More pancake per pancake: how to cook with fenugreek
Almost Pastrami Rub and the maple syrup mystery of 2005
Welcome to the Schmutz newsletter, where we make it a little easier to cook Jewish food without a recipe.
In October of 2005, New Yorkers were worried. The city smelled good.
Concerned citizens started calling 311, and Gothamist built a map to track where exactly all these folks smelled the “pancake truck on fire.”
The city yanked out Hazmat suits to investigate, but it was four years until the mayor held a press event to reveal “Sources of Mysterious but Harmless Maple Syrup Odors.”
New York is back to smelling bad, but I got a whiff of the same craziness when I headed to ByClio, one of the city’s best cake shops, tucked under the shadow of a Gowanus U-Haul center.
Clio and I met at a party last year and hit it off trading gefilte fish stories, so we decided to swap some Schmutz haroset for a little cake. When I stopped by the bakery, she reached for a plum-and-basil slice that blew my mind. It tasted just like pancakes.
In both cases, the same culprit: fenugreek.
For four years in the mid-2000s, slow winter winds had blown from New Jersey, where an Israeli flavor factory was turning fenugreek seeds into imitation maple extract. And Clio was baking with the fenugreek too.
From India to Yemen and Baghdad to Bergen County, Jews have history with fenugreek. Read on for a couple of my own cake takes, plus four savory pantry staples that will put this spice in your regular rotation.
Fenugreek seed has layers: Its warm, doughy, maple aroma will open up any dish, while its mild umami and bitterness, not far from celery or fennel, balances out sweeter flavors.1
Some easy tips to use fenugreek like a pro:
On its own, fenugreek tastes like your favorite memory of fake maple syrup
Fenugreek adds a touch of plant-free meatiness and depth to a soup or marinade
Much like allspice or cloves, fenugreek will add some nutty complexity to any spice-based dessert, like a gingersnap or fruit cobbler
Add fenugreek earlier in the cooking process to temper its bitterness
Toast fenugreek first to open up extra maple aroma
The first step, though, is buying this thing. If it’s not in your spice aisle, try Kalyustan’s (in Manhattan), Sahadi’s (in Brooklyn), or Penzey’s (link to buy online).
Fenugreek Hotcakes
I used to sling brown butter lobster rolls at Eventide Oyster Company, up in Maine, where we packed extra milk powder into melting butter for an impossibly high ratio of “brown” to “butter.”
We’ll take a similarly freakish approach here: more pancake per pancake, made possible by baking fenugreek’s ethereal Eggo-ness right into your flapjacks. This recipe unites an American-style pancake recipe with a savory, yeasted Yemenite pancake called lachuch.
If a yeasted pancake is a little too involved, forget my recipe and just whisk fenugreek into your favorite pancake batter, one tablespoon for every two cups of dry mix. I like Bisquik.
Whisk together your dry ingredients: 2 cups of flour, a teaspoon each of salt, active dry yeast, and baking powder, plus a tablespoon each of sugar and fenugreek. Mix in two cups of milk and let it all sit for an hour or two, until bubbly.
Melt a quarter-stick of butter in a microwavable bowl and let cool. Whisking quickly, mix that into the batter with one egg. Butter your griddle and get cooking!
Fenugreek Icebox Cake
Icebox cake is even less of a “cake” than pancakes: it’s just whipped cream and cookies. But this insanely easy answer to the tiramisu reminds me a lot of the Maple Creemee, a popular Vermont roadside soft-serve packed with local syrup.
First, make your base fenugreek jelly. Bring water to a boil in a pot — I start with two cups of water and two tablespoons of fenugreek. Keep boiling until the water has reduced by half and then set aside to cool.
Meanwhile, whip your cream until you’ve reached soft peaks (for the amounts above, I go for a tall 16 ounce container of heavy cream). Leaving any water behind, spoon in your fenugreek jelly. Whip in the jelly, plus powdered sugar to taste, until just combined. Set aside in the fridge.
Choose your cookies! Graham crackers (my favorite) deliver subtle campfire spice, but you can also go for lady fingers, Nilla wafers, or shortbread cookies. Biscoffs can overwhelm the fenugreek, but then you have a Biscoff icebox cake, and that’s no crime.
Make your cake. Line a loaf plan with plastic wrap, then alternate between layers of cream and cookies until you’re at the top of the dish, both starting and stopping with a layer of cream. Fridge for at least a few hours, and up to a couple days.
Invert, slice, serve. This thing is creamy, so, for toppings, I pair crunch (granola, toasted nuts, cookie crumbles) and tartness (grilled peaches or plums).
Fenugreek Butter
Niter kibbeh is a spiced, clarified butter popular in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Here, we’re amping up the fenugreek in that traditional recipe, but keeping the brown butter solids for a nutty, aromatic spread that’s perfect on summer corn, wedged over a roasted sweet potato, or spread on toast.
Just as good: skip the dairy with an oil-based version, preferred by Ethiopian Jews. I swap in coconut oil for a fragrant, spiced spread that’s great for frying French toast, coating a bowl of popcorn, or basted over whitefish on the grill.
Chop butter into little cubes and simmer in a saucepan until melted. For every stick of butter you used, stir in two teaspoons of ground fenugreek. You can also throw in a couple dashes of other aromatics: cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, cumin, coriander.
Keep stirring on low heat for 5 or 10 minutes and pour into your storage vessel, stirring in a teaspoon of salt and a tablespoon of maple syrup or honey.
Let cool. It’s especially great left out until warm, then whipped till fluffy.
Almost Pastrami Rub
When the world has me down, there’s one place I go: to watch chef Danny Bowien make pastrami for Mark Bittman. It’s a real crowd pleaser dish for Jewish Thanksgiving, or for a very punk Hanukkah dinner.
There’s no fenugreek in pastrami, but the spice is a principle ingredient in pastirma, the ancient Armenian spiced-and-cured beef that eventually became pastrami.
This spice blend mashes up those styles for a flavor halfway between crunchy-brown pastrami crust and that seasoned salt you get over home fries at the diner. It’s great on salmon, eggs, potatoes, carrots, cauliflower, or steak.
4 parts coriander
2 parts salt
1 part ground fenugreek
1 part paprika
1 part black pepper
1 part brown sugar
1 part garlic powder
Mango Quick Pickle
Disappointing mangos—the nearly rock-hard kind I pass over in the produce aisle—are just firm enough to hold up under the weight of perfectly sweet-tart pickling brine inspired by the bright-orange shawarma condiment amba.
Calcutta Jews brought this mango sauce from India to Baghdad to Israel, and now, look, it’s in your pantry, or at least, something like it. These are solid on fish tacos or with grilled lamb.
Heat 2 parts cider vinegar 1 part white sugar until hot to the touch (microwave is fine!). Stir to dissolve.
For every cup of vinegar you used, add in two tablespoons of salt, a few teaspoons of fenugreek, plus whatever you've got of the following: mustard seeds, turmeric, cumin, red pepper flakes.
Throw in your sliced mangos. These’ll keep pickling the longer you wait, but they’ll be ready in 15.
Fenugreek Whip
This mousse-like fenugreek sauce is so central to cooking with fenugreek that Yemenite Jews call it hilbeh… the Arabic word for fenugreek.
It adds a lush creaminess to any dairy-free soup or sauce, or belongs on its own drizzled over a platter of roasted veggies or kebabs.
Add a spoonful of fenugreek seeds to a cupful of water and let it sit for at least a couple hours, or overnight.
Blend or whip well. I like an immersion blender or milk frother here, but you can just as easily use a food processor or whip by hand.
Add salt and pep to taste, plus lemon juice and garlic.
If you’re looking for something spicier, I borrow from Joan Nathan’s recipes for Calcutta and Yemeni hilbeh, blending in ginger, chilies, tomato paste, cilantro, and parsley.
That’s it for this fenugreek guide. Next week, we’re on to buckwheat. Before then, if you’ve got a second, it’d mean a lot if you shared this newsletter with someone in your life who cooks.
Fenugreek leaves are their own beast (sweeter, grassier, herbal) and deserve a full newsletter another time.