ISRAELI CHEF BREAKS TRADITION
Don’t tell Grandma about the pork-filled kreplach
“If my Moroccan grandma had known that I cook pork belly with ras el hanout and dried fruits, most likely it would have been my end,” Tomer Amedi jokes.
The Israeli chef says he grew up in a “fairly traditional” Jewish home in Jerusalem.
His mother is from Morocco, his father from Kurdistan. Both are amazing cooks, he says, but there was definitely no shellfish, raw fish or pork on the menu.
Although inspired by his upbringing, Amedi takes a decidedly different approach to the cuisine of his hometown as head chef at the award-winning Palomar restaurant in London.
Recipes for scallop tartare and kreplach — traditional Ashkenazi dumplings — filled with ground pork are among the recipes he shares in The Palomar Cookbook (co-written with Layo Paskin; Appetite by Random House, 2017).
“What we do at the Palomar is basically, we take our heritage and then we think: How can I interpret it as a chef? What can I do with it that is different, layered, interesting, using non-traditional ingredients with traditional (dishes),” he says.
“(We use) a lot of ingredients and methods that you cook with at home but elevated to a professional kitchen. So it’s got that nice link: You can easily adapt it to the home (because) it was born in the home.”