Reader Recipes, Part One: Falafels

As regular readers will recall, I had some unfortunate encounters with falafels a couple of months ago. Thankfully, a reader was gracious enough to send a new falafel recipe to me to try (look at the Comments in that link). I had imagined this post would be my triumphant report of beautiful falafels. Alas, the cooking muse had other plans for me.

One thing I have learned: it’s not the recipe, it’s me. I am clearly doing something wrong, very wrong. I made two batches last night and both sets turned out the same: big fat oily soup messes.

Batch number 2

So I call on readers once again to help me out here! What the heck am I doing wrong?

Here’s what I did:

1. I followed the recipe religiously.
2. I gently stuffed the falafel mixture into a tablespoon and dropped the little nuggets into hot oil (the pan was on med-high heat). In this batch, I used a lot of oil…enough that it came up the side of the falafels but did not cover them.
3. When that resulted in a disintegrated soupy bean mess, I got a new pan and started over. In this batch, I used about 1/3 of the amount of oil as in the first batch.
4. Then I packed the falafel mixture tightly into the tablespoon, thinking it was my technique that was off. The results, however, were the same.

So, what is going on here? Would making them bigger help?

It’s one thing to fail miserably the first time, but the second time? Come on!