Week 3

🥗 WEEK 3: Fattoush Salad With Zoe

This week you're taking on curing lemons, cheesemaking from home and making a traditional Egyptian spice and nut blend all for layering in a large bowl of delicious fattoush salad. You'll learn how to put your own twist on the dish experimenting with different flavours from the Middle East. Just as you have many complex layers and notes to a perfume, this dish is all about the ‘fullness’ of each bite, how the spices balance with the acidic lemon cured paste and rounded out with the creamy Labneh cheese - combining hot with cold, salty and sour to create a balanced dish.

Share with the community

If you have any questions about blending spices or any of the techniques from this week, Zoe and the other chefs are here to help. You can access the community forum by clicking the button below where you can also share your ideas and photos of your creations with the rest of you group.

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📘 Lessons For The Week

Recipe Development - Fattoush Salad & Labneh Cheese

Zoe takes you through her fattoush salad, a dish that is all about the crunch! She achieves this by carefully selecting her vegetables, building layers of texture and using nuts as part of an Egyptian blend called dukkah which is one of the many North African influences on Israeli cuisine.

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Ingredients Introduction - Fattoush Salad & Labneh Cheese

You're introduced to the key ingredients for the homemade soft cheese, some heavy hitters in the middle eastern spice world, as well as your base ingredients for preserved lemons where salt is used to mellow out their bold, tart flavour whilst heightening their "lemony" essence.

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Head to the Oven - Fattoush Salad & Labneh Cheese

Get ready to bring a mix of different cultural influences into the kitchen to create this dish. You'll be using ancient techniques and a nut and spice mix that was eaten by Pharaohs in ancient Egypt, to bring together a fresh fattoush salad bursting with flavour that is well-deserving of a spot on the brunch table (even just for its rich history alone!).

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📖 Further Reading

Learn more about Tel Aviv, the city that was envisaged as a 'future city' and is undoubtedly a playground for eaters and chefs alike. Have a read of the article below.

A Modern Melting pot - The City of Tel Aviv Yafo

Tel Aviv and Jerusalem are only separated by an hour-long drive down highway 1 - but culturally and spiritually the two largest cities in Israel are set apart by thousands of years of history.