This recipe is from Chasing Smoke: Cooking Over Fire Around the Levant by Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich. They have memories of cooking potatoes in bonfires as children and how delicious they tasted. They really are delicious and if you’ve made the effort to light your barbecue you may as well throw a few potatoes in the embers too.
Baked potatoes with charred spring onion sour cream – serves 4
- 4 baking potatoes, about 250g each
FOR THE SOUR CREAM DRESSING:
- 8-10 scallions
- 300g sour cream
- 1 large clove of garlic, peeled and crushed
- 3 tbsp olive oil
- ½ tsp flaky sea salt
- black pepper
- zest and juice of half a lemon
Wrap each potato in tin foil and place in the embers of your barbecue or campfire. Leave there for about 45 minutes or until a metal skewer goes in easily, turn them over a couple of times as they cook.
Meanwhile, char half the scallions on the grill for a few minutes on each side or until charred. Remove from the heat and finely chop.
Finely slice the green parts of the remaining scallions and set aside to sprinkle over at the end. Cut the remaining white parts into small pieces and stir into the sour cream along with the charred scalllions and the rest of the ingredients.
Remove the cooked potatoes from the fire and remove the foil. Cut each one down the middle and sprinkle with the flaky sea salt and fill with the sour cream mixture. Spinkle over the green scallions and some black pepper before serving.
(Original recipe from Chasing Smoke: Cooking over fire around the Levant by Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich, Pavilion, 2021.)
We really miss cooking for friends and family which is what we do almost every weekend (and some other nights too!). So instead of prepping for the evening we’ve been making more of an effort at lunch. Last week we had these unusual quesadillas outside in the sunshine, sure beats lunch at the desk!
We can’t resist those little plastic tubs of pork rillettes found in the fridge section of French supermarkets. Here’s what happened the end of the tub we brought home. No more rillettes until next year… unless we try making it ourselves of course.
Jono & Jules do food & wine 