Food, Home & Lifestyle
Main Courses: Mafalda Pasta With Quick Shatta
Lesson time 21:54 min
Yotam shares an old Middle Eastern favorite as he combines yogurt, butternut squash, and pasta in this dish. You’ll also learn how to prepare shatta, a spicy Palestinian chili paste, perfect for topping a variety of dishes.
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Topics include: Main Courses • Quick Shatta: Palestinian Chili Paste • Making Mafalda Pasta
Teaches Modern Middle Eastern Cooking
James Beard Award–winning chef Yotam Ottolenghi teaches you his recipes for delicious Middle Eastern platters layered with color and flavor.
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[00:00:00.00] [MUSIC PLAYING] [00:00:09.94] YOTAM OTTOLENGHI: I'm going to make mafalda pasta, pasta with yogurt, butternut squash, and a wonderful chili sauce called shatta. When I think of this pasta with yogurt, it just feels so ancient to me. These parts of the world-- Turkey, Balkans, Greece where they cook pasta in yogurt or serve it with yogurt have been doing these things for so long, and this is a great example. [00:00:41.61] [MUSIC PLAYING] [00:00:46.49] Shatta is a chili dressing or chili sauce that is common throughout the Middle East, especially in Palestinian cooking, Lebanese, Jordanian, Syrian. And essentially what it is is chilies with salt that are allowed to ferment a bit and turn a bit sour and beautiful. And what is really important is that you get that acidity, but I'm going to cheat a little bit and add acidity through the addition of cider vinegar. [00:01:12.84] So I won't let my chilies ferment naturally, which is what often happens. Sometimes people put them in the sun and leave them there for two or three days and then make the mixture with the salt. I'm just going to add a little bit of vinegar, so it's a quick shatta. It still has acidity. It still has a lot of flavors, but it's just a bit quicker to make. [00:01:35.46] And with a food processor, it's also very, very quick because traditionally this might have been done with a pestle and mortar or by hand, but here I'm going to take all my chilies and just throw them in a food processor. And I always have a jar of this at home in the kitchen. I bring it out like four times a day, and it's a wonderful thing to have because it goes into soups. It goes into stews. It goes on your scrambled eggs. It can go over anything that needs a little bit of heat. [00:02:09.17] Because of the tomatoes-- I'm just adding tomatoes now-- the shatta is not like an intense as chili sauce. It's not like harissa. It's not unrelentlessly chili. It's a bit milder. It's a little bit more palatable, so you can really add it in all sorts of situations. [00:02:28.77] And what I want to emphasize is that you can always make these chili sauces your own. If you like them a little bit milder, get milder chilies. You can scrape out the seeds, which means you lose some of that heat as well. So you don't need to follow it to the T. Just cook it to the way that you like. [00:02:49.94] So tomatoes roughly chopped, chilies roughly chopped. You don't need to worry too much about that. And then a bit of salt. And it's very important for the shatta to have texture. So I'm keeping it textural. I want to have a nice bumpy, gritty texture to my shatta. So I'm adding salt and then just shutting it and giving it a couple of pulses. [00:03:25.91] That's about right. Yeah. You can look at-- oh, it looks quite coarse inside. You can really see that this is-- it's going to go a little bit more processed than that, a little bit more pulverized, but that's how we start. [00:03:40.32] Now I add a little bit of c...
About the Instructor
One of the most influential chefs working today, Yotam Ottolenghi creates dishes that layer color and flavor for maximum impact. Now the James Beard Award winner teaches you simple steps for making and mixing Middle Eastern–inspired recipes. Learn how to make generous platters—mezze and brunch spreads to homemade condiments, stunning stand-alones, and delicious vegetables—so you can entertain with ease.
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Yotam Ottolenghi
James Beard Award–winning chef Yotam Ottolenghi teaches you his recipes for delicious Middle Eastern platters layered with color and flavor.
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