A sliceable, make-ahead falafel might be the lunch that street cart dreams are made of.
There are few things that I love more than crispy, crunchy, herby falafel; a delicacy I enjoy whenever it’s presented to me. I love it with tahini, and yogurt, fresh cucumbers, and a ridiculous amount of herbs. I love it warm, and cold, nestled up in chipati or pita, or tossed on top of rice with greens and accoutrements. But I do NOT love making it.
It’s not that falafel is challenging as a recipe in fact making the falafel dough itself is remarkably easy. It’s the frying. I hate frying in my own home because the splattering, the leftover oil, the smell that remains in the air…the mess. And, because even with all of the equipment in the world and all the culinary experience required to make it happen properly, keeping the temperature hot enough to ensure that the falafel babies cook in oil hot enough to make them crispy – not fatty or soggy – is a proposition.
It’s not surprising to learn that my hunger has been at an all time high since Leo arrived and our breast feeding adventure began. It’s probably also not surprising to learn that just as my calorie demands have gone up, the amount of time I have to prepare food for myself has gone down. The make-ahead jam is absolutely what I’m after….which also means that even if I’m dreaming of frying falafel, the space to make it, and the proposition of eating cold fried falafel is absolutely lackluster.
Enter the Giant Skillet Falafel. No, it’s not exactly the same as the tiny, crispy little delicious balls I would get at the gyro stand, but it’s a delicious, crispy, herby, fresh and satisfying alternative that is totally slappin’ right now. You could take almost any falafel recipe and bake it in this way, I imagine, but the recipe below was crafted to optimize digestion and keep the heat of summer pitta at bay. The secret? SPICES. (Read on for more!)
When we go looking to “optimize” our diets in Western culture, we look at superfoods and macronutrients — big picture stuff – and can’t figure out why we can’t get our diets dialed. The devil is in the details, my friends. If we look closely we would see that the small ingredients that we add to our meals make just as much of a difference, if not more and specifically the spices and herbs that we use (or choose not to use.)
In Ayurvedic philosophy, we use herbs and spices as medicine; we add them to meals to reduce inflammation, increase circulation, soothe the mind, help the body to recover, improve digestion and assimilation, help detoxification and more. There is literally nothing that the right combination of herbs and spices can’t achieve (almost regardless of the other ingredients in the dish you’re cooking or eating.)
In Ayurveda, we also use herbs and spices to add flavors to dishes to round them out. For example, adding pungent turmeric and black pepper to a beautiful egg filled with healthy fat makes that egg all the easier to digest – it warms up the cooling effect of the egg. Pretty cool, right?
When I talk about spices as medicine, I’m not talking about the drawer of stale, dry, grey spices that you open every once in a while hunting for something called for in a recipe. If we want to use spices as a medicine, we have to treat them as ingredients that are just as worthy as everything else we cook with. Sourcing, storing and combining is important, and using fresh is critical too!
When it comes to sourcing spices, I order almost exclusively from Diaspora Co, Daphnis + Chloe, or Banyan Botanicals for spices. Whenever I can, I buy whole spices and grind them myself. Sometimes, I order spice blends, as is the case for the special blend I used in this recipe.
In the case of this recipe, I’ve used a special herb blend called hingvastakchurna to add flavor, make this dish more digestible AND replace the alliums that would have made this a heating (or very farty) meal. Hingvastak is an Ayurvedic spice mix containing cumin, ajamoda, black pepper, ginger, pippalli, mineral salt, fenugreek and asofoetida and the result is a combination of herbs that soothes vata and supports the entire digestive process. It’s a particularly helpful blend for those with vata predominant constitutions or vata digestive imbalances such as constipation, bloating or gas. Vata is cold, light, and dry, qualities but the qualities in the hingvastak ingredients are heating, grounding and oily which serve to balance out the drying, light and airy qualities of the astringent chickpeas and bitter herbs predominant in this recipe.
Going further, Hingvastak’s at large has heating qualities that enkindle the digestive fire, stimulate a healthy appetite, and help ensure nutrients are properly absorbed and assimilated. Its grounding quality helps calm the excessive air movement in the system that is characteristic of vata, ensuring proper elimination. For these reasons, this is an herb blend that I recommend to many of my clients as a wonderful travel aid; it’s easy to sprinkle a bit of hingvastak on anything you’re eating to ease digestion and keep things moving!
Typically falafel would call for onions and garlic, and in any other season I would be so game for this flavor addition. Alliums, including onions and garlic, are heating and can be agitating to those with a lot of pitta in their constitutions (me!) and so in the interest of keeping my cool this summer, I opted out. Instead, I added a bit of hingvastak for flavor, and to ensure that this cooling dish was balanced out with non-aggravating heat from the spices. The result is a very flavorful, make ahead masterpiece that really made my lunches this week.
This giant falafel came together in a snap. I blended the “dough” up in a food processor, warmed my skillet and baked it up. We were eating a warm, hearty, summery lunch in less than half and hour – our plates piled high with slabs of crunch giant falafel, crisp cucumber salad, and cool tahini-yogurt dressing. I wrapped the leftovers up and enjoyed them in the following days. A little warming in a hot skillet with a bit of ghee refreshed the crunch. Heaven.
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