halloumi – Gastronomy Domine

21st July 2011

Roast vegetable and halloumi tart

I’ve been busy working on some new recipes while having a month off from blogging. This is a really good-looking tart, great for parties. I love working with filo pastry; it’s very forgiving (any little tears can easily be ignored as you layer new sheets on), and the crisp finish is second to none, fantastic against the softened vegetables and the bite of the halloumi.

For one 20cm tart, you’ll need:

50g pancetta
1 large white onion
1 large sweet potato
4 pointed peppers
1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves
100g halloumi
10 sheets filo pastry
25g melted butter
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 200ºC (390ºF). Toss the pancetta, the onion, diced finely, and the peeled, cubed potato in the olive oil with a large pinch of salt and some pepper. Roast for 45 minutes, stirring once halfway through the cooking time. The sweet potatoes should be turning golden-brown, and the onions should be sweet and golden. Turn the oven down to 190ºC (370ºF).

While the sweet potato mixture is roasting, cut the peppers in half and grill them, skin side up, until the skins turn black and start to blister. Seal the hot, blistered peppers in a plastic freezer bag. The steam they release will help to loosen the skins and make them easy to slip off with your fingers.

Line a loose-bottomed 20cm tart dish with filo pastry. Lay a sheet halfway across the dish and fold over any that dangles over the edge. Lay another sheet across the other half of the dish, brush them both with butter, and rotate the dish 45 degrees. Repeat the process until you have used up all ten sheets. Prick the base of the pastry a few times with a fork, and line with a circle of greaseproof paper. Fill the tart case with baking beans and bake blind for ten minutes. Remove the beans and paper.

Chop the halloumi into pieces the same size as the chunks of sweet potato, and chop the skinned peppers. Toss the halloumi, peppers and thyme with the sweet potato mixture. Spoon the filling into the tart case. Bake for another 30-40 minutes until golden. Leave to rest for 10 minutes before popping the tart out of the case and serving.

6th May 2008

Glazed halloumi and baby fennel

I had a stroke of luck the other day, when I found some baby fennel in the supermarket. These tiny bulbs with their tender stalks are delicious. They’re a little less strong in flavour than their grown-up cousin, and they’ve got a lovely texture, giving easily to the tooth with a good crunch even after cooking. If you can’t find baby fennel for this recipe, you can use a sliced bulb of the adult version.

I’ve teamed the aromatic fennel up with some salty halloumi here, and glazed the lot with a white wine and soft brown sugar reduction. This is a great (and surprisingly quick and easy) supper dish with some crusty bread to mop up the juices.

To serve two, you’ll need:

1 block (half a pound) halloumi
8 whole baby fennel bulbs
2 large shallots
1 clove garlic
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 small glass white wine
1 rounded tablespoon soft brown sugar
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon butter
Salt and pepper
Basil flowers or chopped basil leaves to garnish

Dice the shallots finely and slice the garlic. Slice the halloumi into pieces about half a centimetre thick. Melt the butter and oil together in a large, non-stick frying pan, and fry the shallots with the fennel seeds for a minute or so until the shallots are becoming soft, then add the garlic, fennel bulbs and cayenne. Cook, turning the fennel, for another two minutes, then add the halloumi to the pan in a single layer with an extra drizzle of oil if you think it needs it. There won’t be much room in there, so put the fennel on top of the pieces of halloumi while the halloumi browns – this will take between five and ten minutes minutes, turning regularly (and carefully – a flexible silicone spatula is really useful here).

When the halloumi is golden on both sides, tip in the wine and sugar. Let it bubble up and simmer it hard until the liquid has almost all evaporated. You should be left with a dense syrup coating the fennel and halloumi. Taste to check the seasoning, then serve with a sprinkling of basil (the plant in my kitchen is flowering at the moment, as you’ll see from the photo) with plenty of bread to mop up the aromatic sauce.

5th December 2007

Sweet potato and halloumi sauté

Sweet potato is a great winter ingredient – all that sugar and gorgeous colour make for a really uplifting meal. The tuber is so packed with sweetness that cooking it in this way will make the edges catch and caramelise in the butter, leaving each soft little cube with a coating that’s halfway between chewy and crisp. Alongside the salty halloumi, this mixture of textures and flavours is a real winner.

This dish makes a really tasty main course for vegetarians. I also like it as a side dish with some good sausages. The magic in this is all in the spicing – it’s worth taking the time to set to the spices with a mortar and pestle until they’re really well blended (you can also use a coffee grinder) – whatever method you choose, make sure that the anise and cloves in particular are well-pulverised, because neither ingredient is good to bite down on in large chunks. You’ll end up making more spice mixture than you need, but I view this as a time-saver; just pack the extra mixture into a freezer bag and pop it in the freezer. Next time you come to cook this dish, you can use the mixture directly from the freezer.

To serve four as a side dish or two as a main course, you’ll need:

1 sweet potato
1 block halloumi
1 large shallot
1 clove garlic
1 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 teaspoon flaked chillies
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon onion salt
1 ‘petal’ star anise
3 cloves
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon chopped parsley

Take the cumin, fennel seeds, chillies, cinnamon, onion salt, anise and cloves, and grind them thoroughly in a mortar and pestle or coffee grinder. Peel the sweet potato and cut it into large dice, about the size of the top joint of your thumb. Sprinkle two teaspoons of the spice mixture over the sweet potato pieces and toss well until they are coated. Cut the halloumi into dice the same size as the sweet potato pieces and dice the shallot finely.

Heat the butter in a non-stick frying pan over a medium-low heat (make sure you use a non-stick pan or this dish will stick like glue) until it starts to foam, and tip in the spiced sweet potato. Sauté gently, turning the pieces every few minutes, until the sweet potato is soft all the way through (about 20 minutes).

Turn the heat up a notch and add the shallots and a crushed clove of garlic to the pan. Stir well to distribute the shallots and garlic around the pan, then add the halloumi, making sure that all the halloumi pieces are in contact with the bottom of your pan. Cook for another five minutes without stirring, turn the halloumi pieces and continue to sauté for another five minutes. The shallots should be brown and a little gummy, and the halloumi should be seared a golden colour where it’s been in contact with the pan.

Turn out into a heated serving dish and garnish with parsley.

10th August 2007

Halloumi wrapped in vine leaves

I had a very nice halloumi and vine leaf nibble with drinks at 6 St Chad’s Place, a bar in London (a place I can’t recommend to you with my hand on my heart – it’s so appallingly noisy that you can forget meeting your friends there, because you won’t be able to hear them speak; the chips are frozen; and they made my very pricey Dirty Martini with olives in oil, which floated repellently on top of the gin). The halloumi was excellent, though, so I’ve come up with my own version to be eaten in the quiet calm of my own kitchen, with a Dirty Martini made properly with brined olives and a little of their juice.

Vine leaves and halloumi are excellent with this particular drink because they are both preserved in brine, like the olives; prepared with some aromatic herbs, sharp chilli and herby honey they go down very nicely indeed, and make a good supper dish or a posh nibble to serve with cocktails. To make 12 little packets of flavour (enough to serve three as a main course with some bread or couscous) you’ll need:

2 blocks of halloumi
12 large vine leaves
1 large red chilli
3 tablespoons runny Greek honey (thyme honey is great if you can find it)
1 tablespoon chopped marjoram

Any given pack of vine leaves will contain a mixture of sizes – you should be able to find at least 12 big ones in there. Discard or freeze the rest – piddling small vine leaves aren’t very useful.

Rinse the vine leaves beneath a cold tap and dry with kitchen paper. Chop the chilli into 12 slivers. Slice each block of halloumi into six pieces, and lay each piece on a vine leaf as in the picture above, with a piece of chilli on top. Fold the vine leaf around the cheese as in these pictures:

Heat a large, nonstick frying pan without any oil over a medium flame. Twelve little packets fit snugly in my largest pan, but it is unusually big, so you may find you need to cook in two batches or use two pans. Carefully place each little halloumi parcel, the side with the open leaf edges down, in the hot pan and cook for four minutes. The hot cheese will have sealed the edges, so you can be less careful when turning the parcels. Cook the other side for another four minutes, and remove to a serving dish.

Drizzle the honey evenly over the halloumi and sprinkle the oregano over the dish. Serve piping hot.

18th January 2007

Persian-spiced Halloumi

There’s a shelf in our fridge full of emergency foods. There’s emergency bacon (for those evenings where nothing but a bacon sandwich or some magic beans will do), emergency anchovies, emergency chorizo and other good things with a good long shelf-life. They’ll all make a quick and tasty supper dish. Among the preserved meats and fish, there’s always at least one emergency packet of halloumi, a lovely, salty, Greek ewe’s cheese, which does not melt when grilled.

Grilled or pan-fried Halloumi has a soft texture with a crisp surface, pleasantly resilient to the tooth. It makes a quick and delicious supper dish with a few extra ingredients – the pine nuts and sultanas work well with the salty cheese, and the capers add a lovely aromatic zing. (Rinse your capers well to make sure the dish isn’t too salty.) I served this with some cous-cous which I’d spiked with harissa and a lemony green salad.

To serve two, you’ll need:

1 pack of Halloumi
1 tablespoon butter
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon nonpareil capers in salt, soaked in cold water for ten minutes and well-rinsed
1 tablespoon fat sultanas
1 tablespoon toasted pine nuts
3 chopped shallots
Juice of ½ a lemon

Melt the butter in a large, non-stick frying pan, and saute the shallots with the cumin until they begin to take on a golden colour. Add the halloumi, cut into 1cm-thick slices, and lay in the pan surrounded by the shallots. After five minutes, turn the halloumi and sprinkle over the capers, sultanas and pine nuts.

After another five minutes, turn the halloumi again and pour over the lemon juice. Stir to make sure everything is combined and serve immediately.

24th March 2006

Herb, halloumi and green garlic salad

Wandering through Sainsbury’s this evening, I saw a shelf full of fresh garlic. I spent a whole five seconds or so wondering how they’d managed to get hold of fresh garlic in March, and then (I’m being slow today) thought to read the label. It’s from Egypt. Now, usually, I wouldn’t buy an overpriced, overpackaged single bulb that had flown such a long way to get to me . . . but as I continued my shopping, my mind kept going back to the garlic. After being slightly snappish with the lady at the fish counter about the pathetic lack of shellfish, I finally left self-control at the vegetable counter and bought a single bulb.

Here it is, the thick outer skin peeled off. You can see each individual clove in place; the green tendrils growing in a point from each become the white, straw-like threads you’ll recognise on the cloves of ordinary, cured garlic you have in your kitchen cupboard. When green, these tendrils are edible and very tasty; imagine a garlicky spring onion.

This year, I’m growing a lot of garlic for eating fresh in the garden; it’s sweeter, more fragrant and less harsh than the dry product. (I’m planning to have a go at curing my own this year if I manage to raise enough in the garden.) This fresh garlic roasts to a sweet, delectable paste, perfect spread on sourdough bread or stirred into a sauce. It is mild enough to be eaten raw. Sauteed gently, as in this recipe, it is juicy, plump and delicious.

Halloumi is a salty, mild-tasting, ewes’-milk cheese from the Middle East. It has a very special quality; it holds its shape and does not melt in cooking, instead turning crisply golden outside and tender inside. The Lebanese call it the kebab cheese, and it’s excellent on a skewer over a barbecue.

For a cooked herb, halloumi and green garlic salad to serve three as a main course, you’ll need:

1 bulb green (fresh) garlic, separated into cloves
6 shallots, finely diced
2 packs halloumi, sliced
1 handful each chives, coriander and tarragon
Juice of 1 lemon
1 large, sweet red chili
1 knob butter

Melt the butter in a thick pan, and gently fry the whole cloves of garlic (green parts still attached) and the shallots for about ten minutes until golden. Slide the halloumi into the pan and fry on one side for five minutes until golden. Add the chili, cut into strips, turn the cheese over and wait until the second side is golden too.

Layer half the cheese, shallots, garlic and chilis in a large mixing bowl, then sprinkle herbs on top. Arrange the rest of the halloumi and the pan juices over the herbs. Squeeze the juice of a lemon all over the salad and serve with crusty bread and some sliced tomatoes.