Home  |  Food & Drink  |  Other Ethnic Cuisine  | 

How to Make Egyptian Cuisine

How to Make a Spicy Tomato Sauce for Koushari

To properly view this site, javascript must be enabled and Flash version 9 or higher must be installed.
Get the latest Flash player
Amy Riolo
Author, Cooking Instructor, Food Writer, Culinary Consultant
http://www.amyriolo.com/  
 

Amy Riolo is an internationally recognized culinary expert specializing in Middle Eastern and Mediterranean culture and cuisine. As a cookbook author, lecturer, food historian, food writer, culinary consultant, and cooking instructor, Amy promotes her philosophy of cooking and living with both pleasure and health. Her first book, Arabian Delights; Recipes & Princely Entertaining Ideas from the Arabian Peninsula has received rave reviews (Capital Books). Her second book Nile Style; Egyptian Cuisine and Culture (Hippocrene Books) will be released in spring 2009. She is also completing The Mediterranean Diabetes Cookbook, (American Diabetes Association) which will be released in spring 2010.

Amy’s popular lectures range in topics and include everything from Middle Eastern business etiquette to the history of various cuisines. She has been an invited guest speaker for the Embassy of the Arab Republic of Egypt, Welcome to Washington International, Montgomery College, Les Dames D’Escoffier, The Baltimore-Luxor-Alexandria Sister City Committee and the Mycological Association of Washington, DC. Amy also makes frequent appearances on numerous television and radio programs both in the United States and Egypt including Fox TV, Montgomery and Fairfax County TV, Nile TV and WHYY.           

Amy currently writes the “Culture and Cuisine” feature for the Baltimore- Luxor-Alexandria Sister City Committee. She has also written articles for Cooking Light Magazine, Azizah Magazine, and the Kulanu newsletter. A graduate of Cornell University, Amy has experience in vocational, recreational, and children’s instruction, as well as corporate team building and cultural/culinary events. Her knowledge of the Italian, French, Spanish, and Arabic languages has enabled her to interpret many cultures and cuisines with intimacy and ease. She regularly teaches cooking classes at Sur la Table in Arlington, Virginia, and for private organizations.

A successful culinary consultant, Amy enjoys developing menus, recipes, training seminars, and themes for corporations, restaurants, and hotels. Amy is often asked to work as a consultant for museums where she creates menus and décor which represent the theme of new collections. In addition, she works with curators to incorporate sensory components like scent, touch, and taste into the schedule of events, allowing museum patrons to fully experience each exhibit.

Amy is a member of The International Association of Culinary Professionals, Culinary Historians of Washington, Les Dames d’Escoffier, Slow Food DC, Welcome to Washington International (where she co-chairs the Gourmet Committee), Cornell Club of Washington, the Women’s National Book Association, and the Baltimore – Luxor – Alexandria Sister City Committee (Where she is the chairperson of the Baltimore Friends of the Alexandria Library). Amy is based in the Washington DC, area and maintains a home in Egypt. She is currently organizing culinary tours to both the Mediterranean and Middle East.

How to Make a Spicy Tomato Sauce for Koushari

In this video Chef Amy Riolo will demonstrate how to make Egyptian Cuisine including Semolina Cake with Honey Syrup, Koushari and Hibiscus Punch.

This expert: 468,471 views

This series: 26,755 views

Download to Mobile Device
Tags:

Egyptian

,

Cuisine

,

Food

,

Egypt

,

Semolina

,

Cake

,

Basboosa

,

Koushari

,

Lentils

,

Hibiscus

,

Punch

,

Karkade

,

Tomato

,

Sauce

,

Honey

Comments:

0 (Read Comments) (Add Comment)

Print

How to Make a Spicy Tomato Sauce for Koushari

Ingredients

1 cup brown lentils, rinsed
3 teaspoons expeller pressed corn oil, divided
2 medium yellow onions, 1 diced, 1 thinly sliced
6 cloves garlic, minced
2 cups tomato puree
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon cumin
¼ teaspoon chili powder
1 tablespoon distilled white vinegar
1 cup Egyptian* or other short grain rice
½ cup ditalini or mini penne pasta
2 yellow onions, sliced thinly or cut into thin rings
1 cup canned chick peas, rinsed and drained well

Instructions

1. Place lentils in a medium saucepan and cover with water.  Bring to a boil on high heat and reduce heat to medium.  Simmer, uncovered, until tender (approximately 20 minutes).  Drain and reserve lentils until needed.


2. Heat 1 tablespoon corn oil in a medium saucepan over medium heat.  Add diced onion and sauté until soft and golden.  Add garlic and sauté until it begins to turn color.  Add tomato puree, stir, and season with salt and  pepper to taste.  Add cumin, and chili powder, stir well.


3. Cover and simmer for 20 minutes. Add vinegar and simmer, covered for another 5 minutes. Taste and adjust salt and pepper, if necessary.  Remove from heat and keep covered until serving.


4. Fill a medium saucepan ¾ full of water and bring to a boil over high heat.  Add Egyptian rice and reduce heat to medium.  Cook until tender and drain rice. Place rice back in saucepan and cover to keep warm until serving. 


5. Fill another medium saucepan ¾ full of water and bring to a boil over high heat.  Season with salt and reduce heat to a medium.  Add pasta and cook until done. Drain well, place back in saucepan, and cover to keep warm until serving.


6. Heat remaining 2 tablespoons corn oil in a large, wide, frying pan over medium heat.  Add onions and sauté until dark golden brown.  Take off heat and stir in chickpeas. Assemble the Koushari by spooning the rice evenly into the bottom of a large, shallow serving bowl.  Scatter pasta on top of rice.  Pour sauce evenly over the top of rice and pasta.  Arrange onions and chickpeas in a pattern around the center of the dish.  Serve hot.


Tip:  Cook the lentils and make the tomato sauce one day in advance and store in the refrigerator.  On the day of serving cook rice and pasta, fry onions, assemble, and serve

Print

Transcripts

Amy Riolo: Hi! I am Amy Riolo. Today, I am making vegetarian lentils with rice and pasta and a spicy tomato sauce. This is called Kushari in Egyptian and our lentils are boiling. Because they take the longest, so started them first. While they are simmering, I am going to start our spicy tomato sauce.

Now this is really a classic sauce in Egypt. As you know, Egypt didn't even had tomatoes until about the 17th century, but once they got them, they caught on and they became very popular. Now, this is a very traditional Egyptian street food, kind of, a dish.

So I am going to add a tablespoon of corn oil. Corn is also a new world crop, that is very, very popular nowadays in Egypt. They raise a lot of corn. If you didn't want to use corn, you could use extra virgin olive oil. I am using an organic expeller-pressed corn oil, which is a higher quality and has been extracted with a cold extraction. So that you can make sure that you are not getting any kind of chemical residue in with your corn oil.

So I am going to turn my flame on to low. As you can see, the oil is just coating the bottom of the pan. Thats the right temperature that we want so you can actually start to smell it. Now I am going to add one of our onions, the one which have diced. I am going to stir that right in.

Traditional Egyptian recipes have a lot of onions and garlic. The reason because of this is, in ancient times onions were used as a traditional medicine and they were believed to have wonderful medicinal qualities and actual spiritual qualities. Many of you will believe that onions warded off evil spirits. Of course, as we know today, onions and garlics ward off a lot of illness. So they are great healthy thing to have. As you travel through rural Egypt and in Southern Egypt, you can see a lot of people actually hang garlands full of onions outside of their home. This is why they do that, in order to protect themselves from the evil spirits but there is tons of them in the recipe. So it makes them very, very helpful.

I am just going to let that saute for a minute. This dish can be found everywhere now on the street. People go to what are called Kushari stands and they buy little bowls of it. What we are going to do is we are going to layer all of these ingredients together. So now our onions is just sauteing, it is releasing its aroma. I am going to turn our flame up to medium because I want this to get a little bit of color. Once our onion starts to color, I am going to add our garlic.

Now 6 cloves of garlic. As I mentioned, Egyptians use lots of onions and garlics. So dont be afraid by this. I call this a spicy tomato sauce. It is not too hot spicy but it is spicy because we have got spices that we are adding into it. You can see how nice the onion and the garlic are just mixing together. Now I am not going to give a lot of color to the garlic because the garlic tends to become bitter as it gets a lot of color. So I am just going to combine them and let them release their aroma. It just takes about 1 minute.

So it is time that I can add our tomatoes and here what we have our 2 cups of tomato puree. These are just strained pureed tomatoes which you can get in a can or in a box. I am going to add those right into this and this is the basis for our sauce. A lot of different Egyptian recipes use this, kind of, a tomato sauce. There is a dish called moo-sa-KAH, which is like Moussaka, made with eggplant and layered with minced beef. They also use this, kind of, a sauce in that. Now I am going to add a teaspoon of ground cumin and I will stir that in. I am also going to add cup of chili powder. If you don't want to use chili powder, you can leave that out. It is also traditional to put another, even more concentrated hot sauce on top of the Kushari itself. So they have two separate sauces sometimes and you can do that, if you like. If some people in your house like hot and some don't, just make a mild sauce and then serve more of a very hot sauce on top for the people who want spicy.

Finally, I am going to add a little bit of salt and pepper. This is just to taste and then make sure that everything comes together. My sauce is already starting to boil very quickly. So I am going to turn it down to a simmer. Here is my crushed dried pepper. I am going to cover the sauce and we will let this simmer for about 20-30 minutes or until it gets reduced by about half.

Other Videos