Fail-afel

When I decided to go temporarily vegetarian, the recipe I was most looking forward to trying was falafel. A local restaurant makes excellent falafel, and it looks really easy to make when you look at the recipes. Just throw a bunch of stuff in the food processor, make patties, and fry them in a pan - what could be easier than that?


I was so, so wrong. Sure, the food processor part was easy:

Ooooo pretty

At this point I was feeling pretty confident. The mixture came out of the food processor tasting great. The composition was the problem - the batter was REALLY wet and hard to form into patties. So I tried this, thinking it was a genius idea:

Fail-afel muffins!

...and I tried this - making falafel-balls in my hands and slamming them onto a cookie sheet to make patties (which was a LOT of fun!):

Both efforts failed miserably. When I attempted to remove them from the muffin tin/cookie sheet, they completely fell apart because the middle was so soft. I salvaged what I could, and tried the more traditional pan-frying method with what was left.

These looked authentic, but still completely fell apart on removal from the pan, as the middle was still completely soft. Even the fried outsides were deceptively un-crispy. I ate a few of them with some store-bought yogurt sauce, but they were mushy and awful. I'm sorry to say, most of the results of this effort ended up in the trash.

I have some ideas for how to make this recipe better and will be trying it again in the future. If I ever successfully make falafel, I promise to post the recipe. In the meantime, any suggestions are greatly appreciated.