Mixing it up

Gili Altman runs a meat restaurant in a vegetarian moshav

By MIRIAM KRESH
Cooking Grape Leaves521 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Cooking Grape Leaves521
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Chef Gili Altman, 42, starts his workday at the greengrocer’s, the fish store and the local butcher. Ordering the best and freshest produce of the Galilee’s rich countryside, he heads into his restaurant kitchen and plans the day’s menu with his team. The restaurant serves the beautiful Amirey Hagalil Boutique Hotel, located in Moshav Amirim and overlooking Lake Kinneret.
Raised in the urban center of the country, Altman moved to the North seeking peaceful rural life and the opportunity to cook in the style that matters most to him.
“Cooking is a way of life for me,” Altman says intensely. “And I’m only interested in cooking with local raw ingredients. For instance, this is wine country, so I have access to plenty of fresh grape leaves. I pick them in the vineyards and stuff them with fish from the Sea of Galilee. The herbs, the lamb and beef, the wines I serve – they’re all from around here, raised or grown locally. I don’t call it Galilean cuisine. It’s just local cuisine.”
Altman grew up in a traditional family that kept kosher. His mother’s warm kitchen and ample cooking were his first culinary influences.
“My mother is an excellent cook. On Shabbat and holidays, her table is spread with a huge variety of foods, like at a wedding feast. And she cooks everything herself.
My father and siblings also cook, one way or another, and I started cooking confidently at around age 12.”
We asked Altman to share his culinary philosophy. He is a reserved man, often smiling with his eyes rather than cracking big smiles, but his answer is almost poetic.
“If you cook from your heart, with feeling, thinking about what your family likes, you’ll cook well,” he says.
“When you start searching for exotic ingredients and specialized kitchen tools, you’re not cooking from the heart. You’re only cooking a recipe, and the love goes away.
“It’s important to cook with the ingredients God provides, at the time He provides them. Cook with ingredients that are available at the moment. So in summer, cook what grows in summer and in winter, cook winter produce.”
Altman’s passion for cooking with local, seasonal ingredients leads him to recreate his menus every day. “I have a standard menu, of course. People want to know what they’re getting. But I play with my menus, offering new dishes that reflect the changing seasons from day to day.
Right now, summer fruits are in full season, so they appear in many dishes from my kitchen.” The chef’s voice warms. “Plums of all colors, peaches, apricots, green almonds – there’s everything right now,” he says.
Married and the father of two, Altman teaches his children how to cook at home. He also gives cooking workshops for adults who want to expand their culinary skills in Haifa, Tiberias and at the Amirey Hagalil Hotel. When we asked about his meat restaurant’s location in a vegetarian moshav, he explained that the hotel and restaurant are not connected with Moshav Amirim: “We’re just neighbors.”
We watched Altman prepare an apparatus to grill foods with a smoky taste. He put a handful of barbeque wood chips into an aluminum baking pan and moistened them with a little water. He pierced another baking pan of the same size in several places with a knife, and placed a package of fish wrapped in vine leaves on top of the pieced pan. Settling the pierced pan over the pan with the wet barbecue chips, he covered the whole thing with a sheet of aluminum foil and placed it over the gas at medium heat. It cooked for 20 minutes. Releasing the fish from its leafy wrapping, we tasted it. The fish was cooked through and succulent, and tasted deliciously smoky.
“This way of cooking creates lots of smoke, so it’s best done on an outdoor grill or camping stove,” Altman warns. “But you can try it in the kitchen, if you train a fan on it to blow the smoke out of the window.”
We plan to try it at our next picnic. Clouds of smoke apart, its use of fresh grape leaves makes it a true summertime dish.
What advice does Altman have for the ordinary home cook who’s getting bored with the same food all the time? “Watch fewer cooking shows on television and go to more cooking classes,” he says immediately. “People love to watch cooking shows, and admittedly they’re fun [Altman has appeared on several Israeli cooking programs] – but they don’t learn to cook from them.
“There are so many good culinary workshops in Israel. It’s not like it used to be, when there were only cookbooks to get ideas from. Today, you can learn to make chocolate, pastry, all kinds of things, in a real kitchen. Prices for these classes are reasonable, too. Take a friend or your partner and make a day of it; organize a group of co-workers. The important thing is to get into a real kitchen and get your hands dirty.”
The following recipe was provided in the true Altman style, without specific quantities. As we pleaded for a more conventional method, the chef agreed to reduce the play of the imagination, and gave us a recipe that home cooks can easily reproduce.
St. Peter’s fish fillets wrapped in grape leaves 16-20 freshly picked grape leaves - may substitute brined grape leaves which you’ve drained and rinsed
Boiling water to blanch grape leaves Juice of ½ lemon 4 fillets of St. Peter’s Fish (Amnon) Sea salt Freshly-ground black pepper Olive oil 8 cherry tomatoes ¼ cup white wine
Blanch the fresh grape leaves in the boiling water and lemon juice for 1 minute; drain.
Place 2-3 leaves on work surface so they overlap. Judge the size of the fillet and how many leaves it will need to make a wrap for it.
Place a fillet in the center of the leaves. Slice 1 or 2 cherry tomatoes and place the slices in a line down the fillet.
Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Drizzle olive oil over all.
Roll the grape leaves up from the sides to the center, fold the top and bottom, and turn the package over to make an envelope for the fish. Place folded side down into a heavy iron pan, or a ridged grill pan. Drizzle more olive oil over the package.
Roast the fish packages over high heat for 20 minutes. Just before removing from the pan, pour the wine in and let it sizzle for a few minutes. If you choose to cook this over an outdoor grill, just sprinkle the wine over the packages right before removing from the heat to serve.
Open the leaf wrapping and enjoy the fish.
Yield: 4 servings