Recipe: Sami Tamimi’s Eggplant and Fava Beans With Eggs

Sami Tamimi’s new cookbook Boustany is a love letter to his homeland Palestine. Unless you’ve been living under a giant leaf during the Yotam Ottolenghi-led veggie revolution, you’ve probably eaten (or cooked) Tamimi’s food before. In addition to co-founding the Ottolenghi restaurant and deli empire in London, he also co-wrote bestselling cookbooks Falastin and Jerusalem.

His latest book continues the veggie streak with more than 100 bright vegetarian recipes – including satisfying savoury breakfasts, dinner party show stoppers and easy dinners. If you love shakshuka, you’ll really love this dish, which you can eat at any time of the day. It’s a beautiful marriage of roasted eggplant, broad beans and runny baked eggs – all topped with sumac onions and fresh coriander.

If you take anything from this recipe, it should be that canned broad beans are a handy pantry staple. Tamimi often uses them for last-minute meals. “When simple butter and toast won’t do the trick and I’m in need of something more substantial and savoury, this is when fava beans come to the rescue,” he writes in Boustany. If you can’t source broad beans locally, he says you can easily substitute in other tinned beans – just season them well and add fresh bread to complete the dish. It also works just as well without eggs if you’re making it vegan.

Eggplant and fava beans with eggs (batinjan with ful ma’ beyd)

Serves 4
Prep time: 15 minutes, plus overnight steeping if you are making sumac onions
Cooking time: 50 minutes

Ingredients

2 medium eggplants (around 630g), cut into 4cm chunks
80ml olive oil, plus extra to serve
Salt
Black pepper
1 onion (175g), finely chopped
6 garlic cloves, crushed
1 small piece of ginger (20g), peeled and finely grated
1 green chilli (20g), finely chopped, seeds and all
1 tsp chilli flakes
1 tsp ground cumin
½ tsp ground cinnamon
1½ tsp tomato paste
2 plum tomatoes (300g), chopped into 2cm chunks
1 x 400g tin of chopped tomatoes
1 x 400g tin of fava beans, drained
15g fresh coriander, roughly chopped, plus more to serve
4 large eggs
30g sumac onions

Sumac onions
1 large red onion, peeled, halved and thinly sliced
1½ tbsp sumac
100ml apple cider vinegar
3 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp salt

Method

For the sumac onions: pack the sliced onion into a lidded 400ml jar. Add the sumac and set aside. Put the vinegar with 100ml water, the lemon juice and salt in a medium bowl and whisk until the salt dissolves. Pour the vinegar mixture over the onions, cover and give them a gentle shake. The onions are ready to eat the next day, though they’ll keep in the fridge for up to three weeks.

Preheat the oven to 220°C fan.

Place eggplants in a large bowl. Mix well with 40ml of the oil, ½ teaspoon of salt and a good grind of black pepper, then spread out on a large parchment-lined baking tray. Roast for about 25 minutes, or until completely softened and lightly browned. Remove from the oven and set aside.

While the eggplants are roasting, make the sauce. Put the remaining oil into a large sauté pan and place on a medium–high heat. Add the onion and cook for about 7 minutes, until softened and lightly browned. Add the garlic, ginger, green chilli, chilli flakes, spices and tomato paste and cook for another minute, or until fragrant. Add the chopped tomatoes, tinned tomatoes, fava beans, 300ml water, 1¼ teaspoons of salt and a good grind of pepper. Reduce the heat to medium and cook for 15 minutes, or until the sauce thickens.

Add the eggplant chunks and cook for a further 3 minutes. Stir in the coriander, then reduce the heat to medium–low. Make four wells in the sauce and crack an egg into each well. Use a fork to gently swirl the egg whites a little bit, taking care not to break the yolks. Simmer gently for 7–8 minutes, until the egg whites are set but the yolks are still runny. You can cover the pan with a lid for the last few minutes to speed up the process.

Leave to settle and cool for a couple of minutes, then garnish with the sumac onions, coriander, a drizzle of olive oil and a little salt on the eggs.

Images and text extracted from Boustany by Sami Tamimi (Ebury Press, $65.00). Photography by Ola O Smit.