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.



For other great Jewish cooking ideas, check out Jvillage Network's Jewish Cooking Pinterest page.

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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Kishka - Recipes That Take the 'Ew' Out of Traditional JEwish Dishes

Let's face it. Some traditional Jewish dishes are somewhat to be desired and are rarely prepared by younger generations. These fresh twists on the classics will ensure these traditions continue on for years to come.

By: Sarah Bauder for The Nosh Pit 

Kishka from Joy of Kosher

Ingredients:
3/4 cup oil Shmaltz (can be used as a substitution, making the kishka meat)
1 large onion
2 carrots
1 celery stalk
2 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon paprika
1 pinch pepper
1 1/2 cups flour (you can substatute matza meal)

Directions:
Blend/ Mix in food processor until pureed. Form into loaves and wrap in foil. Bake at 350 for one hour. Chill, Slice, Rewarm and Serve. Enjoy!

Lox: An American Love Story

From Moment Magazine

When I was growing up on the Upper West Side in the 1930s, Broadway was lined with “appetizing” stores, that—unlike delicatessens, which sold smoked, cured and pickled meats—specialized in fish and dairy. These were shops where we bought pickles, fresh sauerkraut, dried fruits and candies as well as pickled, smoked and salted fish, and especially what we called lox. At the time, this now-iconic Jewish food was skyrocketing in popularity, and appetizing stores opened to meet the demand.

Most Americans, even Jews, don’t know that lox was invented in America, not Eastern Europe, explains Gil Marks, author of the Encyclopedia of Jewish Food. “Salmon was not an Eastern European fish,” although it was familiar to Scandinavians and Germans, including German Jews, he says. While “bagels were Polish and cream cheese was Native American,” Jews began to eat salmon en masse in early 20th-century America, where the fish was plentiful.

European Jews had long smoked and salted their fish, and they did the same with salmon when the transcontinental railroad opened in 1869. Salmon from the Pacific Northwest was smoked and shipped east in barrels layered with salt, creating a brine that preserved it for months without refrigeration as it made its way cross-country. The result was what is known today as belly lox—the traditional authentic salty salmon cured in brine. It was affordable, easy to keep and pareve, so it could be eaten with dairy.

The word lox itself is evidence of the food’s non-Eastern European roots. “The key to understanding the emergence of the term among Eastern European Jews in America is that lox is a German word,” Marks says. Lox is the Americanized spelling of the word for salmon in Yiddish (laks) and in German (lachs), and also a derivative of the Swedish gravlax, meaning cured salmon. Nova Scotia salmon, known as Nova, gained popularity after the introduction of refrigerated cases; instead of brining, which was no longer necessary, the fish could be lightly salted and then smoked. Today, we still use the term Nova to refer to the more expensive smoked salmon, although eventually, the word lox has come to encompass salmon from both coasts and even northern Europe.

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The Man Who Introduced Matzo Balls to Moo Goo Gai Pan

 If you ate Chinese food last night you took place in a custom as entrenched as turkey and football, as latkes and sour cream, as…pastrami and egg rolls?

"My personal joke is that I learned to speak Yiddish in the Chinese restaurant from my customers." So says Ed Schoenfeld, a Brooklyn-born Jew and owner of Red Farm, a popular Chinese restaurant in New York City’s West Village.

Having cut his teeth running the bygone influential Uncle Tai's Hunan Yuan on the Upper East Side in the 1970s, Schoenfeld ascended to a culinary king, being named "the curator of Chinese food in America" by Gourmet.

"If you're a New York Jewish guy," Schoenfeld said, "you grew up eating Chinese food. That’s what you do."

Think a culinary marriage between Chinese and Jewish food is dubious? The proof is in the...pastrami egg rolls, which is just one of Schoenfeld's oddly delectable, beloved combos.

- Zachary Solomon for Jewniverse

The Jewish Food Trends of 2013

By Shannon Sarna for The Nosher

This time of year, I love thinking back on the highlights of what I ate, what I made and what I want to create in the coming year. I focused a lot this year on my cakes, which I will be sharing on the blog in 2014 (stay tuned!), and I expanded my vegetarian repertoire significantly. And meanwhile, the Jewish food scene was busy with its own 2013 agenda, some of which I found exciting, and some that I would be happy to see not make a re-appearance in 2014.

Gluten Free Everyone and Everything
If one more person tells me they are going gluten-free or their doctor has told them they have a gluten allergy, I am going shove a loaf of challah right into their mouth. Ok, I know that might sound harsh. But it seems like everyone around me has gone gluten-free this year, no!?

If you ask me, Jews have always been the kings and queens of gluten-free cooking and baking, since it’s pretty close to a Passover diet! For example, my Passover Sweet Potato Pie with Macaroon Crust is also…gluten-free. A happy side effect.

But aside from my snarky attitude about the gluten-free fad, there are great resources out there including Rella Kaplowitz’s kosher gluten-free blog and even an entire Jewish cookbook dedicated to classic Jewish baked goods called Nosh on This. And don’t forget to check out our very own recipe for the Ultimate Gluten-Free Challah.

Pop-Ups Popping Up

Pop-up restaurants have been, literally, popping up all over the country for the past couple of years. In fact the first time I experienced a pop-up was in New Orleans about 3 years ago. The general concept of a pop-up is for a chef or group of chefs who want to try something different, or who don’t have their own space, will use a traditional restaurant space or other space and open a restaurant for a short amount of time. And in 2013 pop-ups have taken on a distinctively Jewish flavor. Devra Ferst wrote in The Forward that “New York Pop-Ups Deliver the Country’s Most Exciting Jewish Fare.”

Earlier this year The Kubbeh Project from Naami Shefi made the biggest headlines, opening for three weeks in the East Village of New York City.

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