Falafel: the worldwide street food - Chron.com
On a windy street in the Marais district - where Jewish shops and restaurants line the sidewalks - some of the best crispy-filled pitas outside the Middle East are sold. It's the only stop I made twice on a food tour though the city some years ago, and upon my return to the U. S. , I immediately began a search for the perfect fried chickpea rounds like the ones I had in Paris. They're nearly impossible to replicate from restaurant to restaurant, let alone across continents. The Israelis serve falafel with pickle spears. "Anywhere you go, of course they'll tell you they have the best falafel," said Nawal Kharsa , chef and owner of San Francisco's King of Falafel. According to Palestinian-born Kharsa, her restaurant was the first to introduce falafel to San Francisco more than 40 years ago, when she and her husband bought the corner liquor/grocery store and began serving the spiced fried chickpea balls for... "We just started cooking it in a very small volume and handing it out," Kharsa said, "and after a while, people would come in to order it. ". The space was transformed into a full counter-service restaurant in the 1980s, and now she's frying up... It's a fairly basic recipe - made predominately from chickpeas, parsley, garlic, onion, jalapeño peppers and sesame seeds - but a quick lesson on falafel-making revealed that it's more about the technique. Source: www.chron.com
