Egyptian · Side

Dukkah

Easy
20 min
roughly 1 of 4 for cost
Vegetarian
Vegan

nutty-toasted · herb-fresh · earthy · gently hot Leads with toasted, nutty warmth throughout, fresh herbs arguing happily on top, with warmth in the tail.

Ingredients

100 g hazelnuts
50 g roasted chickpeas
80 g sesame seeds
30 g coriander seed
20 g cumin seed
5 g black peppercorns
8 g flaky salt
5 g dried mint

The skills inside

Roasting in a hot oven Dry-pan toasting: spices, seeds and nuts Frying the paste until the oil splits

The words inside

Dukkah Coriander Seed

Allergen screen

Found: nuts · sesame

Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.

Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.

Method

Roast the hazelnuts at 170C (340F) until the skins split and a cut nut is straw coloured to the centre, then rub them in a cloth while hot to shed the skins.
Toast the sesame in a dry pan, moving it without pause, until the seeds hiss, jump and smell oily; tip them out of the pan at once, they keep colouring in the residual heat.
Toast the coriander seed until it smells of orange peel, then the cumin on its own until it darkens one shade; they reach their point minutes apart, so never toast them together.
Cool everything to room temperature, then pound or pulse the nuts, chickpeas and seeds in short bursts to a dry rubble that still rattles; stir in the salt, pepper and mint.

How to tell it is going right

This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.

Roasting in a hot oven 56 recipes

The oven was fully up to heat before anything went in, given time beyond the indicator light rather than judged by it.
Every piece has air around it. Nothing touches its neighbour and nothing is packed to the edge of the tray, because crowded food steams itself in its own moisture and never browns.
Colour is even across the whole tray, the tray having been turned at least once: no pale row at the back and no dark row at the front.
It came out BEFORE the target temperature, not at it. Carryover keeps driving the inside up by several degrees after it leaves the oven, and that rise is part of the cooking rather than an error in it.
The temperature was read at the coldest part rather than the easiest one to reach, and read again after the rest.

Where it goes wrong The tray was crowded, or the oven was not truly up to heat. The food releases steam faster than a cool box can carry it away, so it sits pale and slack, and the extra minutes spent chasing colour take the inside well past where it should have stopped.

Dry-pan toasting: spices, seeds and nuts 70 recipes

A single layer on dry metal with nothing added: no fat, and nothing else sharing the pan or the tray and competing for the heat.
It is kept moving: shaken, stirred, or turned. Anything left still scorches on the face touching the metal while the rest of it is barely warm.
It is judged by smell before sight: once it is fragrant there are seconds left, not minutes, and the nose reaches that point well before the colour does.
It leaves the pan the instant it is done, onto a cold surface. A hot pan keeps toasting whatever stays in it, and carryover here is the difference between done and ruined.
The colour is even and light rather than patchy, with nothing black at the edges: one scorched piece taints the whole quantity it is ground into.

Where it goes wrong It was left alone for a moment while something else was attended to. Dry heat has no margin: the pieces against the metal go from fragrant to acrid inside a minute, and the bitterness cannot be picked back out of a ground mixture.

At the Table

The Pour: Sauvignon Blanc (Sancerre)
Also Right: Grüner Veltliner
From the Taps: Berliner weisse
Zero-Proof: Cucumber-lime water

Green plates want green wines: vinaigrette’s acid meets its match, and the difficult vegetables surrender to Grüner.

Family notes

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Film school

This dish, cooked on camera Search films of Dukkah The cuisine, deeper Technique films from the Egyptian kitchen