Hi, my name is Mohammed Karimy with Lebanese Taverna Catering Cooking Classes. We’re preparing our signature dish called Baba Ghanoush, or one of our signature dishes, Baba Ghanoush, very simple and healthy.
Here we have some chopped, very finely chopped eggplant, baked eggplant, couple of tablespoons of yoghurt here, plain. Now, we’re going to mash, chop some garlic. Alright, this is a garlic clove and I have my knife right here. Either you can do it like, squeeze it like this, mash it like that and then chop, or you normally can cut in half and then chop. Here, I’m chopping the garlic first and then I have mortar and pestle right here to mash the garlic. So, what I do is first chop, add the garlic inside the mortar and pestle, see, and add some salt. Salt makes it mash faster. You see, add a little bit salt, like a dash of salt. You just pound, pound till it becomes mushy. See, it's mashed, get more juice, more flavor out. If you are really stressed this is a really good therapy for that. Thats perfect, see, all mashed up.
Now, we add this one to the eggplant here, all goes here, garlic inside the bowl. You guys can see garlic sitting over eggplant and we can also add the plain yoghurt, it goes here. Yoghurt is optional to add to the Baba Ghanoush. It gives this nice color and also flavor. It takes away the bitterness from the eggplant too. Other main ingredient is Tahini, which is sesame paste. Before you use it make sure you shake it really good so the oil and the sesame paste is mixed and the oil is also from the sesame. You never put this in the refrigerator. Always at room temperature in the shelf. I’m just going to put say about, quarter cup of Tahini, see that, for close to two pounds of, two cups of eggplant. It goes on to top, some salt to taste. Good thing about cooking is you can taste it several times while you cook, while you prepare. Fresh squeezed lemon juice, look at that. When you cut the lemon in like zigzag shape, you can easily squeeze, look at that. Alright, I’m going to squeeze a little bit more, its about one healthy lemon. If you have some seeds, don’t worry about it, it's from lemon, nothing bad. Then you mix and already, if you look, the color changed.
That’s because it's Tahini and yoghurt. Now, it looks chunky, alright, that’s the traditional way that Baba Ghanoush is supposed to look. In Lebanon that’s how they do it, but again, some people they don’t like it chunky. Some people they don’t like seeds very much. So all you have to do is put in a food processor and you puree it even finer, but traditional way is like this. I’m going take this, see how it tastes like. Hmm, very well. It needs a little bit more Tahini. If your Baba Ghanoush is a little, it's runny; it means it needs some Tahini paste to make it a little bit thick. It needs some salt a little bit and a little bit more of the lemon. Then you mix them all of it. Make sure the whisk, use the whisk. It changed the color, look at this. You can use pita bread; you can use vegetables, dips, anything to eat the Baba Ghanoush. I’m going to put this in a bowl here. Then we come back, we’re going to garnish our Baba Ghanoush platter.
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