Falafel Fail

I'm beginning to wonder if maybe I'm missing some falafel gene. Surely, at the very least I'm missing the requisite cultural competence. Those are my falafel's in the picture, but don't let their appearance deceive you -- they look better than they taste. As you can see, I tried to hide my falafel ineptitude with spring greens, tomato and cucumber, but I think that only made things worse. Another failed falafel attempt.

The false promise of tasty falafel.

In addition to what I'm convinced is genetic inadequacy, I think the problem with these falafels is two fold. First, the recipe just wasn't that great -- which is what I get for using some random, not user rated recipe floating around on the Internet. Hopefully that lesson has now been learned. The spice proportions were alright, and these things were drab, close to tasteless. Falafel attempt #1 may have not looked quite right, but they tasted delicious. These were the opposite, they looked better but tasted far worse. Furthemore , falafel professionals undoubtedly know this, but you just cannot bake falafel and have it still be a falafel. Falafel's really must be fried. I tried using the broiler, which resulted in a little bit of browning, but you need to fry them to get the right texture. In a last ditch effort to salvage my dinner, I stuck them in a pan with some vegetable oil. They didn't fall apart as much as last time, but as I mentioned before, they were tasteless, which in my book is much worse.

From the looks of it, you'd expect them to be pretty good ... well, you'd be wrong.

After a few minutes of broiling on both sides, they flattened out a little -- I was just glad they hadn't fallen apart.

The second part of the problem I again attribute to the use of canned versus dried chickpeas. Unless I can find some dried chickepas, there isn't much I can do about that. If I do find the dried variety and my falafels still suck, I'll take it as evidence of the missing falafel gene. I just may have to quiet my next falafel hankering with the crumbly but delicious mess I made last time. At least the lemonade tasted great -- almost good enough to cover up how disappointingly bad these falafels turned out.

At least I know I have no inherent disability when it comes to making lemonade.

Falafel - 2, Me - 0.

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What's Cookin' - Baked Falafel

Even though my first attempt at making falafel -- a wonderful Middle Eastern (not Greek, as I once erroneously thought) dish of fried spiced chickpeas -- two or three months ago was pretty much an unmitigated disaster in terms of presentation, the mixture of herbs and spices was so delicious that I've been craving it ever since. Unfortunately, my sesame allergy prevents me from procuring falafel at food establishments like most other people. (Much to my boyfriend's dismay, I attempted to get falafel at a restaurant once after making sure there was no sesame in the falafel itself ... but I forgot about the tahnini.) Tonight, I can resist the call of the falafel no longer and am going to give it another go.

Homemade falafels take #1, though yummy tasting, completely fell apart in the frying pan until it became a mess of brownish green slop nowhere close to even resembling the delicious falafel it aspired to be -- more fal-awful than falafel if you ask me (hardy har har). I attribute the disaster primarily to the use of canned versus dried then soaked chickpeas. I tried to remedy this deficiency for future falafel frying at my local Trader Joe's, but they only carry the canned type. (On a somewhat related note, they also don't carry arborio rice, which surprised me, TJ's being the precisely the type of place where yuppie, arborio-cooking types such as myself wouuld shop.) Not wanting to brave the alleged general unpleasantness of Berkeley Bowl (seriously, read the reviews on Yelp, it sounds like an acute version of foodie hell) or the prices at Whole Foods, I'm going to have to stick with the canned chickpeas. In order to avoid the previous sopping disaster, for homemade falafels take #2, I'm going to try baking them instead. I'll be using this recipe gleaned from the interwebs and will let you know how it goes and maybe even provide pictures. We'll see.

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