Shakshuka - Our Favorite Anytime Meal! | The Woks of Life

Hi everybody. Today we're going to make shakshuka. Not Chinese. This is really good. So you might be wondering, shakshuka, that's not Chinese, right? Absolutely not. Not Chinese. But at the end of the day, the Walks of Life started off as an archive of family recipes. And yes, we focused on Chinese recipes, but you could see in our recipe archive, we've got tons of other baked goods, Western recipes. We've got a pernil style roast, which is a favorite of ours. We've got turkey. We've got all kinds of things. So this is one of the things that our family loves and enjoys. And especially with the harvest, the fall harvest and all the abundance of tomatoes and fresh tomatoes that we have. Now, I don't remember where I first had shakshuka, but it was not what I was expecting. Not what we usually cooked. It was very plain. It was a very plain tomato sauce with eggs in it. And a friend of mine, a childhood friend of mine said, yeah, what were you expecting shakshuka? When my mother used to make it, it was tomato paste and eggs. And I thought, oh, okay, well, the shakshuka that I had and I have been cooking is quite different. So we're going to show you our version today. There are some basic things in shakshuka that are not negotiable, right? You got to have the onions or shallots and garlic, red pepper, but you'd also use the jars, the roasted red peppers and tomatoes, fresh tomatoes. Now I have actually an unusually large amount of tomatoes in the shakshuka because I think it tastes better when you really kind of cook it down and get a little bit of a thickened sauce with them. So lots of tomatoes, not characteristic. I don't have tomato paste in here, so I'm going to depend on the flavor of the tomatoes concentrating and cooking down. Of course, we have eggs from our own chickens, cumin and paprika, also chili powder. And some of the add-ons that we do put in, feta cheese, and I'll use cubes of any cheese, feta cheese, cheddar cheese, any cheese that we have, manchego cheese, any cheese we have in the refrigerator. And for the summer, we also have an abundance of like eggplant and we have an abundance of zucchini from the garden. One cooking note is what we'll do is we'll cook these separately and that also gives you layers of flavor as well. So we're going to do that, put these aside, and then when we saute the aromatics until they're nice brown and fragrant along with the red peppers, red peppers will basically just melt in the sauce and give it sweetness. And then we cook the tomatoes. Some of the other things we enjoy with this is merguez, which is a lamb sausage. So served on the side, delicious. And of course, you got to have a piece of bread. Now you could have a piece of laffa bread, pita, or you just get a nice piece of sourdough bread and we toast it on the cast iron skillet. And usually if we're having that for breakfast, that's what we'll have. And we cook a put it in the fridge and take it out for later. And we also can have it for lunch. You can also have it for dinner. Usually if we have it for dinner, we'll have a side salad, which is a really nice dinner. Shakshuka, side salad, a piece of bread, piece of sausage, what a meal that is. All right, so let's go make this shakshuka. All right, so we got pan heated and what we're going to do is we're going to, we're going to saute both the zucchini and the eggplant. Want to soften a little bit. We also want to get a little bit of a sear on there for some extra flavor. So we're going to create some layers of flavor here. Let me do this. Ah, see we got a nice little sear on this. So at this point, I'm just going to salt it a little bit. And you got to watch the salt that you use because they're going to be layered. A little bit of, a little bit of pepper here, not too much. They do look a little dry. I'm just going to drizzle a little oil. All right, got a nice sear on them. Taking it off now. Okay, I'm going to reduce the heat. Olive oil. It's a medium heat right now. When you start with these aromatics, the garlic and onion, you got to really brown them. And that's where you get a nice, all that flavor coming out. And the same thing goes for the, for the tomatoes. It's not like our beef tomato recipe where you just cook, cook them and you want to taste the freshness of the tomatoes. For me in a shakshuka, this has to cook down and you get a little bit of a nice, a little bit of crispiness or charred tomato around the edge of the pan, which makes the dish really good. You want these little crunchy bits here, but you've got to be, watch it like a hawk now because you don't want to burn it. I'm going to really add these red peppers now. Okay, we're going to let this cook for a little while. I'm going to add some salt to it at this point too. The salt does draw the water out of the vegetables. Add a little bit of pepper. Okay. I'm turning it all the way high and I'm going to add the tomatoes. It's a lot of tomatoes, I know, but they're going to all cook down and we got to, we want to have a nice sauce. A lot of recipes don't use as many tomatoes as I do, I think. And most recipes just use either tomato paste or they use canned tomatoes. You can choose to do that, but fresh tomatoes always best. Let that cook and I'm going to heat the pan for the merguez. So these tomatoes are on pretty high heat right now because we cooled off the pan by dumping them all in. So you want to keep moving them around, especially around the edge, off the edges, so the edges don't burn. We don't want our aromatics to burn, but we do want these tomatoes to cook down and to caramelize. So, and I'm going to switch the sides to start our merguez. The merguez, this brand of merguez is cooked a little bit, so I'm just going to put a little bit of oil to start them off. And it's six sausages in the package. This shakshuka serves six and one person gets a sausage each. Okay, so this merguez is cooking. What I'm going to do is I'm going to turn this merguez in the back and put it on low so we can watch that and put this to the forefront. So I got that on low medium heat. That'll continue to heat up and sear. And this is starting to bubble nicely. Okay, at this point I'm going to add a salt. I'd say add, I like to add a little bit at a time, so I think I'm adding about a quarter teaspoon here. The recipe says add salt to taste. If you feel like your tomatoes happen to be too tart, then you could add some sugar. I'm not adding any sugar. These tomatoes are plenty sweet. They're right out of the garden. All right, here's a cook's note. See what's happening here? See this caramelization around the edge? That's why I have it on higher heat. I want that. There's plenty of moisture in the middle. So now what we're going to do is we're going to add our cumin. This is the chili pepper and this is the paprika. See they're a little bit different. Now I'll give this a mix now because this caramelized on the edge. Add this. Okay. All right. Now I'm going to turn this down to a medium heat. Oh yeah. Oh, do we have chopped parsley? Okay. I forgot the fresh thyme. Showed it before, but this is thyme that we picked a few days ago and it's kind of dried nicely. So I'm just gonna, you can put whole sprigs in here, but I'm just going to strip them. What do I got here? Maybe about a good teaspoon or two of thyme. You could use dried thyme if you don't have it, but this is so nice from the garden. That's good. Layers of flavor. All right. We're just about ready to start cracking the eggs here, but before I do that, I'm going to give it another taste. Okay. Needs a little salt. That's pretty good. So now we're ready to make the wells for the eggs. One egg there. Make a little well and you do want to spread these out. Try not to break them. You can actually push them if you have to, which is what I'm doing right here. Oh, I broke that one. It's okay. It's another one. And then I'm just going to stick one right in the middle. Eggs are cooking really nicely. Now we're going to put the feta cheese in. So the way I do it is I look for the empty spots in between the eggs and stick the feta cheese in. These little salt bombs are going to be very tasty. What else can I stick of cheese? Running out of room for the cheese. Right here. Lovely. Right there, she says. Okay. At this point, you don't want to touch this. Let it cook. Now here's where you got to decide if you want to cook your eggs well done, which we don't like, or if you cook them sort of like in an over easy state. So what I like to do at this point is give them a cover. I'll put the cover on here and let them go for a few minutes and check it. You can see through the glass too. So it's been about two to three minutes. Look at that. That's beautiful. Okay. And for us, I think this is done. So I'm just going to hit it with some parsley. And what I like to do is just serve it right out of the pan. Now these cheese balls aren't quite melt. Oh, they're like little tofu balls now. They don't look melted, but they're tofu squares. They're pretty melty. Oh, look at that. So these sausages, there's not really a lot of oil in them, but what we're going to do is we're going to toast the bread right in here. So I'm going to turn that on high and then we just serve it just like this. So this is ready to serve. Okay. Ooh, I smell that lambiness. Do a little olive oil on top of this bread here. And there is a little bit of olive oil, a little bit of oil already. I started it. And just get a nice little toast on here. In fact, I'm going to turn it over now for now. Hit this side, hit this side with a little olive oil. Okay. We're just going to finish toasting our bread and we're going to serve our shakshuka right out of the pan and our merguez, which we just finished. So let's go. feta. The perfect bite. That's the way I like shakshuka. A little piece of zucchini and merguez. Something that I never had until I traveled to the Middle East. Very good. If you like lamb, you have to try this lamb merguez with the shakshuka. Come on folks. It's not Chinese, but this is really good. Awesome. Mmm. I dubbed it in. You can't see thumbs up on the video camera.