Dukkah

Dukkah has approximately a million different uses. Hmm, I may have exaggerated that slightly but it is really versatile. It's great with bread dipped in oil, sprinkled over chicken and fish then baked, or over roast vegetables. Or mixed with lemon juice and oil to make a salad dressing, or sprinkled on top of bread rolls before you bake them. Or stirred through yoghurt and used as a marinade for chicken. So what I'm saying is, make dukkah, and you will not regret it. This recipe makes a jam-jar's worth of dukkah. Most recipes call for hazelnuts, but the bulk bin store only had walnuts, so walnuts it is!


2/3 cup walnuts
1/2 cup sesame seeds
2 tablespoons coriander seeds
2 tablespoons cumin seeds
1 teaspoon ground pepper
1 teaspoon salt


Toast the walnuts, sesame, coriander and cumin seeds one at a time in a dry frying pan over a medium-high heat. Shake the pan every 30 seconds or so, and be careful - the sesame seeds especially will burn very quickly if you don't watch them. You want to just colour each batch, so they're golden but not burnt. The walnuts will take about 3- 4 minutes, the rest slightly shorter. 

After each batch is cooked, pop them into a mortar and pestle or food processor. Once everything is nicely coloured, grind the walnuts and seeds together. You're not aiming to make them into a powder, more to just break up the large seeds so everything is roughly the same size as the sesame seeds. Add the pepper and salt to taste, then store in an air-tight jar.