BarCamp-safe Skordalia
When I started thinking about what to cook for BarCamp Vancouver, I had a fairly simple set of criteria - the food needed to be yummy, cheap to make, easy to eat, simple to serve, friendly to various dietary restrictions and conversation-friendly.
Enter Skordalia, the classic Greek garlic spread. The problem with Skordalia is that it is one of the knock-outs of Greek cooking; one bite of this delicious garlic spread and any conversation you enter goes down for the count after just one round.
To get around this, I used roasted garlic. Garlic's powerful odor and flavor is only unleashed when it is crushed or cut. If you bake garlic, you get a much milder and warmer flavor. To compensate for the reduced punch, I used a lot more garlic. Most Skordalia recipes call for a few tablespoons of pureed garlic to a few cups of potato or bread. I used roughly equal amounts of roast garlic and potato. As a plus, this also reduces the amount of olive oil that you need to use.
Skordalia
Ingredients
- Garlic, 9 bulbs (yes, entire bulbs)
- Potato, Baked or Boiled, 1 large
- Olive Oil, Extra Virgin, 1/2 cup
- Lemon, Juice and Zest, (1 large lemon)
- Salt to taste
Method
- Preheat your oven to 350 F/180 C.
- Remove the papery skin from the outside of the garlic buds and slices of the very tips of the individual cloves.
- Place the garlic in a casserole, drizzle with olive oil and cover. Place in the oven.
- Wash the potato and puncture the skin with a fork four or five times. Oil the potato. Place in the oven.
- Cook the garlic and potato for about an hour - until both are soft when pushed with a spoon. Remove from the oven and set aside to cool.
- While the garlic and potato cool, clean, zest and juice a lemon. Mince the zest. Set the juice aside.
- Mash the potato and set aside.
- Carefully squeeze the soft roasted garlic out of the buds - it should come out as a soft paste.
- Mix the potato, garlic, minced zest and lemon juice together.
- Blend (either by hand or with a food processor) until smooth, adding olive oil to a nice creamy-yet-pasty consistency is reached.
- Add salt to taste.
- Serve room temperature.
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Posted on Monday, August 28th, 2006 at 19:11
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September 2nd, 2006 at 16:09
Wow! I may have to make a roadtrip up from Portland to your next bar camp just for the food. As a vegan, I usually end up living on luna bars and trail mix at events.