Kaly Cooks - Blog Posts

Hello and welcome to Cooking with Kaly.  I decided I wanted to make chouta. It was an adventure. 

We know that the meatballs are made by mixing flangria with ground lavis, forming it into balls, battering it and frying it.  To create these meatballs we therefore need something to represent flangria, something to represent lavis, and a way to put it together without egg (since eggs are unlikely to be used in cheap street food on Roshar.)

I happened to have ground turkey in the freezer that I had gotten on sale at some point. It seemed like a reasonable stand in for flangria. Given the range of ways lavis is used, I feel like corn is a reasonable earth analogue, so ground lavis gets to be corn meal.  I mixed the 1.5 lbs of meat with 1/4 cup of cornmeal, 1 Tbsp chili powder, 2 tsp cumin, and 2 tsp oregano, formed it into small balls (maybe a heaping Tbsp of meat per ball?  I didn’t measure), then covered them and put them in the fridge for a while to let the flavors meld.  

Before cooking them, I rolled them in cornmeal, dipped them in water (some but not all of the cornmeal will fall off), then rolled them in the cornmeal again.  I fried them in a thin layer of canola oil in a cast iron skillet until they were golden brown.  The cornmeal gets all crispy and the flavors are great.  I’m a big fan of these meatballs. (note:the plate in this picture is small, the meatballs are not giant. There are also a lot more meatballs not shown)

For the flatbread, I mixed 1 cup mashed potatoes (since tubers seem to be common on Roshar) with 1/4 cup cornmeal, a heaping 1/4 cup flour and 1 tsp baking soda. I kneaded the mixture until I had a dough that I could press out into a decent sized flatbread.  This made enough for 2. Transfer the pressed out flat bread *carefully* to the frying pan and make sure you don’t try to flip it too soon or it will tear and be a mess. This made a decent flatbread. I think the recipe needs work though.

I used the pan drippings from frying the meatballs to make the gravy, but I didn’t have any good broth to use so it came out a little bland.  I think drippings gravy is the right idea here, I just didn’t do it well.

Overall verdict: This definitely feels like street food. It was tasty and has the potential to be amazing once I get the flatbread and gravy right. Nomnomnom. It’s not going to win any awards for being good for you, but that’s not what this is about.