Shakshuka by Ottolenghi

Are you in for a dinner of ratatouille with egg with the perfect spicy touch? Yes, here is the grace of this Yotam Ottolenghi recipe that Miriam (author of The Winter Guest ) brings us today. A vice! Go for bread...

The word shakshuka sounds so exotic... and even more so if we know that the recipe comes from the well-known and cool cook Yotam Ottolenghi , of Israeli origin but living in the United Kingdom, from his book The Vegetarian Gourmet .

I am going to proceed to remove all the glamor from this shakshuka : it is about eggs on a plate, with a bed of stir-fried vegetables that is suspiciously reminiscent of a ratatouille from La Mancha or a tavern from Almería. I'm evil, but it's not my fault, they drew me like that.

Of course, what differentiates it from more familiar preparations is the spice . In addition, as Ottolenghi himself comments in his book, it is a North African and Levante Mediterranean dish that has a multitude of variants, many more exotic than what we bring here.

This shakshuka has the advantage that the vegetable stir-fry can be made in good quantity and in advance to liven up any dinner or fast meal: all you have to do is crack one or two eggs in a pan or casserole lined with the stir-fry and curdle them to be reasonably happy with a very balanced dish and imagine that we are in the old city of Jerusalem. Come on.

Skeppshult cast iron frying pan , Luigi Bormioli crystal oil can , Mediterranean crystal glasses and Mediterranean crystal jug .

Ingredients (for 4 people)

• 100 ml of olive oil
• 2 large onions
• 2 Italian red peppers
• 2 Italian green peppers
• 6 large, fleshy tomatoes
• ½ tsp. cumin grain
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 tbsp. of sugar
• Salt to taste
• thyme to taste
• A good sprinkle of ground cayenne
• A good pinch of saffron threads
• Water (if needed)
• 4 large eggs

Elaboration

1. Cut the onions to taste and fry them over low heat in a wide pan with the oil, until they are transparent (in the original the onions are only sautéed, but I don't like them hard).
2. Cut the peppers into strips and fry them when the onion is to our liking, until they soften.
3. We put the cumin so that it is toasted.
4. In a saucepan with boiling water, blanch the tomatoes for 1 minute to comfortably remove the skin. Peel and cut them into pieces, removing the seeds.
5. Add the tomatoes to the pan together with the cayenne pepper, sugar, bay leaf and saffron, and continue to fry until they soften and the whole thing thickens in the form of a sauce. If the mixture dries excessively, we will add a little water.
6. When the sauce is ready, we divide it into small pots or pans that can be put on the fire. In each one of them or two by two servings as seen in the photos, we make a hole in the sauce and crack an egg.
7. Salt the egg and heat the casserole or frying pan over medium heat until the whole is hot and the egg is set. If you don't want to run the risk of the yolk curdling completely, as happened to me, you will have to put only the white (you can use an egg separator ) and pour the yolk carefully at the last moment.
8. We serve the shakshuka immediately, warm and with a good amount of bread to slice.

Skeppshult iron skillet and Mediterranean glass jug .

The mixture of cumin with a sweet and spicy point is quite addictive, I tell you... Try this shakshuka because you will like it, and it can also be prepared by the arrobas for a rainy day, as the Anglo-Saxons say.