Making a Mess of Things
So, Koshari is one of those recipes that’s in what I think of as the “Many pots make light work” school, because…step one is to start boiling several different dishes: one for the Lentils, one for the pasta, and one for the rice.
Ignore the smoke from the pasta pot. Very normal. (we have a problem with residue on our back burners)
This is also part of what makes the dish great for left-overs: if you ALREADY have cooked lentils/pasta/rice, you can cut a lot of time out of it: while I had to cook all three, having one or two of them cooked beforehand would have allowed me to turn what ended up being about an hour of cooking into something like 20 minutes, depending on what I had prepped.
Which is not to say that this first part was entirely easy. First of all, I was irritated and slightly concerned about my lentils. See, one of the recipes I found specifically noted that you want BROWN lentils, not Green, because Green will end up cooking to a chewier texture. And in MY stores, unfortunately, brown lentils are not labeled as such. There were green lentils, red lentils, and…”lentils”. No color, just “lentils”. And, fun fact, brown lentils and green lentils don’t look all that different.
Are these Green, or Brown? Because they LOOK green.
So I wasn’t certain at first that I had gotten the right lentils, and considered using Red lentils instead to be safe…but they’re known to break down EVEN MORE than brown. So I stuck with the ones I bought. And I did something that NONE of the recipes called for, so maybe it’s sacrilege in the world of Koshari, but it sounded like a good idea to me: I seasoned my lentils as I cooked them. Specifically, I tossed in some bay leaves and smashed garlic cloves, along with a pinch of salt and pepper. I did this based off a recipe for Mujadara I consulted, where the lentil-rice mixture is seasoned in boiling. I DIDN’T use the cumin they suggested seasoning it with. This was an entirely creative/culinary decision, and has nothing to do with the fact that I couldn’t find the ground cumin, and we might be out of it.
WHY ARE YOU EMPTY?
I then used Basmati rice as our rice, which, as I said earlier, according to Wikipedia means it’s no longer authentically Egyptian. I ALSO used 1 cup of uncooked macaroni, which is a GREAT number, as it turns out, because, at least in my box, 1 cup of dried macaroni is about 4 ounces by weight, meaning it’s exactly the amount needed to use up the macaroni we DIDN’T use in last week’s recipe! I then immediately forgot how to cook pasta, and tossed it into a cold pan of water, which I then had to heat.
Now, the lentils take 15-20 minutes to cook, and I have no idea how much water, because I didn’t do the math: The instructions on the bag were, “For every POUND, 6-8 cups.” So I went with 2 cups of water to 1 cup of lentils. This, as it turns out, is wrong, and you want around 3 cups. (Specifically, a pound of lentils is about 2.3-2.5 cups. So 6 to 8 divided by 2.4 is 2 1/2to 3 1/3.) So I had to add another cup of water to my pot after about half the cooking time, because the top lentils were already starting to get dry.
Once the grains are all cooked, it’s time for the “more technically complex, but still pretty chill” steps of the process: making the sauce, and frying onions. Like the Macaroni last week, this recipe actually has VERY LITTLE in the way of normal “kitchen work”: the ONLY things you cut are some garlic that you mince for the tomato sauce, and one onion you finely slice to fry. Otherwise, everything is just “measure some of X, add it.” I also doubled up on cookware, using the pot I cooked the lentils in for the sauce, and the pot I cooked the rice in for the onions, to minimize clean-up later.
So a couple tablespoons of olive oil in a pan, and two minced cloves of garlic. I also added an ingredient which appeared slightly controversial when I studied recipes for this: Baharat.
Spices AND Paprika? When did Paprika stop being a spice?
Baharat is actually just the Arabic WORD for “spices”, and different places will put different ingredients in (in this regard, it’s kind of like Ras al Hanout) but common ingredients are things like coriander, paprika, cumin, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, cardamom, etc. Basically all the “warm” spices you’d see in Garam Masala or Pumpkin Spice, with a little more heat/cumin. I say it might be controversial because at least one author I read directly stated that putting cinnamon in Koshari is blasphemy, while another states that the flavors of baharat are a MUST in the dish…which are contradictory claims, given cinnamon’s presence in baharat. I erred on the side of caution, since technically, reading the recipe the first person claimed was blasphemy, the cinnamon was added into the boiling water for the rice (well, quinoa, ANOTHER thing the write found offensive), while my other source notes the Baharat is part of the TOMATO SAUCE, so perhaps that’s where the issue comes in. As such, I added my baharat to the oil to bloom for 30 seconds or so as I got the tomato sauce.
One recipe I consulted suggested I should sweat onions here, and add the spices later, without blooming. I decided to go for blooming, no onion.
I also added some red chili flakes, as one of my recipes suggested the sauce needs to be at least fairly spicy, since it’s what’s going to cut through the sea of carbs the dish is made of. The spices ended up blooming longer than I intended, because it took me 2 minutes to find my tomato sauce; Someone (quite possibly ME) had re-arranged the counter space I had set it on while washing dishes in the week between me buying the ingredients and making the dish. I seriously worried the spices were burned, and would need to be thrown out, but a quick taste told me that it wasn’t too far gone. (after the first minute of looking, I took the pan off the heat while I searched, which I think saved them.)
Dump in some tomato sauce, and start spicing and simmering. The directions I had were that we wanted a somewhat spicy, fairly acidic sauce, so I added a little more red chili flake and baharat, as well as a tablespoon of red wine vinegar, and let the sauce simmer while I got to the last step: frying onions.
Now, I’ve fried onions before, for our Loco Moco recipe, (and for our Chili Crisp recipe) so I went into this assuming I knew what I was doing. Turns out, I didn’t: the recipe I was using this time actually doesn’t call for deep-frying the onions, but rather, pan frying them. As such, I had overheated my oil for the first batch of onions.
There’s a fine line between “deeply browned”, “charred”, and “burnt”.
Luckily, a quick recheck, and mental re-balancing, allowed me to get the second batch right while still deep-frying them.
Much less burning.
After about 11 minutes at medium-high heat, the onions were nicely browned, so I snagged them from the oil using a spider (the name for a tool used in deep-frying. Probably originally called a “spider’s web” due to the design of the metal scoop, shortened over time to “spider”), sprinkled them with salt, and it was time to serve. A layer of rice, then lentils, then pasta, a scoop of sauce, and a sprinkle of onions, and BOOM.
Mine is much more colorful.
The results were pretty enjoyable. Even Nate labeled the dish as “pretty good” with a positive inflection instead of his normal unimpressed monotone. There’s just enough textural difference between the lentils, pasta, and rice to be interesting, and without a ton of flavor on their own, they really serve as a sort of vehicle/canvas for the tomato sauce, and the crunchy onion bits add a great contrast and bit of sound to the eating experience. I would KIND OF like a bit more flavor in the base starches/dish. Maybe like, cooking the rice in broth instead of water, or, as I saw one recipe do, use a more pilaf-like effect on the rice, toasting it in oil before boiling/steaming. Maybe I should have made/found some garlic vinegar to add, or tried (as some places do) sprinkling on hot sauce to taste.
Still, for a first attempt, it was a rousing success, a great comfort-food mix. AND, also long as you use vegetable oil, it’s completely vegan too! Which, now that I know my other brother and his vegan fiancée are coming next weekend, makes me kind of regret cooking it today. WHY DOES NO ONE TELL ME THESE THINGS?
THURSDAY: WE PROBABLY DISSECT EGYPTIAN FOOD MORE THOROUGHLY, BUT I HAD ANOTHER IDEA THAT I’M CONSIDERING DOING. IF SO, WE’LL BE TALKING ABOUT AN EXPENSIVE RESTAURANT MY FAMILY LIKES. I KNOW THAT DOESN’T SOUND CONNECTED, BUT IT TECHNICALLY IS.
MONDAY: IT DEPENDS ON WHAT I DO FOR THURSDAY, BUT IT WILL ALMOST CERTAINLY BE CENTERED ON BEEF. THE QUESTION IS: IS IT CHINESE BEEF WITH EGGPLANT, OR AMERICAN BEEF WITH POTATOES.
Recipe
Koshari
Serves 4ish (there’s more lentils and sauce than needed for 4, but just about enough rice and pasta.)
Ingredients
The Starches
1 cup dry brown lentils
4 cloves of garlic, smashed
2 small bay leaves
Salt and Pepper
1 cup dry white rice
1 cup dry elbow pasta
Water
The Sauce
2 cloves garlic
1 tbsp vegetable oil
½ teaspoon baharat spice mix (optional, or substitute If desired)
¼ teaspoon red chili flakes
1 14.5 oz can tomato sauce
1 teaspoon hot sauce of your choice
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
Additional spices to taste
The Onions
2-3 cups vegetable oil
1 large yellow onion, thinly sliced
½ tsp salt, divided
Preparation.
Cook the rice and pasta according to package instructions. In a third pot, cook the lentils with the garlic, bay leaves, 1 teaspoon salt and 10 cracks freshly ground black pepper and 3 cups of water for 15-20 minutes, until tender. Drain, and set aside.
In a small saucepan, heat the oil for the sauce over medium heat. Add the garlic, and cook until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add the baharat, and bloom for 30 seconds to a minute. Add the tomato sauce, stir to combine, and simmer for 10 minutes. Taste, add additional spices, hot sauce, and the vinegar, and simmer another 5 minutes, tasting for balance.
In a large pot or pan, heat the oil over medium-high heat until shimmering. Add half the thinly sliced onions, and fry for 10-15 minutes, until deeply caramelized and slightly crisped (they will crisp more as they dry). When cooked to your liking, remove to a paper-towel lined plate, and sprinkle with half the salt. Bring the oil back up to a shimmer, and repeat with the remaining half of the onions.
Assemble the koshari by layering the rice, lentils, and pasta, spooning over tomato sauce, and topping with fried onions. Season if desired with additional hot sauce, or garlic vinegar, if you have it.