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Shani Brill
Shani Brill
The King and Queen of Israeli Pastries

Longtime staples of Jewish-Yemenite cooking, jachnun and malawach have become popular comfort foods across Israel, where their recipes have adapted to local tastes

The Tel Aviv Port Market will, for the first time, honor the king of local pastries: jachnun. For two consecutive weekends—January 19-20 and January 26-27—the plaza outside the market will be filled with stands selling the fresh, handmade treats. Jachnun is primarily known as a Jewish-Yemenite dish, but—along with malawach, another Jewish-Yemenite pastry—it has been a mainstream Israeli fast-food favorite for decades. They are both perfect comfort foods. Let’s start with jachnun. It is warm and mildly sweet, and gives you a fuzzy feeling. It could be mistaken for a dessert, but it’s traditionally a Shabbat breakfast food, served in Israel with an oven-baked egg, fresh grated tomato, and zhug (Yemenite hot sauce), which gives it an extra kick. These days jachnun is consumed all day long—everywhere and anywhere. No Israeli hotel breakfast buffet or school picnic is complete without the commercial version of this log-shaped goodie. Since the rise of foodie culture, some Israelis have recently started making jachnun at home, but for many years, only Yemenite grandmothers would make it from scratch. If the rest of us wanted to consume it at home, we would either buy it frozen or order it as take-out. You can eat jachnun at most rest stops and many cafes. And on the weekend, jachnun is sold everywhere in Israel: Convenience stores keep a metal container that holds warm jachnun, and kiosks hold a pot of jachnun for clubbers to grab a bite in the early morning hours after a long night out. While traveling across the country it’s not uncommon to see DIY signs, written in a felt-tip pen, informing passersby that jachnun is sold at stands on the side of the road. Jews in every corner of the world found their own solution for feeding their family on Shabbat while considering religious prohibitions and local supplies. Yemenite Jews from different areas came up with different solutions. Jachnun was the solution of the Jews of the port city of Aden in southern Yemen, where the Jewish community flourished until a deadly pogrom in 1947, which was the beginning of the end of this community. ...

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A Michelin star is still very much a status symbol and the few restaurants in Israel that do fine dining really want it.

Israeli food journalist Amit Aaronsohn, in ‘Israeli Restaurants Reach for the Star’

100 Foods and Beyond

Check out Tablet’s book The 100 Most Jewish Foods: A Highly Debatable List, and learn the stories behind iconic Jewish dishes. Argue with your friends about what we left out. And if you get hungry, we’ve included 60 recipes, too. And then there’s more...

Play the Jewish Foods Memory Game with your kids. Match up doubles of chicken soup, or borscht, or kreplach, and work up their appetite in the process.

Or try the 500-piece 100 Foods circular puzzle, and set the perfect table filled with your favorite Jewish foods.

Or check out this sticker book, featuring the tastiest items from 100 Most Jewish Foods. Put your favorite stickers on your laptop, your notebook, or your refrigerator.

You can buy all the merchandise, plus The Newish Jewish Encyclopedia, edited by the hosts of Tablet’s Unorthodox podcast, by clicking here.

The Tab Volume 2

Bookmark The Tab archive to pick up your new weekly printable edition every Friday morning: Tablet’s most readable material, on paper.

Download this week’s edition of The Tab printable digest here.

Get the matzo ready! Passover is coming

This year, Passover begins at sunset on Wednesday, April 5, and ends at sunset on Thursday, April 13. Get cooking with some of Tablet’s Passover recipes, or download Tablet’s printable Seder mini-cookbook.

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Keeping Kosher

17

Percent of U.S. Jews who say they keep kosher in their home, according to Pew Research Center

Introducing Collections

Editor-curated, thematic deep-dives into Tablet’s archives

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Courtesy Joan Knows Best
Courtesy Joan Knows Best
Tahini Treats

Joan Knows Best: The best way to turn this sesame spread into delicious cookies—with some help from tahini expert Amy Zitelman

One of the most exotic trips I have ever taken was to the sesame-growing area of Ethiopia, a country I had always wanted to visit. At a wedding in Tel Aviv, I was invited to go with the Soom sisters, who have a tahini company in Israel. I immediately accepted. After a harrowing plane trip from Addis Ababa, followed by an hour’s trip on roads where we were constantly dodging cattle, camels, and women walking with water bottles on their heads, we arrived in Humera—known for the quality of its sesame seeds, which are used uniquely for tahini. Although sesame seeds originated in China, tahini from Ethiopian seeds has become popular in the United States as an ingredient in pastas, and vegetable and meat dishes; it is high in protein, vitamins B and E, as well as magnesium and iron. It has branched out far beyond baba ghanouj and hummus, two dishes eaten now and when I lived in Israel in the early 1970s and wrote about it in my first cookbook, “The Flavor of Jerusalem,” which appeared in 1975. But ever since Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, two sons of Jerusalem, wrote their bestselling “Jerusalem,” and included delicious tahini cookies and other exciting new recipes, coupled with Mike Solomonov’s soon-to-follow “Zahav,” the popularity of the ingredient went off the charts. And it doesn’t hurt that it is good for you, too. ...

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Joan Knows Best

Everyone says their mom is the best cook, but when your mom is Joan Nathan, cooking looks a little bit different. Join Joan Nathan and her son, David Henry Gerson, for a video series covering Joan’s favorite Shabbat dinner recipes with a seasonal twist.

Joan Nathan is Tablet Magazine’s food columnist and the author of 10 cookbooks including King Solomon’s Table: a Culinary Exploration of Jewish Cooking from Around the World.

Perfect Pita

Joan Knows Best: The best way to make the ancient bread in your modern kitchen—thanks to a tip from chef Michael Solomonov

Shake Up Brunch With Shakshuka

Joan Knows Best: The best way to make this popular tomato-and-egg dish—with some help from Israeli chef Erez Komarovsky

The Pleasure of Pletzel

Joan Knows Best: The best way to make this Eastern European flatbread—with some advice from food writer and radio host Arthur Schwartz

A lot of Jewish food’s appeal, I have found, has more to do with fond memories of growing up than the food itself. Your early sensations are the ones that stay with you. You similarly always remember your first kiss. Technically speaking it probably wasn’t your best kiss, but it is the one that gave you the taste.

How do you hummus?

With the original recipe dating all the back to the 13th century, and thousands of renditions since then, hummus has become quite possibly the most popular, universal middle eastern dish of our time. There have even been entire books published about hummus!

It’s been called a peacemaker, and has been the subject of lots of controversy. Whether it’s your entire meal, or a dip for your vegetables, there are so many opinions, and stories to share about our delectible dish.

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