Pastrami Sandwich Challah

By Shannon Sarna for The Nosher

When I was in high school, I had the most wonderful English teacher (that’s you, Mr. Scanlon!) who quoted Emerson, roughly, saying that we all contradict ourselves.

I often feel like I am the epitome of contradiction where eating and cooking is concerned. I strive to keep a mostly vegetarian diet, but sometimes I can’t help it. I relish making something fatty and delicious using red meat. And my Pastrami Sandwich Challah fits this bill precisely.

Stuffing my challah with meat all began with my famous challah dogs (stay tuned for that recipe!). But recently I had a hankering to stuff my challah with something else. Ground beef? Seemed messy. Chicken? So dry. But then I thought of the North American classic deli roll—a dish I did not grow up with, and which I find both disgusting and delicious. And the idea for this crazy new challah began to take shape.

If you have a local butcher as an option, please please please go get freshly sliced pastrami. Thin is best—a thick-cut pastrami will not result in the same consistency.

Make sure not to spread the Russian dressing on too thick, or you could end up with a leaky challah. I know that sounds delicious, but it might not make for such a pretty-looking challah.

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Bukharian Cuisine: A Taste of the Silk Road

By Josh Tapper for Moment Magazine

Bukharian Friday night dinner is an elaborate affair: Plates of carp doused with garlic sauce and cilantro, garlicky fried fish and mushroom salad flecked with dill, array the Shabbat table, enveloped in the fragrant aroma of non-toqi, a broad, flat, matzoh-like cracker. Nearly always prepared by women, the dishes are exercises in over-indulgence, a relic of days when large, kosher meals were organized to feed families in insular courtyards, hidden from non-Jewish neighbors.

That was the meal one recent Friday at Arsen Abramov’s Toronto home, where several of the more than 200 known Bukharian recipes graced the Shabbat table. Once the plates of fish were cleared, Abramov’s wife, Yelena, brought out platters of lamb-filled samsi, baked puffs similar to the Indian samosa, and a triangular pastry called bichak, filled with stringy orange squash. Those preceded the centerpiece of the Bukharian Friday night table: bakhsh, a brownish-green plov—or rice pilaf—with cilantro leaves and chunks of lamb that was served sliced from a log and packed loosely into the ribs of a roast chicken, where the rice continued to warm.

Plov, in many respects, is the lifeblood of Bukharian culinary identity; children learn at a young age how to scoop the oily rice from the platter into their palms and thumb the morsels into their mouths. Saturdays call for two other varieties: one, called osh-savo, with cumin, cilantro, tomatoes and lamb, and another, khalti-savo sweetened by green raisins. Both are a sort of Bukharian cholent, left to simmer overnight Friday and, like bakhsh, they’re traditionally prepared in a cotton bag submerged in a pot of boiling water, a method likely borrowed from Persian and Iraqi cooking. Bukharians have the “only Jewish cuisine that has so many canonized dishes cooked in a cotton bag,” quips Yochai Primak, who researches Bukharian culinary history at Hebrew University’s Ben-Zvi Institute.

Bukharians are believed to be the descendants of Babylonian Jews who stayed in the empire after it was conquered by the Persian king Cyrus in 539 BCE instead of returning to Jerusalem. For more than two millennia, these Jews lived in an isolated region between Kazakhstan’s northern steppes and the Hindu Kush mountain range, primarily in the former Emirate of Bukhara, in modern-day Uzbekistan.

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Challah with a Chinese Twist

By Shannon Sarna for The Nosher

Love challah? Love Chinese food? You can’t believe the luck you’re in: Challah with a Chinese Twist!








Find her gloriously easy and delicious recipe here. “Inspired by the scallion pancake,” she writes.



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Plov (Pilaf)

A signature Uzbeki rice and meat dish.

By Adeena Sussman for MyJewishLearning

I've been curious about plov (based on the original Persian word pulaw), the signature Uzbeki rice and meat dish, ever since I tasted it a few years back at Ta'am Tov, a kosher Bukharian restaurant in New York's Diamond District. Many countries--Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, India, and Syria, to name a few--have a rice-and-meat dish with a phonetically similar name. Each country's plov is slightly different, with its own array of seasonings and additional ingredients.

On a recent trip to Tel Aviv, I happened upon a delicious plov recipe in an amusing and typically Israeli fashion. I had ducked into a little salon on Sheinkin Street for a pedicure and got to talking to Bella, my aesthetician. It turned out she was an Uzbeki immigrant who had run an Uzbeki restaurant in Tel Aviv. I took out a pen and paper and scribbled furiously as she rattled off ingredients and instructions for this tempting layered dish.

This recipe, although somewhat time-consuming, is fairly straightforward to execute. Onions, garlic, potatoes, carrots and meat are cooked in a deep skillet to which chick peas, rice, and cooking liquid are added. Once the chick peas and rice are cooked, the dish is inverted. The upper layer of rice becomes the bottom layer on a serving platter, which is topped with the fragrant, hearty stew.

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