For as long as I live, all hummus will be judged against the hummus at Abu Hassan in Tel Aviv.
When you hear hummus, you may think of the meal-y, grainy hummus you buy in the refrigerated section of your grocery store and dip pita chips into. In Israel, hummus is a breakfast food, served fresh– and warm. And when I say fresh, I mean Abu Hassan makes a batch in the morning and then closes when it’s gone.
We ate regular hummus and then a variety called masabcha. Masabcha is hummus but the chickpeas are left whole and drenched in the wonderful sesameness of tahini. IT WAS AMAZING. Amazing enough that I bought an Israeli cookbook when we got home so I could try my hand at making my own. At Abu Hassan, they served the hummus with warm pita, raw onions, and little saucers of lemon juice with spicy chilis marinating in them, which is used as a condiment to add spice to your hummus if you cared to…and we did.
When I think of food in Israel, the first thing I will think of is that hummus, but in truth we did not eat a bad meal the whole time we were there. The highlights:
- Sabich: We ate sabich at the end of our food tour, when our pants were positively bursting at the seams. Severin and I decided to split one, thinking since it had already been paid for we could take one bite and throw the rest away. Except that it was literally one of the tastiest things I could have conceived of– it was a small, hand-size pita stuffed with fried eggplant, hardboiled egg, harissa, Israeli pickles, cucumber tomato salad, hummus, and tahini sauce. It was so amazing we totally destroyed it.
- Babka: Apparently Babkas are becoming a thing in Brooklyn. We had delicious and very unique Babkas that I’d like to try making at home– the most unique one was the halvah babka. Halvah is a fudge-like substance made of sesame paste, and when baked into a babka it had a really nice caramelization on it. We also had a cranberry ricotta babka which, while not particularly exciting or Israeli, was super yummy.
- EtroGat Juice: This wasn’t particularly tasty, but it was unique. Etrog is a form of Israeli citron. I would describe it generally as a “grotesque lemon”– not gross in the form that it is soft and mushy or anything, but its thick rind gives it kind of rough bumpy features. Apparently the “gat” in the mix is actually that qat leaf (which is chewed as a drug in many places in the Arabian peninsula and East Africa). We weren’t aware of the qat element until I just looked up what the heck we were drinking.
- Pillow Bread with Labneh: This dough is stretched crepe-thin on a round pillow, then flipped onto a convex griddle until crispy. Then it is stuffed with sour za’atar and some herbs, folded up like a crepe, and makes a great on-the-go snack.
- Fresh Za’atar: I always thought za’atar was a spice blend but it’s actually a wild herb. I’ve seen it referred to as “wild thyme” but in fact to me it tastes like a milder form of oregano. Naturally, za’atar is used in a spice blend also known as za’atar when mixed with sumac and sesame seeds.
We visited Akko (Acre) for the day and ate at a Palestinian restaurant in a small Turkish bazaar. The bazaar itself was a narrow sandstone passage with shops on both sides; the restaurant (Maadali) took up two small shops and had a couple of tables right in the middle of the passage. As it happens, Maadali was featured in the New York Times the day after we got back from Israeli. We found it by happy accident– we were actually hoping to find hummus somewhere, but we had arrived in Akko late and many of the hummus shops had already closed for the day. They didn’t have an English menu (but maybe they will now), and our server didn’t have the best English, so we weren’t really sure what we ended up ordering. No matter. My favorite dish was eggplant, cut in half and roasted on high heat, then drenched with fresh tahini, sprinkled with a bit of parsley, and with small piles of harissa on the plate to dip as you wished (and thus began my harissa obsession). We also had a whole roasted eggplant dressed with tahini, parsley, and pomegranate seeds. Also amazing.
In Jerusalem, I remember being slightly underwhelmed by the food, especially after all of the amazing meals we had eaten in Tel Aviv and Akko. However, we did the chef’s tasting menu at Restaurant Machane Yehuda in Jerusalem (a colleague’s recommendation). Our parameters for the chef were “We’re Americans so we don’t eat weird stuff like innards.” I wish I had written down everything they brought us, because I’ve forgotten the details now. I do remember that we probably ate at least 12 dishes, maybe more, and on a few of them we flirted a few times with our definition of adventurous eating (more fish than I’d choose for myself, and possibly some organs?). Severin had a delicious cocktail made with arak, an aniseed-flavored spirit very similar to ouzo. I *think* it was mixed with pomegranate, which made for a nice herby-fruity flavor. Definitely worth some experimenting at home.
Unfortunately I don’t have extensive photographic evidence of what we ate, because I was still using Severin’s camera in Israel, which, while lovely, does not have my super f1.8 fixed focal length lens which I’ve found to be much better for low-light situations. But a sample follows.
This bakery was literally a large hole-in-the-wall with a large wood-fired oven, and open 24 hours. On the bottom shelf you’ll see beautiful flatbreads topped with fresh herbacious za’atar (the herb, not the spice mix).
These bourekas we sampled in Jaffa are a Balkan import, but no less delicious. One was stuffed with a Balkan cheese, I can’t remember the other one now but I do remember enjoying it!
Pillow bread (not its technical name) makes a great mid-market snack…
We didn’t actually eat an baklava in Israel (we can get that in Cyprus ANYTIME), but I liked the scene:
We tried a bunch of samples of juice on our food tour….
but there were plenty of juice stands around had we wanted to try more:
As a point of reference, those are abnormally large cantaloupes. I was trying to get a picture of the pomegranates, but I wanted them in there to give you a size of scale. The pomegranates were ENORMOUS.
Heaps of delicious spices:
While walking in the old city of Jerusalem, we finally broke down and bought some fresh pomegranate juice from a street vendor. All of the vendors have these heavy duty metal pomegranate presses, and they will split a pomegranate in front of you and press your juice straight into the cup. I still remember how my fingers stuck to the cup, the juice was so sweet and tart at the same time.
A box of pressed oranges and pomegranates in the old city of Akko:
