Bring the flavors of the Middle East to your table with this Kofta recipe served alongside creamy hummus, fresh tabbouleh, tahini, and garlic sauce. Juicy, spiced Kofta pairs perfectly with these classic sides for a meal that’s flavorful, authentic, and easy to make at home. Perfect for family dinners or entertaining!
Recipe: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JkjV6xj1niz28-en-2d_8maCzYcTwRRPS5cpoR5L3yM/edit?usp=sharing
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I just want to make sure that we’re getting the my meat. Some may say they look rather feal. I wasn’t going to say it, but yes. Today on Continue Cooking, we’re making the ultimate Middle Eastern meal. Juicy spiced kofa, bright and refreshing tibuli, creamy hummus, and a rich tahini sauce to bring it all together. It’s a full spread that’s simple to prepare, but looks and tastes like a feast. Hello and welcome back to Continue Cooking with me, Monte Cristo, my delightful wife, Susie. We have four recipes today. Wow. We’re doing some Middle Eastern food. It will be kofa with beef and lamb, which is kind of a Middle Eastern/Mediterian beef meatball. We will not be doing the kebabs because I don’t have a grill. We are going to be making hummus from scratch. We will be making tibuli, which is a Middle Eastern salad. be making more of a Lebanese style one with a heavy parsley infusion and we’ll be making some tahini sauce as well for our kofa and everything will be delicious. Here are the ingredients for our hummus. You’re going to get three cups of chickpeas. This is about 1 and 1/4 cups dried that has been rehydrated and simmered for a couple of hours or it’s about 1 and 1/2 cans of canned chickpeas if you prefer doing that. We’re going to have the juice of one lemon, couple of cloves of garlic. We have tahini here, which is sesame seed paste, kosher salt, and then for serving, we’ll put a little sumac and extra virgin olive oil on top. Very easy. We’ll also add a couple of ice cubes, but I’m going to assume I don’t need to pull those out for you guys. What do ice cubes look like, sir? I I I need to know. How can I make this? How can I make these ice cubes? So, these are dried chickpeas, and the reason why they are in here is that they were soaked overnight, and I’ve been simmering them for a couple of hours. You can use canned chickpeas for this, but we are not going to do that. Dried beans in general are going to be a significantly more pleasant experience. They have better texture. I have been simmering this for the past couple of hours, so it’s good to go. What we’re going to do is add a teaspoon and a half of baking soda. And it’s going to foam up a little bit. Oo, this is a fun fun uh science project, sir. Yeah. And the reason why is we’re we need to get the skins off of the chickpeas because that’s going to create a better texture. We’re only going to leave the baking soda in for a couple of minutes. You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to remove the skins at all, but the texture of the hummus is going to be nicer and smoother. All right, so this has been good enough now. Move it over here. So, I’m going to show you what these skins look like. So, as you can see, partially off is this skin of the chickpea here. And so, they’ll be pretty slippery. And when you take them off, the chickpea will feel kind of textured but still smooth, which is nice. So, you can keep them in the colander and you can kind of do it in the sink under running water where you uh you more or less just kind of massage the chickpeas. But what I realized is that if we submerge it, the skins are going to float to the top. And so, we can use a strainer here to just go ahead and strain skins. Whoa. This is fun. It’s like Yeah. So, I’m just using a fine mesh strainer to skim the skin fragments off the top. This is not going to be perfect. Like, it’s not going to be ruined if you have some chickpea skins in there. As long as you get most of them off. I I have this food processor. Tada. I’m just going to mince these cloves of Actually, I’m not going to mince them. I’m just going to thinly slice them cuz we’re going to put them into the food processor anyway, so who cares? So, two cloves of garlic. You can add more if you really love garlic, but remember this is not going to be cooked, so it’s raw garlic, so it’ll be quite potent. And we are going to add our chickpeas. 3 cups cooked/canned, which is I used 1 and 14 cups. Uh, actually before I do this, I’m going to save some of the prettier whole chickpeas for the top of our hummus. Oo. To add some visual interest. Okay. So, because we don’t have a lot of liquid in here besides the liquid that’s in the chickpeas, we’re going to turn this on to low. Just kidding. It’s not plugged in. If it was plugged. Ah. So, I’m just going to turn this on to low. What we’re going to try and do is turn this more or less into powder. That’s looking pretty powdery at this point. So, while it’s running, we’re going to add a few more of these ingredients top down. So, I’m going to add the juice of a lemon here. I’m going to just try and get some of these seeds out in advance so we don’t squish them all in. I see a couple just on the surface here. Couple of ice cubes here. Now, you may be wondering, why am I putting ice in the hummus? And what this does is it’s going to create it’s going to airate it, interestingly. So, it’s going to create a lighter texture instead of a thicker texture as we put it in. A fun trick. So, I’m going to kind of add this in waves. Probably add half the tahini now. Chuck the salt in. Squeeze the half of a lemon in. Add the rest of the tahini. Add another ice cube. Squeeze another lemon in. Get rid of the seed. Probably going to want to let this go for four or five minutes. I can still hear the ice cube rattling around in there. It’s getting chopped up now. I don’t know if you guys can hear that. And we will add some water. You can add cold water to this, a tablespoon at a time. And what we’re going to do is try and get a the consistency we want, which honestly, there was quite a bit of water in the chickpeas. So, the the consistency is okay. It’s a little bit grainy right now, partially because we haven’t food processed it enough, but it’s still not super smooth. So, I’m going to add a tablespoon of water. Stop jumping around. It’s the ice in there that’s making it do this. I’m going to add another tablespoon of water. Now, I think that’s probably all we’ll need. If we need any more, it’ll just be one or two tablespoons more. So, I’m just going to open it up and take a Oh, yeah. Look at that. Yeah, that’s nice and creamy. Yeah, we’re getting there. I think it probably needs one more tablespoon of oil. [Applause] Oh, okay. Looks great. So, you can see how smooth the hummus is. So, if you want it a little pastier, you can achieve that by just adding less water. So I I ended up adding 3 tablesp of water to this. These are the ingredients for our tibuli salad. We are going to use, of course, a lot of parsley. We’re using curly leaf parsley. The reason why I like to use curly instead of flat leaf parsley is that the curly leaves trap the dressing better in my opinion and provides a more interesting texture to the salad. We’ll use four green onions, one English or in this case a Korean cucumber, Japanese or maybe a couple Persian cucumbers if they’re small. uh juice of two limes. We have four tomatoes. I can’t get Roma tomatoes in Korea. You should use Roma tomatoes. I will show you what happens if you use regular tomatoes. You can fix it. We’re going to use a little bit of mint leaf, some extra virgin olive oil, and some kosher salt. Oh no, I forgot something. Uh-oh, I forgot. Of course, we have to have the fine bular. This is critical. How could I forget this? We’re going to deal with that first. So, first things first, we’re going to use a half a cup of fine bulgar wheat. This is really healthy whole grain, very high protein. This is good stuff. So, half a cup of the bular wheat. And we need to soak this before we do anything else. So, we got to soak our half cup of bulgar wheat for, you know, 5 to 7 minutes. But realistically, we’re going to just soak this uh for as long as it takes us to cut the vegetables. Okay. So, tomatoes. Use Roma tomatoes if you have access to them. Roma tomatoes are meatier. They’re better for salads. use them for pico de gallo. They’re better for sauces a lot of time because they introduce less water and they don’t have quite as many seeds. I can’t get Roma tomatoes. I live in Korea. I’ve tried. But what I can do is buy boxes of regular tomatoes from Costco. You can use regular tomatoes. There’s just going to be some extra steps to this. I use these for pico de gallo here as well. Problem is is as you can see, there’s going to be lots of seeds in the middle, right? Huge amounts of seeds. I’m going to core the tomatoes like this. Right. So, we get rid of the stems. I am then going to cut them in half. And at this point in time, I’m going to take them to the sink and I’m going to scrape out all of these membranes. By removing the seeds, we’re going to be left with only the meaty parts of the tomato. And that’s what we want cuz we don’t want this to turn into like some kind of watery mess. And we don’t need the seeds for any reason. This is honestly useful even with Roma tomatoes if you’re being a perfectionist. You know, we have this problem here where we just have a lot of seeds. And so, we can take out all of these seeds. And the reason why I wash them is to get rid of some of the additional seeds in here, but we’re scraping out all of this. We can keep these membrane walls cuz these can be cut up. So, we’re not so worried about those. But, we do need to cut these tomatoes into very small, even pieces for us to have a nice texture salad. But what I’m going to do is basically just get rid of all of these membranes, which I guess I can just do here. And then I’ll rinse them out. Okay. So now I have this whole thing of juice, which I’m just going to throw away. Haha. You can’t stop me. Be gone. I’m going to rinse the rest of the seeds out of this and just get rid of some of the extra little gooey bits. If you’re not doing this step, even with Roma tomatoes, you may want to put these tomatoes into a colander in a bowl so that they lose some of the water out of it. We won’t have to do that cuz these tomatoes, I promise you, do not have very much water in them anymore. So, what I’m going to do is I’m going to cut it like this. So, I’m going to cut the kind of inner membranes out so that I have these meaty pieces of the skin that have a bunch of the tomato flesh on them that I can put flat. And the reason why I’m doing that is that we’re going to be engaging in a laborious cutting process. We’re going to cut them really small here. So, we’re going to do a pretty nice dice of these tomatoes. And the reason why we want them about this size is that we’re going to be cutting the cucumber to about the same size. And we are also going to be mincing the parsley. So, we want this to be a pretty small chunk salad. I don’t know how else to say it because we want that texture of it being small. And if we don’t cut the tomatoes and the cucumbers small, the it’s going to be kind of weird because the tomatoes and cucumbers would be a lot bigger than the parsley to the skin side. That’s fine. We got a lot of good-looking tomatoes that are not crushed. Now we’ll do the same for our cucumber. Chop this too. We wanted to get approximately the same size as the tomato. In this case, I’m using a Korean cucumber, which does not have a lot of seeds to it. Uh, as you can see here, there’s not a lot of seeds. It’s pretty meaty, so we don’t really have to worry about that. If you’re using a regular Americanstyle cucumber, you will want to seed this first so that you’re not introducing a bunch of water that’s going to dilute the dressing when we put it into the salad. So, I’m going to cut this into quarters. And then I’m going to go ahead and chop this. These are a little bit bigger than the tomatoes, but this is the fattest part of the cucumber as well. [Music] All right, so we have our one cucumber. We can go ahead and give that a mix now. It’s looking good. We have all of our parsley. Now, this is about two bunches worth of parsley that you would find at the grocery store. It’s probably around 100 g. We need to get this off of the stems. So, we’re going to be pulling all of the parsley leaves off. If you get a few of these little tender parts at the top, the tender stems close to the top. Not going to be a big deal, but let’s just try and avoid that as much as possible. Okay, so we have a lot of parsley here. That’s so much parsley. It’s a lot. And we’re gonna mince it because we want to cut it down into very small pieces so it sits around our tomatoes and our cucumber which will swim upon the tides of parsley. Oh my god, that is so much parsley. Probably a good size for it to be. We’re putting all this parsley in our bowl as you can see here. And uh now that it’s minced pretty small, it’ll start to cover our tomato and cucumber and disperse nicely throughout the salad. So we have our bular wheat that we’ve been soaking. I just drained off a lot of the water. It’s softened up now. And you do have to do this cuz otherwise it’s going to be hard little bulgar pellets. And now it is nice and moist. It’s like a pretty fine couscous almost. So what I’m doing is I’m squeezing the water out of it cuz again we don’t want extra water content in there. So I’m just going to go ahead and squeeze our bular wheat. And this is going to give a nice kind of earthy flavor and also just really healthy cuz this bular wheat is super good for you. So it’s used in a lot of uh Turkish cuisine as well and it can be added to kofa also act as a filler or a binder uh with the meat. So we’re just going to cut these thinly slice these four green onions. [Music] We are going to use some just peppermint leaves. Dozen or so leaves should be sufficient. Add some more freshness. A touch of mint. So you don’t want the mint to overpower. So the dressing on this is basically just lime juice and olive oil and salt. About a teaspoon of kosher salt. It’s a pretty big bowl of tibuli. I might need just a little more more. So I’m going to add 3 to four tablespoons of lime juice. In practice about there’s about 2 tablespoons of lime juice typically per lime. So, I’m going to add two whole limes to this. You can use lemon juice as well. Many recipes will use lemon juice instead. [Music] This is going to be better as it sits for a little bit. You know, a lot of salads there, it’s not like, oh yeah, this is better the next day. This is one of those things that’s better the next day. The flavors really start to meld. You want to chill it. You know, the bular wheat is going to absorb a lot of the flavor of the lime juice and the salt and so it’s going to be in my opinion more delicious on subsequent days. Here are the ingredients for our kofa that we are going to be making today. I have a pound of ground beef or 500 g of ground beef and 250 g of ground lamb. So, making a beef and lamb combination. Got a bunch of fresh parsley here. Three cloves of garlic. one medium yellow onion. And our spices, little bit of cayenne, pepper, paprika, ground nutmeg, cardamom and sumac, salt, salt here, pepper, olive oil, and and our last spice is all spice. The almightiest spice. This is the best part, a piece of wet toast. I need a piece of toast for the kofa later because it acts as a binder because we’re not using breadcrumbs. We’re just going to use a soggy piece of bread. Yum. So, we we are going to toast a piece of bread and then squeeze out all of the water from said bread because we’re not using bread crumbs and this is going to be a binding for our ground meat. Damp toast that I’ve squeen out. If you want to make these into kebabs, you can go ahead and get some skewers wet. I don’t have a grill here. You can grill them. You can form the meat around the skewers to make kebabs. Kofa is a pretty wide ranging dish that is going to be made differently in a lot of places. It can be steamed. It can be fried. It can be pan fried. Uh, it’s basically just a meatball/meatloaf with Middle Eastern spices and herbs made out of lamb, beef, or a combination thereof. So, we’re back to our food processor, which has been cleaned out from our hummus usage. So, first thing we’re going to do is toss a bunch of our vegetables, garlic, and herbs into the bowl. So, I’m going to be thinly slicing three cloves of garlic, veg scraper. There it is. Uh, we don’t need to be super precise, but we do want to get it just a little bit smaller before we hack away at it in the food processor. So, I’ll give it a nice, very rough chop here. Go ahead and transfer that over to our food processor. And then we’re going to add the parsley as well. So, going to be a whole bunch of parsley here. Again, uh, I’m just going to get rid of the stems. We don’t need to mince it this time because the food processor is going to chop it up. [Music] Okay, so next phase. We’ve got our onions, our garlic, and our parsley. And I’m going to lightly chop this. [Applause] And that’s looking good. nice and minced up now because we want to mince this into our meat because this is going to add a lot of the herbs and flavors into our meat. Then we add our wet toast. Then we’re going to add our nice ground beef here. Just root that around the bowl a little bit. So 500 g of ground beef and it’s about a pound. And then we’re adding half a pound or 250 gramish of ground lamb. You can make it all with beef. You can make it all with lamb. I think a mix is nice. So I at this point in time I’m going to add a teaspoon of teaspoon and a halfish of kosher salt to this. Add some black pepper as well. Maybe half a teaspoon black pepper. We’re going to add 1 and 1/2 teaspoons of allspice. It’s going to be the most present spice in this. Okay. A half a teaspoon of paprika. This is sweet paprika, which is regular paprika, not smoked paprika. Half a teaspoon of nutmeg, ground nutmeg. Half a teaspoon of cardamom. Half a teaspoon of sumac, which sumac, if you’re unfamiliar, is a Middle Eastern spice, guys. And it it has a very bright almost lemony kind of like earthy lemony taste. So, those are all our spice. Now, we can mix it up. And what this is going to do, what this is going to do is create almost like a meat paste that we can form. That’s pretty fun to watch, though. I’m going to use a spatula here. So, it is going to decrease in volume naturally as we mince it up. And it’s looking good. But we still have some of the larger ground meat chunks towards the top of this thing, which I’m just going to push down. [Music] There it goes. All right. Yay. It should be good. And what you’re going to get m meat paste. Meat paste. So clearly it’s very similar to how you would make meatloaf. Okay, we’re going to make the kofa now. And remember, you can put these on kebab skewers. I’m putting them on parchment paper because again, I’m going to be cooking these in a grill pan. So you probably want them around like an inch in diameter. So, basically, we’re making meatball or meatloaf logs. Some may say they look rather feal. I wasn’t going to say it, but yes. Here is the cast iron grill pan on medium high. Uh, I’m going to wait for it to smoke a little bit. I’ll add a little bit of oil to this. You can do this on a grill. Again, kofa can be cooked in a variety of different ways. You could toss these in a steamer. You could pan fry them in just a normal, you do it in a non-stick pan. You could do it in a stainless steel pan. Grilling them is probably my favorite way, but we don’t have that. But we’ll get some nice char marks on here. We’re going to leave it for 3 to 4 minutes per side. Oops. Oh yeah. So, the reason why I’m doing it on the grill pan here is that we’re approximating the look. You know, what we would get if we did this on an actual grill is kebabs. All right, these are looking pretty good. We got 3 to 4 minutes aside. They’ll continue cooking a little bit on the plate as well. Continue cooking. Continue cook. That’s the name of the stream. Yeah, it’s looking good. This one fell apart a little bit, but it’s fine. You guys can see the inside of it here, guys. Our recipe for tahini sauce. We have tahini paste, of course, which we’re going to be diluting down. I’m going to make this a half recipe compared to what’s below. So, I’m going to use 1/4 cup of lemon juice, which is four tablespoons, which approximately two limes, excuse me, lime juice. I’m going to use one clove of garlic that I’m going to be putting in a mortar and pestle with 1/4 teaspoon of salt. And then we’re going to add some cold water to it in the food processor as well. Oh my god. I’m going to make half of the recipe for tahini that we have cuz I don’t want that much tahini sauce cuz this is going to require what 3/4 of a cup of tahini paste and that’s too much tahini paste. I’m going use one clove of garlic here. And I’m going to mash it in this mortar and pestle. So, this is one clove of garlic. That a little bit difficult to get out of this mortar and pestle with the salt, but we’re doing our best. And I’m making a a half recipe compared to what you guys have seen. So, because I needed 3/4 of a cup, uh, if I’m going to use half of that, I need 3/8 of a cup. I’m going to do between just a little bit less than a third, which is 3 9ths obviously because I don’t have eighth measures of cups. Okay, so I’m adding my 3/8 of a cup or 3/4 of a cup if you’re doing the full recipe. I’ve decided I do not need that much tahini sauce. That’s like a lot of tahini sauce. Sad, too. So, we’re going to use two whole limes here, which is 1/4 cup approximately of lime juice. [Music] Okay, so back to our food processor cam. Uh, as you can see, without the water, it’s going to turn into this kind of like paste consistency, but we don’t want it like that. So, we’ll try and add about a tablespoon at a time. So, I add about two tablespoons of water there. Let’s give it a check. So, it’s smoothed out quite a bit. This is still not saucy enough. Yeah, you can add cilantro or not cilantro, parsley to this as well. But we have parsley in the meat already. So, I’m not going to do that in this case. I add about another tablespoon in there. I’m going to add the last tablespoon of water because I want this sauce to be really kind of runny so I can drizzle it. It needs to be drizzleable onto my kofa. Now we have a more drizzable consistency. And we’ve successfully turned this into a tahini sauce, which tastes like sesame seeds and lime juice and garlic, which is exactly what you would think it would taste like. Kofa. Nicely grilled up, caramelized on the outside. Got that nice mayard reaction. Super good. Oh my god, it’s really good. [Music] [Music] Everyone’s saying it looks so good. Monty, that looks fire. Oh my gosh, Kofa looks so good. All right, so it’s time for me to try it. We can take a nice bite of our kofa with the It has a little bit of hummus on there, too, which is nice. I’m going to go ahead and pop this onto a piece of bread. M. It’s good. Really good. This is just romaine lettuce, right? Which is much more common to the Middle East and West. And one way to eat tibuli is to make a Korean style lettuce wrap. and just stick it in your mouth. You get nice crunchiness on the outside with all of the other vegetables within.
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