AMMAN — From jameed chocolate to face masks made of eggplant
to a soup that mimics human tears, Jordanian chef
Omar Sartawi has become
internationally acclaimed for his extraordinary creations.
اضافة اعلان
Sartawi, a Jordanian chef and food artist who has a degree
in design and engineering, began his career working in construction in the
Gulf. Afterwards, Sartawi returned home and established a design house in
Jordan, while still pursuing a long-held passion for cooking and culinary arts.
After opening his first restaurant,
Food Box Co. in Jabal
Amman, which is an Italian-Asian fusion restaurant, Sartawi realized the
restaurant didn’t quite feed his need for creativity and innovation in the
kitchen. So, after studying food science and chemistry, he developed one of his
most unique creations — jameed chocolate.
The chocolate is a hybrid dessert that combines the sourness
of jameed with the sweetness of chocolate. Jameed is a dairy product made from
salted and sun-dried goats’ milk. The traditional Jordanian ingredient is then
shaped into a ball before being used to make Labneh, one of the main
ingredients for mansaf.
Jameed has a very strong taste and aroma, making it an
extremely complex material to work with. Sartawi told
Jordan News: “I wanted to
express my culture in a way that’d seem logical to a French person for example.
Jameed on its own may seem like an alien ingredient to them, but mixing it with
the delicacy of Swiss chocolate will make it taste more familiar.”
“Jameed is not an apologetic material, it’s a tough and
strong ingredient — a pure creation of the Jordanian desert,” the chef
explained. “I failed miserably in the beginning when I tried to hide its
flavor, but when I took a step back and decided to embrace it, the results
turned out amazing.”
Sartawi described the taste profile of jameed chocolate as a
delightful journey that starts with the acidity and roughness of jameed, before
the delicate sweetness of Swiss chocolate breaks through.
Sartawi was shocked by consumer enthusiasm for the
unexpected combination. People from around the globe started ordering his
dessert.
Chocolate isn’t the chef’s only innovative use of
jameed.
Taking advantage of his background as a designer, and his
specialty in molecular gastronomy and food science, Sartawi was able to sculpt
a replica of the two-headed Ain Ghazal statue using “jameed concrete” — a
material that’s similar to concrete and stiffens with time.
The Ain Ghazal statues are reed and lime plaster sculptures
that were found in Jordan, and dated to the Neolithic period. These statues
were among the first large-scale representations of the human body.
“I wanted to expose my culture through food,” he said. “This
edible replica got so much media exposure that it allowed people to get more
familiar with Jordan as an important cultural inhabited land.”
Perhaps some of Sartawi’s most creative culinary creations
are “My Beirut” and “Tears of Beirut.”
Sartawi laser-engraved the name “Beirut” onto a lamb’s
heart, as a literal interpretation of the Arabic saying “Your name is written
in my heart.” Alongside the heart is a broth that closely mimics the salinity and
viscosity of human tears.
This dish was created in response to the tragic explosion in
Beirut. Sartawi went on to raise funds for the city along with other
international chefs.
Recently, Sartawi created a material that is “almost
identical to animal’s leather, as it can be torn, stretched, and shaped in
every way, and is able to fool the sharpest of fashion critics” out of the skin
of eggplants.
Sartawi is currently cooperating with designers from London,
Dubai, and Bahrain to create furniture, bags, and facemasks using the “leather”
material.
Sartawi encouraged young chefs and food artist to explore a
career in this field, equipped with proper knowledge, experience, and an open
mind.
“The biggest obstacle is one’s self. People should be
familiar with constant failure, because at the end, it’ll all pay off.”
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