Friday 8 January: Bosnia 🇧🇦 : Bosanski Lonac / Bosnian Stew
The first dish from a country that I have not yet visited though will get to as soon as this crisis is over. I Google recipes and specialities of Bosnia and this one comes up regularly. The recipe that I use is from allyskitchen.com
It is a Friday evening and I start cooking late after getting back from the supermarket. So late in fact that I only serve up at around 11…
The recipe is simple though. Start by frying some beef. Add some spicy sausage. (The recipe for American audiences says pepperoni, but I am forced to go for chorizo.) Add some garlic and shallots. Deglaze with a bit of vodka and then vegetable stock. Season with salt, chilli flakes, whole peppercorns, and bay leaves. Then add layers of tomato, carrots and potatoes. Leave in an oven for 45 minutes. Add some chopped celery. Cook for a further 15 minutes. Throw in some basil briefly. Leave for 15 minutes. Eat.
It is utterly simple. It is utterly delicious.
It is a balance between the tender chewiness of the stewed beef, the soft fruitiness of the carrot, the solidity of the potato, the crunch of the celery, and the kick from the peppers, chilli and chorizo, with a lingering hint of the basil, all held together with the tomatoes.
It is a country stew with knives drawn and guns at the ready.
And it is even better for lunch the next day, and dinner a few nights later. The peppercorns rise up like jewels from the ocean, sublime from their marinade.
I can’t wait to ride in Bosnia.
Saturday 9 January: Montenegro 🇲🇪 : Brav u Mlijeku / Lamb in Milk
Another Balkan stew but a different type of preparation, again the result of extensive Googling. The recipe I use is from internationalcuisine.com. Some of my friends blench when I tell them that I will be cooking a milk stew yet it is very common in the Balkans and Italy.
A garlic and parsley sauce blitzed with fennel seeds and chopped rosemary. Chopped bits of lamb shoulder fried in the green sauce until loosely brown. And then the milk, first to deglaze and then to stew. Peeled and chopped potatoes and carrots and a few rosemary sprigs are thrown in and then the whole thing is left to stew for 75 minutes.
Finally, the meat, carrots and potatoes are removed and the milk sauce is reduced then pureed. To balance the heaviness of the stew, I make a Shopska salad. Admittedly this is not so much Montenegrin as Balkan or more specifically Bulgarian, but as it is widely made across the whole region, I see it as fair.
The end result? Utterly fabulous. The lamb is soft and chewy, retaining all its gorgeous flavour. The sauce is lightly cheesy, halfway between a bechamel sauce and a cheese sauce. As with the Bosnian stew, the carrots are soft and fruity and the potatoes give the sauce some heft. There is the odd delightful taste of the fennel.
And all of this is balanced by the freshness of the salad: cucumbers, tomatoes, black olives, peppers and goats cheese, all blended with oil and red wine vinegar: the very taste of so many Balkan meals from my journeys.
I go to bed with a heavy but happy stomach and a hope that it will not be too long before I ride through Montenegro.
Sunday 10 January: Albania 🇦🇱 : Butrint Mussels
The first time that I went to Albania was in 1994 as part of a ‘study visit’ with fellow students from the College of Europe. The country was crazy but wonderful: few cars but thousands of satellite dishes all pointed towards Italy. After our first dinner in the country, my Albanian friend A pulled me and a few other friends away to a converted underground bunker where we were joined by his family and fed what I recall as sheep’s intestines in a milk sauce. I was delighted to be part of the special group, but after a hefty main dinner, had to squeeze the food down to please my hosts. I still remember the stomach ache…
On that trip, we also had a roasted suckling pig, lamb, and other meats grilled over a fire or hot coals. And returning to Albania two years ago, it is fair to say that stewed lamb or barbecued meat would have been the most representative way to eat Albanian. But having just made two stews and being in the thick of winter, I settle for a more modest recipe from Rick Stein’s roadtrip from Venice to Istanbul based on some mussels he had on the coastal town of Butrint. I figure that it will be my last fish for some time, the recipe sounded intriguing, and it gave me a chance to try again with mussels.
The recipe is super easy: sweat some garlic, diced green pepper and sliced onion in some olive oil for a few minutes. Add some ouzo (or in my case pastis) and 600g of cleaned mussels until the mussels are well steamed, and then briefly heat some passata and feta with a bit of chilli flakes and seasoning before scattering some chopped dill at the end.
This time, I leave the cleaned mussels in cold water for 20 minutes to get rid of the salt, an approach that works nicely.
The effect? Perfectly edible and nice to eat, but I had the feeling of two separate dishes, not quite complimenting each other, with the tomato and feta sauce rather overpowering the delicate taste of the mussels.
And was it really Albanian? Googling it too late, I found no other reference to it so suspect that it was a local chef trying something out. Greek feta and ouzo, Italian passata.
And yet in some way very Albanian. Few countries have such an energetic diaspora. The country was almost destroyed under the Hoxha dictatorship with local traditions dying out and thousands heading abroad (and many others leaving to escape the dire economic situation of the post-communist years). Many of those émigrés have returned, bringing with them the experience and tastes of their time away, including a generation of Albanian chefs ready to experiment using foreign-inspired ingredients melded to local ingredients. So very, very New Albanian.
Monday 11 January: Greece 🇬🇷 : κουνέλι στιφάδο / Kouneli Stifado / Rabbit Stew
I use the time saved making the mussels to get a stew for the next evening mostly done, based on a recipe from Sue Smillie in a recent series in The Guardian in which writers evoke dishes associated with their travels.
Again, super simple: sear a whole skinned and jointed rabbit – in my case with the smoke nearly burning the kitchen down – and then remove. Throw in some whole peeled small onions and garlic cloves. Pour in some red wine and vinegar to deglaze. Add water and returm the rabbit pieces. Stick in the oven for one and a half hours until the skin falls off easily.
Having done that, I remove it all and reheat the next day, serving with a Greek salad very similar to the Shopska salad served with the Montenegrin lamb.
The effect? The rabbit is pleasantly chewy. The rich brown onion sauce provides a gentle back up for the bunny, subtle and very unlike the rather overpowering French onion soup. Again, the crisp freshness of the salad provides a nice counterpoint.
It is simple. And yet, in the emptiness of my lockdown home and no one to be disgusted, I find myself plucking the rabbit bones and unceremoniously sucking every bit of meat from them.
It also evokes a very pleasant memory of a delicious braised rabbit in a converted Turkish baths in the back streets of Chania, Crete, as well as pleasant summer memories of open air barbecues and the smell of the charcoal and roasting meat. Quietly wonderful.
Wednesday 13 January: Turkey 🇹🇷 : Circassian Chicken
My final dish for the week, and the end of Europe and the start of Asia.
When I think of eating in Turkey, I think of a night on the suburbs of Istanbul near the end of my ride from Sofia to Istanbul in 2018, sitting outside on the banks of the Bosphorus with a plate of fried whitefish, a decent salad, and a glass of raki mixed with water.
But I also think of a night in the nondescript town of Saray in Thrace, chosen only because it had a hotel and was a convenient stop on the way to Istanbul, in which with very limited Turkish, I ended up in a cheap and cheerful restaurant where I pointed at the cooked chicken stew that I wanted and had it doled out to me. Simple but nice.
So I opt for my third Rick Stein recipe, and again very simple: poach two skinned chicken breasts in chicken stock until tender enough to peel into thin slices with your hands, whiz some walnuts with breadcrumbs, crushed garlic and the leftover chicken stock to the point of a creamy walnut paste, mix with the chicken, throw in some chopped coriander, and drizzle the whole lot with some red pepper sauce made from grilled and peeled red peppers, tomato puree, and cayenne pepper all whizzed together with a bit of olive oil.
The result? It is like a warm chicken salad on steroids. The soft moist goodness of the chicken pieces, the delightfully creamy walnut paste and the gentle kick given by the red pepper sauce. Delicious and indulgent.
On to the Middle East…
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