Food, Home & Lifestyle
Mezze Spread: Pea Spread With Smoky Marinated Feta
Lesson time 19:22 min
Learn how to prepare a smoky feta condiment, a pea-based mezze, and how to display them together beautifully.
Students give MasterClass an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars
Topics include: Smoky Martinated Feta • Pea Spread
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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[00:00:04.56] - I always think of food as something that starts really, from a visual impression. I know food smells and food tastes, but for me, the first interaction is through the eyes. Whether you go to the shop or to the market and choose your ingredients, whether you cook something and look at it, and want to judge whether it's right or wrong, first for me, it's a visual experience. [00:00:27.40] [MUSIC PLAYING] [00:00:35.21] Another dish from my meze spread is a pea paste or pea spread, which is really a celebration of fresh peas. You all know how wonderful fresh peas are. When I say fresh, frozen is absolutely fine, but it's all about that kind of green grassy flavor of peas which works really, really, really well on a meze spread. Because normally, most meze are kind of dark and red. There's hardly ever something really, really bright green on it. So this is what I'm doing with my pea spread. And you'll see that where the herbs and with a couple of other tricks, it really does open up the appetite and has that wonderful freshness. [00:01:22.50] I'm going to make marinated feta. And that's something you might be going back to over and over again if you fall in love with it like I do. So it's injecting feta with tons of flavors. It's like feta on steroids. I'm going to have smokiness there and garlic and lemon and all those wonderful things in with the feta. And when I have a moment of crisis and I'm really hungry and I'm about to go to bed and I haven't had something to eat for about three minutes, I take a jar of this feta and a glass of wine and I'm just a happy person. [00:01:55.06] So I'm going to start by charring some garlic. So I've got a very hot pan here and some peeled garlic cloves, and I'm just going to throw those in. [00:02:02.25] [PAN CLINKING] [00:02:04.09] Love that sound. I can already hear them starting to char. I'm trying to release all the oils and aromas from my aromatics. And by heating them up and charring them, that's what I'm getting. You get a bit of caramelization. So the garlic is getting a bit of color. It will take them a second. Meanwhile, I'm going to peel a lemon. So just get a bit of lemon skin, about six strips of lemon skin. Lemon strips. Try to avoid the white pith as much as possible. So a little bit of pith is fine, but not too much of it. [00:02:46.54] [PAN CLINKING] [00:02:48.85] It's really important to char your aromatics. So everything that has infusion in it-- and this is based on infusion, because the oil will soak up flavor, and that's what we call infusion-- really benefits from charring the flavoring elements. In this case, garlic, lemon, bay leaf, and chili flakes. And the charring just brings out the essential oils. It concentrates the flavor. And it's always something that I do before I want to give things flavors. Just think of any sauce or anything you cook-- we want to intensify flavors. The cooking down, the charring, the browning-- all that gives it wonderful flavor. [00:0...
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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