Kicking Off the AtWCC

The first country we explored for the Around the World Cooking Challenge was Afghanistan, and we started way back in June 2020. I really meant to recap these on time, and I actually wrote many of the posts back in 2020, so why did it take almost two years to get to this point? Because I had wanted to write WorldEats restaurant summaries of our Afghan food exploration first to show what we were modeling the dishes after, but that just never happened because it was a daunting task that I never seemed to have enough time to do. Since we're almost to our fifth stop on our world tour, it's time to get started, with or without the WorldEats recaps.

Aushak

My favorite Afghan dish is probably aushak, leek dumplings topped with a meat sauce and yogurt sauce. I mentioned this in my 2011 favorite food memories list, and we got it often when we went to Ariana, one of our favorite neighborhood places when we lived in Hell's Kitchen. (I've said favorite a lot in this paragraph, but aushak deserves it.) Aushak is a fair amount of work though, and I wasn't so good at making dumplings (still not great at it), so it was not how I wanted to start the challenge. But there was another dish at Ariana called aushe burida that we got a couple of times, which was sliced noodles with a very similar garlic and mint yogurt sauce and meat curry sauce that was kind of like aushak but with noodles instead of dumplings. I decided to start there to try to start off the challenge with a win.

Aushe burida, looks very similar to aushak

I couldn't find a recipe for aushe burida online, and every time I searched for it, I just got brought back to the description of the dish at Ariana, so I'm not sure if that's just one of their family recipes or if it's spelled differently elsewhere or what. So I pulled up an aushak recipe from Tara's Multicultural Table, used that to get some ideas about the sauce, and tried to adapt that from what we remembered about aushe burida at Ariana (which wasn't that easy since it had been years since the last time we had it), adding in some leeks as a nod to the flavor of the aushak.

There were three main components to the dish: the noodles, the meat sauce, and the yogurt sauce. I ended up with a yogurt sauce that consisted of plain yogurt, salt, a lot of garlic powder, a few cloves of minced garlic, and about 1/3 cup of finely chopped fresh mint. The yogurt sauce chilled in the fridge while I made the rest of the recipe. Although the aushe burida at Ariana was made with homemade noodles, I chose to just use dry pasta, because I definitely did not have time to tackle a separate pasta-making project too.

I made the meat sauce while the pasta was cooking using onion, garlic, a meatless crumble, salt, freshly ground black pepper, garlic powder (a lot), paprika, ground coriander, scallions, leeks, tomato sauce, and chopped fresh mint, all generally added in that order with the mint at the end right before taking off the heat. Traditionally, this sauce would be made with actual meat, but I don't cook much red meat at home and opted this time to use the Gardein beefless ground. It would probably work with any ground meat or meat substitute though. The bowls when assembled were layered with the noodles on the bottom, then the meat sauce, and lastly topped with the yogurt.

Overall, we liked the dish, and we thought the taste got close to what we remembered of the aushak and aushe burida at Ariana, but not exactly. We thought maybe it was the richness of the meat stewing in the sauce that was missing with the plant-based meat substitutes, so maybe something like Impossible Burger would be better since it mimics the flavor of beef so much more. Visually, the sauce also looked different from what we had at the restaurant because it looked like there were some yellow split peas in their sauce. Maybe there were also more secret ingredients that we couldn't guess.

We've made this several more times since then, mostly using the same recipe with some minor tweaks until about 22 months later when I tried a recipe from a cookbook I hadn't yet discovered the first time around (not surprising considering I wasn't really browsing library catalogs or cookbook lists less than 3 months into the pandemic). More on that another time!