Garnishing Baba Ganoush

Hi, I am Mohammed Karimy with Lebanese Taverna Catering Cooking Classes. We just prepared our Baba Ghanoush. We chopped eggplant, and we mashed some garlic, we added all the good stuff, Tahini and yoghurt here and lemon juice. Now, we are going to do the final touch, alright? Here we have to do the garnishing, to garnish our bowl before you take it to your guest. Presentation is very, very important. You eat with your eyes first. If you look something and it looks nice, you will eat it. You will have the courage, the guts to try it. If it looks ugly, you wont even try it.

So, for the Baba Ghanoush, now, this is what I am going to do. I am going to like a canal here for the olive oil, for the Extra Virgin olive oil, okay? You can see. This goes here, alright, and oil, extra virgin oil goes on the top. This is the best part; the extra virgin olive oil goes on the top. Here, I have some; here I have cucumber, English cucumber. I am going to garnish with this also. What I am going to do is I am going to put it inside this vegetable thingy. I dont know the name for this, but I call it a thingy. I went to the store to buy this. I asked the guy who was working there, I was like, do you have the vegetable thingy? He gave me this. So, I assume it doesnt have any name, we just call it thingy. So, what the thingy does, you see, looks like hair, you know. Anyways, this is for garnish. It looks nice when you put it like this. Some cucumber, we are going to put in the center. So what we are going to do with the cucumber, you are going to stamp it. I mean with the Sumac. You cut like this and like a cross, alright, see that, how you cut. This is sumac, non-poison sumac and you stamp. If you want to stamp, you can stamp one right here, and then we are going to stamp another one right in front of it, right here. To finish the garnish, we are going to use some parsley. We are going to quickly chop this parsley, alright? So, hold them as a bunch and we are going to chop very quick. Hold them as tight as a bunch, the knife moves back and forth, chop fine. You put a little bit here, a little bit there, up here. If you have pomegranate seeds, sprinkle a little bit here. It gives it nice flavor and also healthy for you. Pomegranate is really high in antioxidant. So, this is your finished product. Let me tilt it a little bit for you.