This tabbouleh is Syrian, but not as we know it

Jul 18 2008 by Our Correspondent, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

HELLO everyone. Well, I’m pressing on with the outdoor eating theme this week, as the forecast looks reasonable. By this I mean it’s not chucking it down at the moment.

Eating al fresco is one of life’s exquisite simple pleasures. Warm, calm weather, good friends, good food, perhaps a few glasses of dark rosé, or perhaps even a lightly-chilled Loire Valley red (this is the only occasion I’d ever countenance this); a long, sultry evening in good company – nothing like it, is there?

This week, we turn to the Middle East for a recipe. The Levantine region is probably the fount of all knowledge when it comes to filling a table with tasty charcoal-grilled meats, and crisp, lemony, salad-y things. And it’s to Syria we go for the origins of this dish, the famous tabbouleh. It’s their national dish, too, so I feel it important to point out that the resemblance between the prescribed ‘classic’ version, and the recipe I’m using here, is fleeting at best.

The original recipes use colossal amounts of herbs and vegetables, with a comparatively small ratio of bulghour wheat, ending up with what looks more like a green salad than anything else. This, a more ‘westernised’ version, comes from the fertile culinary mind of my wife, Tracy, who’s made more tabbouleh than anyone I know.

Over the years, she’s honed the recipe down to a smashing, nutty, light-as-air dish, a clean-tasting accompaniment to all manner of meat, poultry and fish.

Sometimes we stick to the requisite bulghour wheat, but recently we’ve been extremely sacrilegious and have turned to couscous, those excellently nutty grains of semolina wheat. Even more recently, we’ve discovered a fantastic barley couscous, and it’s this one we’ll be using today.

As with many of the recipes here in this column, I fully expect, indeed hope, that you’ll veer off the prescribed path, and play about a little. Remove any ingredients you don’t fancy, and replace them with something else. The addition of some fiery chillies may tempt some of you, or perhaps even the scorch of some finely-chopped raw red onion? Some cubes of fried courgette or aubergine? A pinch of cinnamon? Go ahead! Many people will omit the cucumber (I always feel sorry for the poor put-upon little cucumber, so unpopular it appears to be!), but I feel it adds an authentic background flavour to the whole salad.

Anyway, let’s press on…

Stephen Jackson is chef and co-owner of the award winning Weavers Shed restaurant in Golcar.