Eureka!!! The Best Vegetarian Cholent Ever!!!

Well, that's probably an exaggeration, I did, however, make a very good vegetarian this Shabbos. It had great consistency, and for vegetarian, a very good taste. Friday afternoon before Shabbos, I put six large chopped carrots in olive oil on the bottom of the five quart crock pot. To that I added three cups of dried beans - black, red and white. I also added a cup of wheat berries, a cup of barley, three heaping teaspoons of salt, a spoon and a half of pepper, and also a half a spoon of peppercorns. I also placed six whole eggs in the pot and more olive oil. I would have added paprika, but we were out. I filled the pot with water and let it cook until just after davenning early Shabbos afternoon. The ingredients blended very nicely and yielded a thick, filling consistency. The pepper gave the cholent some kick, but not so much that our pepper-averse congregants could not eat it. I augmented my own bowl with some cayenne so that it was sufficiently spicy for my taste. I had been adding mushrooms to the cholent but some people don't like them, and I feel that mushrooms don't hold up that well in leftovers. So I made this one without mushrooms. Reviews from the other congregants were uniformly positive although they would have been much happier if they could have had meat cholent.

Cholent Review - Shabbos Parashas Matos

As we made our way through Sefer Bamidbar, I continued to experiment with the cholent recipe. I put a whole bottle of barbecue sauce in the vegetarian cholent and it came out something like Jewish Boston baked beans. I also poured a bottle in the fleishig cholent and while I did not try it (I am trying to cut down my meat consumption) those who did thought it was good. Admittedly, a few dastardly souls dared to say there was too much barbecue sauce in the cholent, but there are always spoil-sports in any crowd. Nevertheless, I must confess that after two weeks straight of barbecue cholent, I myself was also ready for something different.

I think I found it. For Shabbos Parashas Matos I made my usual Morroccan dafina with chickpeas, barley (I am not brave enough yet to do it with rice), cumin, salt, pepper, olive oil and who eggs. I did add a new ingredient that made a big difference: wheat kernels, which are also know as a wheat berries. In the past, I added the wheat kernels in place of the barley. The cholent would often come out soupy and undercooked because the wheat does not soak up water the way the barley does, and somehow, there has to be the right proportion of dry ingredients to water in order the the cholent to cook properly. For this last cholent, I put a full cup of barley in and a half a cup of wheat kernels, plus the regular chickpeas, spices, oil and eggs. The additional wheat kernels had a great effect. The cholent was completely cooked through. even the chickpeas, which tend to be hard, were soft and fully cooked. And the wheat kernels were chewy and gave the entire cholent a sense of weightiness. In other words, the density and the texture were perfect, something which is hard to achieve in a vegetarian cholent. The following week, for Shabbos Parashas Masei, I made my usual Ashkenazi cholent but added the additional half cup of wheat kernels, and this improved this cholent's texture and density as well. Ah... the sweet taste of success! Have a good Shabbos!