Falafel and pita bread

It's rarely the case that I cook something and do not find on it a myriad of defects. I guess that's normal: perfection comes with practise and at home one never cooks the same dish three or four times in a row to be able to improve on it. Today was a bit of an exception. It was by no means perfect, but it exceeded my expectations. To put it bluntly, I never ate neither falafel nor pita bread that were as tasty as the ones I made today.

As I don't have any cookbooks that cover middle-eastern food, I resorted to probably what's at the same time the most powerful and the most dangerous source: the web. I saw plenty of recipes, some clearly lacking in coherence, and then selected one for each, and a few more for backup, so that I ended up not following any in particular. Here's what I did:

Falafel

• 1 cup chickpeas, soaked for 18 hours, water changed 2 times
• 1 medium onion, finely chopped
• 2 cloves of garlic, minced
  
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1 tsp chili pepper flakes
  
• 1 tsp fine salt
• 1 large handful of parsley and coriander, chopped
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 3 tbsp flour (more or less)

Drain the chickpeas, discard any that look bad. Put them, along with all the other ingredients, except baking powder and flour, inside a bowl, if using a blender, or inside a food processor. In case it's not clear, the chickpeas are not cooked at this point, they are raw. Blend until it forms a fine-grain paste - were're not looking for a puree. Check for salt, although at this point it's a bit hard to tell whether there's enough. Add the baking powder, and one tablespoon of flour at the time until it all comes together in a cement-like paste. Refrigerate for an hour or so. I shaped the falafel as quenelles using two spoons and deep-fried them until golden.

Pita bread

• 500 g flour + a few tbsp more
  
• 1 sachet of easy bake yeast (7g)
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1 tbsp olive oil + a bit more to coat
• 300 ml warm water

Put the flour in a bowl along with all the other dry ingredients. Mix well. Make a well in the middle, and add the water and olive oil. Mix with a spoon until it all comes together. Tip the dough onto a lightly-floured surface and knead it until it gets elastic. This amount of water was perfect this time, I imagine it may need adjustments depending on many factors. Coat another bowl with olive oil and put the dough inside. Move the dough around to make sure it's all coated in oil. Cover it with a tea towel and let it rest for 2 hours or so, until it doubles in size.

After that period, tip the dough onto a lightly floured surface and knead it for a minute or so. Form 12 equal-sized balls and let them rest. In the meawhile, heat the oven to 200C with a cookie sheet inside close to the heat source.

Roll each ball into a disk using a rolling pin. Thin disks, how thin it's hard to say, less than 1/2 cm perhaps. Almost all the pita puffed, but a few did not. I wonder if it was the thickness of the disks...

When the oven is hot, drop the disks on the cookie sheet, a few at the time. After a few minutes, they will start puffing. Turn them over and wait until they brown a bit. Mine were a bit pale, but I guess that if you let them cook too long they will just dry up. The ones that came out nice turned out to be perfect pockets that you could slice open and fill with the falafel. Next time I may put them under the broiler to see what happens.

Dressing
This was a bit improvised, simple, but turned out really good: whisk two yoghurts until smooth and add 1/2 cup of chopped cucumber (remove the skin, say 1/2 cm cubes). Season with salt and one tsp of cumin. Chill.

Take a look at the result. Pretty, eh? We couldn't stop eating it...


Edit: you successfully freeze the falafel after they are shaped. What I did was to stick them in the freezer on a tray until they are frozen, and then put them in a ziplock bag. Fry them frozen, no need to thaw in advance.