Shop at the Shuk

Tuesday, December 1. 2009

For serious grocery shopping in Jerusalem, there's only one place to go: the shuk. Specifically, I'm talking about the Mahane Yehuda Market in the New City, where you can pretty much buy any kind of Israeli food there is, either in raw ingredient or in takeaway lunch form.

Mahane Yehuda is as large as the Mercado Central in Sao Paulo, taking up about 5 blocks of alleys. Unlike the Mercado Central, though, it's not covered, but that's not as much of a concern in Jerusalem as it is in rainy Brazil. As you can see, on a Sunday afternoon it's packed with shoppers (Sunday is a weekday in Israel).

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A large part of the market is devoted to produce. My brother brought me to this booth to identify the types of mushrooms.

This being the Middle East, they also sell enormous amounts of garlic. You can't tell in this picture, but behind the vendor that metal door leads to a 5' x 10' stone room filled three feet deep with garlic. I also took some cool vegetable screen background pictures.

This Orthodox Jewish man does NOT approve of stawberries. Wanton fruit! Berry of Sheeba!

Moving on to spices, this Jewish spice and nut vendor probably has the most photographed spice stall in the world. His shop was featured in the recent Saveur article on the shuk. Those vermillion cones are "oiled paprika", which actually doesn't taste like much and I think is there mostly for show.

He also sells less demonstrative spices, nuts, and flavor mixes. The last, mixes of spices, nuts, seeds and other things for adding to rice, salads and 3-day-old-cholent, are his biggest sellers.

Mmmmmm ... cheese. Lots of it basically feta, of course; brined sheep and goat milk cheeses. In Israel, you see more goat and sheeps' milk cheese thank you do cows' milk cheese.

The sweet of choice in the Levant is Halvah, a crunchy, pasty substance made from sesame seeds, honey or sugar, and spices. If you've only had canned halvah in the US, it's like judging all cheese by Velveeta; the real thing is much finer and comes in a variety of flavors. That being said, even after several years in Israel, my mother still can't stand the stuff.

Of course, it wouldn't be an Israeli market without bread! Both the Arab kinds, and the European kinds. Yaaaay bread.

Moving into preserved foods, olives are of course another cornerstone of Mediterranean cuisine, and a panopoly of varieties from tiny to huge and from plain to get-me-some-yogurt-now spiced are widely and cheaply available.

In the dry climate of Israel, nuts are also a staple, and there were at least a dozen nutsellers at the market.

Even candy is sold in open bins, like nuts or produce.

They sell meat at the shuk as well; we watch these guys hurl big slabs of meat into a shopping cart on the sidewalk, presumably for distribution to the various meatsellers elsewhere in the market. This shows you to be cautious about your shopping; Israel does not have the same sanitation laws as the US, and with meat and fish especially you want to have a clear idea of where it came from and how long it's been out.

Now, you want something with your dinner too, eh? When I visited Israel first in the 1980's, there were two kosher wines available in Israel, both of them barely fit to cook with. Today, there are more than two dozen Israeli wineries,, both kosher and non-kosher, which easily measure up to the wines of California or France.

So, next time you visit Jerusalem: rent an apartment, visit the shuk, and cook yourself some fantastic Israeli food.

Posted by The Fuzzy Chef in Food Tourism at 19:59 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)