I think you might be surprised. I use Bob’s Red Mill sesame seeds, fresh garlic and lemon juice, California Olive Ranch EVOO.
After a little experimentation you can get the perfect toast on your seeds to your liking. I do the toasted seeds in the vitamix with a splash of the EVOO 'till it is like nut butter. It is light, fresh, as the EVOO really brightens things up over pure sesame. If you have a good blender/FP I really recommend you give it a try.
Okay. I don’t have a blender of any kind, but I do have a spice grinder. (It’s new, and I’m still getting used to it, which is why I set out to chop walnuts for Charoseth today and ended up with walnut powder. Oh, well.)
How do you process your falafel?
Food processor.
If your lower blade is “very” close to the bottom of your FP you can make the tahini in it.
Yeah, it’s not. Hence the acquisition of the spice grinder. After the 10,000th time I scraped down the bowl, I bit the bullet.
Raw red cabbage is also added at some of the restaurants I’ve visited in Toronto and London, ON. I’ll take a photo next time I see it. Now I’m craving falafel.
We supposedly have decent falafel in town now that a national (?) chain opened up recently. I’m not big on chains, and the local Lebanese place is only so-so, so I may just have to save my cravings for the summer.
Although even then I honestly don’t eat that much falafel 
Not on any of my recent visits. Cuban is still Cuban.
Wow! Luv their site… if their food is as good as its execution I’d be on board. Unfortunately, it is no where near me.
Hmm. Maybe I should break my own rules? Reports in our local food group have been positive. Like, freshly toasted pita, which is a nice touch for a chain.
There were two Moaz shops near us in Paris. I had a system of moving the falafel out of the pita in order to stuff as much of the “salads” in as possible, then gradually add the balls back. They used to kind of look as me. As in, “Thank God there’s only one like her.”
The felafel at Mezeh is awful, not served fresh enough to even consider as remotely acceptable. However, I do adore the ‘steak.’ It is inherently spicy. The best thing about Mezeh is that you can ask for a pocket bread as where 99% of customers get a rice or salad bowl. Some of the toppings (roasted eggplant, crunchy dried chickpea, baba ganouj) are excellent. The variety is very good, and if you want it spicier the spicy sauce is serious. Overall an impressive array of toppings. With the roasted eggplant and baba ganouj I ask them to double up on the topping. Also, I skip the fillers (rice, leafy greens) and go right for the fresh and pickled vegetables.
The ways in which all the various conversations about “authentic” foods are going, particularly when certain dishes are described as coming from certain nations or regions, makes me think:
“Authenticity” (as discourse, pretending it’s just an innocent word doing nothing is disingenuous at best) is a coloniser’s tool. It divides up what people (who move, change, communicate with one another, and operate often with constraints that force innovation) do into locations and consistent/eternal practices. It’s not how people work, it’s not how food works. It’s just a form of mapping and delineation, and often done by those seizing a power of description.
I was thinking this when I saw the discussions of Palestinian v Israel falafel which might apply to the restaurants in one’s city, but don’t work as they’re moved. The tense debates over these foods, which is authentic, better or even what each one is, somehow move away from the fact that these are both relatively recent terms (please, no bible talk guys, I don’t have the energy for a full history of the region). The debts online often go to having anger at Israel claiming this at all-- and while I won’t get into questions of legitimacy here because they absolutely don’t belong-- what bothers me is that the argument seems to be because Israelis are then cast as all Ashkenazi, with Mizrahim and Sephardim and their origins utterly severed and erased. That is, the delineations are too political in multiple ways to be useful as people forget the Syrian Jews, Iraqi Jews, etc.
I’m not saying this for any of us to get into any discussion of the region in terms of state politics but that the cultural politics of food and the language of states we use to define regions of authenticity are themselves so problematic that, well, why bother? It can be a point of observation that the food in X restaurant takes just like the one you had back in X country but going any further and it becomes sticky value judgements that are very temporally located.
Sorry for writing so much. The conversation about falafel just got me thinking of all the falafel I’ve had around the world and the arguments I’ve heard.
As an aside: As long as I can add pickles (by which I mean pickled veg, not simply gherkins) , I’m happy. And fortunately (kinda) I have very low blood pressure so I can go wild.
Thailand has never been colonized, so when a Chowhound from Thailand proclaimed he found an authentic Thai restaurant - with a secret Thai menu- then I did not question him on why he adopted the colonizer’s language, according to your way of thinking.
I went with him, and it was a great meal. It wasn’t the first time I’ve ordered off a Thai-language menu, but in this case I’m glad I had help. Words, no matter how you want to associate them, can be an effective tool for communication, or so I’ve heard.
When I use the term authentic, i use it to refer to whether what Im tasting here is a good representstion of what I had there.
A local German table here in Florida wins my definition of authentic because what I order in that restaurant tastes like what I had when I was in Bavaria.
No politics. No religion. No arguing over who owns which people.
Simply food. How it tastes. The memories it triggers. Nothing more.
This seems very similar to Subgum Wonton soup. I grew up in the suburbs of NYC and remember seeing it on the menu often. I don’t remember mushrooms in it, but def pork, chicken, shrimp, spinach, carrot along with the wontons. It was delicious and I haven’t had it in years.
It seems to be one in the same, but the key will be to get a rec from Steve R for NY. He da man.
We are getting there. https://thewoksoflife.com/wor-wonton-soup/
Now to track down the “where in NYC” part. The place I went (Hong Ying, 11 Mott St) is long gone.
