Given my ingrained response to clamp on to anyone and anything involving food it’s perhaps not surprising that I’m particularly drawn to charming gentlemen proffering food through one of my favourite things-the TV.
Even though my Mam recently dumped her longtime TV boyfriend Jamie Oliver for Donal Skehan, Rick Stein will forever be my true love (Shirley Valentine fling with Raymond Blanc pending).
Along with the fab addition of Mykonos Taverna to Dame Street, the memories of five weeks spent in the Greek Islands when I was a young ‘un, it was an episode of Rick’s series From Venice to Istanbul that pushed me off the couch and into the kitchen to try Moussaka for the first time.
Rick visits one of his heroes, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s home in Kardamyli, a village in south Peloponnese. The story of this Moussaka comes from Leigh Fermor telling his housekeeper, Elpida, to not make Moussaka as he didn’t like it. She made it anyway and didn’t tell him (I like the cut of her jib). Of course, afterwards this was lauded as the best Moussaka ever. Like a lot of these types of dishes, everyone makes it a different way so it’s all subjective. Before watching this episode I would’ve sided with Patrick on the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ feeling for what seems a pretty unexciting lasagna type dish. On my travels around Crete, Sardinia and Naxos, I’ve had very pleasant versions but nothing more than a bit of good stodge with mild flavour. But if this is THE BEST ONE EVUUUURR, why not give it a bash?
I re-watched the episode before attempting it and it seems Elpida’s recipe was modified on Rick’s website but you can watch it on the BBC iPlayer and decide for yourself what you want to do. I modified the amounts but stayed pretty on course with the ingredients. The quantities given below is enough to work for the size dish I had and easily feeds six hungry heads.
If you’re going to follow the original recipe, make sure you have a good deep dish for this. I ended up throwing out some of the béchamel sauce and not doing a third layer because my dish (height about 12cm/ 5in) was too shallow. The other proportions were fine, 24 x 35cm. Not a huge waste as there was plenty of sauce on top, but if you want to be exact, a deeper dish is better. I feel you’d still need a second aubergine than given in the original recipe also to make the extra layer.
Ingredients:
Salt
1 aubergine, sliced lengthways
3 courgettes, sliced lengthways
About 400ml olive oil, have more ready as I lost track of how much I used in the end
2 large potatoes, peeled and sliced lengthways
2 small onions, chopped
10g/2 cloves garlic, chopped (I used 3 tsp minced garlic)
500g minced beef
2 x 400ml carton chopped tomatoes
1 cinnamon stick
1 bay leaf
12 turns black peppermill
For the Béchamel
75ml butter
75g plain flour
500ml full-fat milk
3eggs
¼ tsp grated nutmeg
150g Gruyère, freshly grated
Begin by slicing the salting the aubergine and courgette slices and leaving them for about 30 minutes.
Slice the potatoes and fry off. In a deep ovenproof dish, about 24cm x 35cm, arrange the potatoes in a layer.
Fry off the aubergine and courgette in plenty of the olive oil over a medium heat until lightly browned and starting to soften, then drain on kitchen paper and set aside.
In a separate pan, heat 70ml of the olive oil and fry the onions and garlic for 5 minutes until softened. Add the minced beef and brown it before adding the tomatoes, cinnamon stick, bay leaf, ₁½ teaspoons salt and the pepper. Simmer for 30–40 minutes. When done, remove the cinnamon and bay leaf.
Top with half of the beef, then the aubergine and courgette followed by the rest of the beef.
Heat the oven to 220°C/gas 7.
To make the béchamel sauce: melt the butter in a saucepan over a gentle heat, stir in the flour and cook for 2 minutes so it loses its raw taste. Slowly incorporate the milk, and continue stirring until the sauce thickens. Remove from the heat and whisk in the eggs, nutmeg and 100g of the grated cheese. Elpida uses an electric whisk but a bit of elbow grease works fine for this quantity if you’re too lazy to dig it out!
Spread the béchamel over the layered meat and vegetables and top with a further 50g grated cheese. Bake for 30 minutes, then take out and leave to cool. Serve warm.
Freddy Kreuger
popandglug.com 