Shakshuka - Breakfast for Dinner

I love playing around with spices and herbs and their interaction with wines, so decided to do a North African/Israeli breakfast dish for dinner!

We did the usual nibble with a bubbly (Cremant de Bourgogne in this case) and then one of my new favourite soups without wine (a dark mushroom soup anointed with whipped cream infused with thyme - next time I intend to experiment with just a spot of added Madeira or Oloroso to finish it).

I tried a shakshuka recipe from Balaboosta, a Mediterranean cookbook I have been playing with recently. I'll include the recipe in case anyone else wants to try it out.


3 tablespoons canola oil
2 medium yellow onions, chopped
1 large green bell pepper, cored, seeded, and chopped
1 large jalapeño chile, cored, seeded, and chopped
7 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1/4 cup tomato paste
One 28-ounce can whole peeled tomatoes, crushed by hand
1 bay leaf
2 1/2 tablespoons sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons kosher salt
1 tablespoon sweet Hungarian paprika
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 1/2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon ground caraway
1/2 bunch Swiss chard, stemmed and chopped, or spinach
8 to 12 large eggs

Step 1
1. Heat the oil in a large skillet. Add the onions and sauté over medium heat until translucent, 5 to 10 minutes. Add the bell peppers and jalapeño and cook just until softened, 3 to 5 minutes. Stir in the garlic and tomato paste and sauté for another 2 minutes.

Step 2
2. Slowly pour in the tomatoes. Stir in the bay leaf, sugar, salt, paprika, cumin, pepper, and caraway and let the mixture simmer for 20 minutes. Layer the Swiss chard leaves on top.

Step 3
3. Crack the eggs into the tomato mixture. Cover and simmer for approximately 10 minutes or until the whites of the eggs are no longer translucent.

This was the perfect recipe to use my nonstick pan with a clear glass lid for - I could keep an eye on the eggs and pull them at the correct moment without having to remove the lid all the time.

I lowered the sugar and ramped the spices up a tad - the Serrano chile added heat and the cumin and paprika (I used smoked sweet Hungarian) gave the spice backbone and the freshly ground caraway injected an unusual (for us) note that I quite liked.

I opened a wine that I have been wanting to try - a BC 2015 Pinot Noir single vineyard offering from Kettle Valley (only 88 cases made) and it went with the food superbly, playing of the heat of the spicing very well.

This dish is definitey red wine friendly!

Sounds yummy, Bill. And shakshuka recipes have been very popular here on the East Coast for the past several years, as shakshuka, as Eggs in Hell, as white shakshuka (white beans and lots of spinach).

[Jenise]

Seeing Shakshuka makes me wish I liked poached eggs, which I don't, so this won't happen for me. But that said I read your recipe. It mentions a Jalapeno but later you describe a Serrano. Were I to make this I would use neither since there's a whole green bell pepper in there for that flavor and would instead bring in the heat with red chiles, or maybe even a dried chipotle for that smokey element.

Also, I'm surprised by the swiss chard. You laid them on top, then where did they go? I would guess they got pushed into the sauce before the eggs went in?

[David M. Bueker]

Green bell pepper - might as well be kryptonite.

I love Einat Admony’s book Balaboosta , the Israeli word for grandmother. She’s funny, down to earth and practical. I have made many things from that book especially the sauces , spice mixes and pickles. All good. She had some restaurants in
Manhattan but not sure how they fared during the pandemic. Taim, was one of them noted for it’s falafel. I’m shocked at the number of closed storefronts and small restaurants.

I’m shocked at the number of closed storefronts and small restaurants.

A lot depends on the nature of the neighborhood in which the resto exists. Business districts were hit hard, residential neighborhoods somewhat less so.

So, what I see on my daily perambulations:
- Maybe around half of all restaurants near my office (which is near Penn Station) closed for good or temporarily during 2020-2021; now maybe half of those are back; so there are still empties. Neighborhoods closer to Times Square or the Theater District were practically wiped out.
- Near my home, the number of empties depends on the hoity-toity -ness of the street... the fancier and more commercial it was, the more empties are there now (presumably, due to landlords asking higher rents)... the more ordinary streets are faring much better with many fewer empties.