Mitchell Davis
Lunch with Erez Komarovsky
In Galilee
Erez Komarovsky licked bits of chicken liver and leek off his fingers. He was making his version of chopped liver. The livers came from chickens killed by Druze farmers the day before. He seasoned them generously with rock salt, and with black and green peppercorns coarsely ground with mortar and pestle. He seared them to medium-rare in a smoking-hot, cast-iron pan, glazed them with pomegranate molasses, and transferred them to a giant stone mortar — he doesn’t cook with electricity. There he mashed them haphazardly with an equal amount of leek that had been cooked slowly in olive oil. He washed his hands and paused to tear just-picked figs into neat sections for garnish. Then more salt, more pepper, more mashing.
Komarovsky insisted we rip off hunks of the whole-grain bread he had baked that morning and use them to scoop the warm liver and figs out of the mortar. This was not the chopped liver that my mother prepared for Jewish holidays. Served warm, Komarovsky’s liver had a deep, aged-Cabernet color. Yet it had the delicate taste you expect from lighter-colored livers, and the texture, too, was rich and creamy, reminiscent of foie gras. (Incidentally, Komarovsky was part of a coalition that led Israel to ban the force-feeding of birds.) The faint sweetness of the melted leeks was echoed and amplified by the pomegranate and figs. Sitting around a table on a terrace overlooking the hills of Galilee, we returned to the mortar. The liver and the experience of eating it here were satisfying in a primal, intimate way.
Israelis are very proud of how much they have evolved gastronomically in the last 15 years. To make the point, as part of a culinary “mission” sponsored by the Israeli ministries of public affairs and tourism, I was carted around with a small group of food-writer friends to restaurants, farms, wineries, and other spots of gustatory interest. The lunch at Komarovsky’s house came midway through our week. We had enjoyed other meals, but this stood apart. Komarovsky’s cooking — passionate, personal, mature (more so than his 47 years) — relied on bold flavors and only a few ingredients. Its creativity lay in essential combinations, not complexity.
Komarovsky is more famous in Israel for his bread than for his food. After studying at Le Cordon Bleu and working in restaurants and bakeries in Paris, he ran a catering business out of his mother’s kitchen in Tel Aviv. In 1989 he moved to San Francisco, where he was impressed with the food and fell in love with the flavor and texture of the bread. By 1994 Komarovsky was back home, and two years later he and a business partner opened Lehem Erez (Erez’s Bread) in Herzliya, a small city northeast of Tel Aviv. Komarovsky maintains that he bakes like a cook, kneading ingredients into his doughs as a chef might add them to a soup — garlic in spring, figs in summer, Jerusalem artichokes in winter. The bakery is widely considered the starting point of a bread revolution in Israel. Within a year, Komarovsky opened a café next door serving light, seasonal food. Today Lehem Erez is a national chain with 26 bakeries. Such rapid growth hasn’t been easy; the business has had its ups and downs, and some people have criticized the bread. “It started as a small innovative bakery and ended up being a huge chain,” Erez later wrote me in an email. “I am not interested in business. I love to cook and bake. I love to smell organic vegetables and play with dough.” About two years ago, Komarovsky sold his share of the business (by then, only 10 percent). “I went back to the basics, my love for food.”
He spends most of his time now in a sort of self-imposed exile at his home in Mitzpeh Matat, a small community near the Druze village of Hurfeish in Upper Galilee, less than a kilometer from the border with Lebanon. He gardens, cooks, writes, teaches, and occasionally receives journalists.
Salads are an Israeli obsession, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but the ingredients and flavor combinations we encountered were mostly uninspired. (The pervasive Israeli salad has chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, parsley, lemon; we saw variations, some delicious, but all essentially the same thing.) Komarovsky’s salads were different. Juice ran down his arm as he tore ripe cactus pears into pieces and arranged them on an earthenware platter. He scattered fresh mint and parsley leaves over them, drizzled the fruit with fresh lime juice and olive oil from the Golan Heights, and sprinkled it with freshly ground white pepper and a shredded, tangy, Bulgarian-style ewe’s-milk cheese called Brinza from Hameiri, Israel’s first and oldest dairy, located in Safed. For another salad, which resonated with my Ashkenazi heritage but tasted like nothing I had eaten before, he combined finely diced raw beets with sour pomegranate seeds, ground caraway, silan (date syrup), lime juice, and cilantro. The unexpected flavor in his roasted tomato salad came from one of the dozen varieties of sage Komarovsky grows. Whole heads of cauliflower roasted in his wood-burning oven sat atop a pool of tahini andsilan. He began a warm okra salad by pouring olive oil into a pan, which immediately began to smoke. He added a bowlful of tiny okra that sizzled and danced. “I love the sound of it; it sounds like war”. He spooned in some very reduced chicken stock, salt, and a handful of fresh mint, and put the salad on a serving platter, topping it with grated dry ewe’s-milk cheese, another Brinza, this one from the Kadosh dairy, also in Safed. With only a few ingredients, these salads excited with unexpected flavors and remarkable vibrancy.
Outside the kitchen, Komarovsky is more provocative. He once included a recipe for suckling pig in an article published on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, on which Jews fast. He helped overturn the nationwide law banning the sale of bread on Passover. During the second Intifada, when Israelis stopped going to Arab-owned businesses, he prepared a special dinner with the chef Duhul Sfadi at Sfadi’s restaurant Diana, the most traditional Arab restaurant in Nazareth. In a country where everything is political and any balance of tensions is so tentative that a child accidentally running into my hand in the shuk in Jerusalem’s Arab quarter led to an unsettling exchange of stares, the simple act of combining beets and caraway from the Ashkenazi tradition with pomegranates and cilantro from the Sephardic tradition, and tossing it all with date honey from the Arab tradition, is nothing short of a call for peace. “Food is a nice sublimation,” Komarovsky said.
The Talmud affords no help in the debate over whether hummus or falafel should be Israel’s national dish. Hummus varies from good to great, but rarely does anyone do anything novel to it that makes any sense whatsoever. Maybe that’s because it’s a symbol of Israel’s cooking prior to the current wave of culinary sophistication. (Nevertheless, Israelis enjoy debating which are the best hummus purveyors — just about everyone agrees that hummus made by Arab-owned shops is superior — the way New Yorkers debate pizza and bagels.) In the same giant stone mortar in which he made his “chopped liver,” Komarovsky prepared massabacha, a popular variation on hummus that is chunky and served warm with a sauce of lemon juice, chile, and garlic. For chickpeas, Komarovsky substituted bubbes, large, plump beans that his Polish grandmother preferred and that resemble Greek gigantes. He began by making a paste of green chile and garlic, then added to the mortar lemon juice, tahini, olive oil, and salt, and finally the cooked beans. He mashed these until about a third of the beans remained whole. Last, he mixed in a handful of whole salted almonds that had been coated with olive oil and roasted slowly in the oven until they were deep brown all the way through. The beans, even the whole ones, were soft and smooth. The almonds contrasted in flavor, texture, and color. On Komarovsky’s chewy flatbreads, the massabacha was remarkable.
For the main dish, he roasted a rack of goat from his village in his oven. He made a paste with zitrach, a local variant of the thymelike Middle Eastern herb za’atar, together with white pepper, fennel seeds, and black olives that he rubbed on the meat. He drizzled the meat with olive oil and placed it in a roasting pan. It was done in less than 30 minutes. “I do not marinate. We do not have time to marinate. There could be a crisis tomorrow.” Alongside the goat he served the most delicious Jerusalem artichokes I’ve ever tasted. (Jerusalem artichokes were on menus everywhere we ate in Israel despite or perhaps because of their geographically inaccurate name.) Komarovsky peeled the tubers and poached them in the same concentrated chicken stock he used with the okra, before glazing them with olive oil, honey, mace, and white pepper, and roasting them alongside the goat to a glistening gold. “White pepper is, to my mind, the king of peppers,” Komarovsky noted. “The most aromatic of all peppers, and it doesn’t ‘bite’ you.” The mace and white pepper accentuated the vegetable’s unique nuttiness, while double cooking gave them the unexpected texture of a fine purée stuffed inside a delicate membrane.
It struck me as I ate that the question of what constitutes Israeli cuisine is not that different from the question of what constitutes American cuisine. Israel may be only the size of New Jersey, but it comprises people from all over the world. Despite its ancient traditions, it is a very young country. The climate ranges from the powerfully dry, hot Negev Desert to the cool Galilee hills. While noting that in America “there is no federal cuisine,” Komarovsky believes that there is something that can be considered American cuisine, or rather that there are regional American cuisines. Similarly, he believes something is evolving that can be called Israeli cuisine, with regional and ethnic influences. “The question is how to develop a national cuisine without doing fusion,” a style of cooking he dismisses for having too many ingredients, too many disparate components. By limiting his pantry to what is raised in his immediate vicinity and by minimizing the number of flavors in any dish, Komarovsky manages to fuse Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Arabic, and other influences into a straightforward, legitimate cuisine that couldn’t come from anywhere else. ●
