Lamb and potato kofte
Kofte, black-eyed beans and spinach served with yoghurt, bread and plenty of olive oil. Big Has brings a taste of Cyprus!
Ingredients
For the black-eyed peas and spinach
- 500/1lb 2oz black-eyed beans in the pod, or dried black-eyed beans soaked overnight
- 260²µ/9½´Ç³ú spinach, chopped
- 300²µ/10½´Ç³ú shallots, finely diced
- 2 lemons, juice only
- sea salt
- good-quality extra virgin olive oil
For the kofte
- 1.4kg/3lb 2oz potatoes, ideally Cyprus, finely grated
- 35g/1oz sea salt
- 12g/½oz freshly ground black pepper
- 2 tsp cumin seeds, crushed
- 1 tbsp pul biber (dried red pepper, also known as Aleppo pepper)
- 2 large onions, grated
- 700g/1lb 9oz minced lamb shoulder
- bunch fresh flatleaf parsley, finely chopped
- sunflower oil, for frying
To serve
Method
To make the black-eyed peas and spinach, pod the black-eyed beans as you would peas or broad beans, leaving any smaller ones in the pod as we can just cook these as is. Add the beans to a saucepan of water and boil for 5 minutes – to soften the outer skins.
Drain off the murky water, give the beans a little rinse, put them back in the same pan, with cold water, and bring to the boil. Now, depending on how fresh your beans are, you need to slowly simmer them for anywhere between 25 and 45 minutes. The skins should be cooked until soft and you can taste a smoothness in the beans’ interior.
To make the kofte, pat off any moisture from the potatoes using a tea towel or clean muslin. Add the potatoes to a large bowl, season with the salt, black pepper, cumin and pul biber. Add the grated onions with any onion juice, and then the minced lamb and parsley and give it a good mix. Mix it for at least 5 minutes – don’t just use your hand as if it was a spoon; squeeze the mix through your fingers and make sure that everything is evening distributed. Shape into little torpedoes or small meatballs – we do either in Cyprus, it’s up to you.
When the beans are cooked, add the spinach, and take the pan off the heat. Spinach is very soft and will pretty much wilt in the sun, so it doesn’t need long. Don’t leave the spinach in the water for too long or you’ll just drown it and loose all the flavour in the water. Drain the beans and spinach and set aside.
In a small frying pan, heat some olive oil and slowly fry the finely diced shallots with a good amount of salt. Cook for about 15 minutes, or until they’re soft and sweet without any colour.
In a tall-sided frying pan or saucepan, heat enough oil to cover half of the kofte. We don’t want to deep-fry them, but shallow-fry and turn them midway through cooking. If you deep-fry the kofte, the heat is too intense, and the potatoes won’t cook. Be patient, they’ll take about 4–5 minutes on each side or until they’re a beautiful golden-brown.
By now, the shallots should be sweet, and the beans and spinach shouldn't be steaming hot, so put everything in a bowl. (If your beans are still super-hot you’ve not cooked your shallots long enough!) At this point, taste the mixture and you’ll probably find it’s a little flat – you’ll have a little saltiness, but nothing will be singing. Squeeze in the lemon juice and taste again. Now the acidity is up, our tongues are entertained, and you want to mellow that acidity out with peppery olive oil!
Add olive oil, not as if you were dressing a salad, but more like you’re using the oil as a flavourful ingredient. A lot of Cypriot dishes are oil-heavy. It’s all about balances; olive oil in Cyprus is made from black olives so it can be quite heavy, but when you’re cooking something as basic as beans and shallots, you need something that will carry flavour and give you that power. You want to be able to see the olive oil on the plate – that’s the good stuff that bread was made for.
Plate up the kofte and beans and spinach with some yoghurt and flatbread.
