So, my go-to Israeli cookbook is Zahav. I have found Jerusalem to not be quite as flavorful and impressive at the table. However, for a quick weeknight dinner (and admittedly not wanting to use up the most exciting dishes in Zahav that I may be saving to cook for others), Ottolenghi will answer my call. I’ve been looking to cook this one for a while, both because it looks yummy and is beautiful!

For some reason, I had my doubts that a serving of this with a single egg would really constitute a whole meal. Wishing to sustain myself for 6 meals (until a much-anticipated Ethiopian dinner with my housemates on Sunday), I decided to play it safe and triple this recipe. I made this decision thinking the eggs would be finished in the oven (like shakshuka and a few other baked Ottolenghi dishes). It turns out this recipe actually calls for setting the eggs on the stove (perhaps just for convenience?). I followed the recipe using my 13-quart dutch oven, extending the times by only a few minutes for each step. When it came to the eggs, I put the whole thing in the oven with the lid on at 310F for about 15-minutes. I think this would have worked well had I kept a better eye on it, but it did go slightly over. 12 minutes would have been ideal. Instead, my egg centers had just set, and were deep gold and gelatinous throughout (fine!) Serve with crusty bread.

The resulting dish was rich, meaty, and nutty. The picture in the book doesn’t quite capture how much this is a meat stew of sorts. The yogurt sauce and the tomatoes make the dish quite good (bumped it up half a point!) Get the cast-iron as hot as you comfortably can. Cleaning the cast iron after charring these cherry tomatoes will test your cast-iron cleaning abilities – do it right away, remove as much as you can with a chain mail or scraper, wipe dry, heat it up on the stove to apply oil, *then* you will probably have to spot clean with some steel wool to really make sure there is no residue building up. Then apply a nice layer of oil and let it smoke for 5+ minutes. Good! Also, you will need more than a pinch of salt in the sauce, and I did find the water to be necessary there too.

Joe’s Rating: 6.5
Difficulty: 5.5