The Ultimate Guide to Great Dates
A special Eid edition of Five Things I Ate, featuring the magical fruit.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things I Ate! This week, we have a special feature on dates (the fruit), to celebrate the end of Ramadan. Special thanks to Mariam, daytime researcher, nighttime purveyor of BTS memes, who is our expert for this week’s letter. Check out past posts here, and please follow my Instagram @fivethingsiate.
Jumbo – not extra jumbo – dates at Kaluystans
123 Lexington Ave, New York, NY 10016
It’s officially Date Season*, as marked by the entire rack of gift-wrapped and bow-tied RAMADAN SALE JUMBO DATES at Kaluystans, my favorite spice store of all time.** As a human with a sweet tooth, I love dates. But as a mere mortal with no cultural context for this magical fruit, I called in my friend Mariam, who I am naming as an expert because she handed me one of the best dates I’ve ever eaten out of a plastic baggie, which is enough qualification for me. Her first pro tip? Skip the fancy wrapping paper and go for clear boxes, so you can see if they look soft or not. My eyes glazed over from the shelves and shelves of dates, which ranged from the small, but “super good” ajwa variety, to tons of deglet-noor (the most common in the US) and of course, lots and lots of caramelly medjools. If you want to become an expert date-er, here’s a run-down of 25(!) different types of dates you can study. As for me, I ended up splurging on a few jumbo (I’m not quite on the level of self-care where I think I can buy the extra-jumbo) dates I carefully selected with tongs from the large glass jars near the entrance. When I got home, I made a cup of green tea and savored one. The skin was so soft it melted in my mouth, with gooey insides the likes of health-food stores have never seen.
*Not to be confused with when Dates are In Season, which is apparently much later in the year.
**One day, I’ll write a proper love letter to this store, which is neither the cheapest nor the freshest spice store in Manhattan, but definitely the most magical.
Date “Snickers” at home
Recipe idea from TikTok, which I really need to delete.
Mariam personally recommends just eating dates as-is, especially during Ramadan, for an instant burst of energy. (If you’d like to wax poetic while doing so, I enjoyed reading "Looking for the Khalasah", which is a very old-school* piece on the search for delicious dates.) “Interestingly,” she told me, “Egyptians do not cook with dates much except when making cookies,” which is an energy I respect. However, as an American who loves Halloween candy, my favorite thing to make with dates is stuff them with crunchy Skippy peanut butter, and dip them in melted chocolate. Blasphemy? Possibly. Delicious? 100%. I feel like freezing enhances the texture of dates to make them even more chewy and caramel-like; for the date “Snickers", scroll to the bottom of this old post. A bonus: They’re the perfect size dessert, approximately the size of a fun-size Snickers bar.
Hawaij and date latte at home
Hawaij spice mix from Kalustyan's.
In Williamsburg, there is a popular Yemini coffee shop that serves all varieties of well-spiced lattes and chai in a bustling, warm atmosphere. It is so popular that I have not yet had a chance to try their famed Yemeni Latte, because the line is always too long. So I bought some hawaij while I was at Kalustyan’s to try to make some myself. I brewed some pour-over in the Melitta filter (half ounce of light roast) as usual, but added a teaspoon of the spice mix, and a spoonful of date syrup (see below) in the bottom of the mug, and topped it all off with about 2oz of whole milk foam. The result was so spicy and warming and delicious, I now can’t imagine starting my day without it. It was very reminiscent of my gingerbread au lait (date syrup, which is also called date molasses, really does taste like molasses!), but with a more complex flavor.
Soleil delget noor date syrup at Kalustyan’s
Here’s the bottle, for reference
While this is technically Not a Solid Date, I couldn’t help but buy this bottle of date syrup I found on the second floor of Kalustyan’s, in the magical bitters and syrups section. There were many different brands (Arab and Californian and otherwise) of date syrup or molasses available, but ultimately I just went with this one because it came in a small squeeze bottle. I am really glad I succumbed to this impulse purchase, because it’s the perfect sweetener for my morning coffee (or a hawaij and date latte). Coffee and dates pair really well together, the resulting flavor greater than the sum of its parts. It’s also great in homemade fun iced drinks, like an iced latte, because the syrup thickens delightfully like caramel syrup when it hits the ice (you could do that pretty thing where you drizzle syrup down the side of a cold glass before you pour your cold brew in).
Chinese Jujube /Red dates (hong zao) at Kaluystans
123 Lexington Ave, New York, NY 10016
I had to sneak on some Chinese dates, or jujubes into this newsletter. Although it’s technically not a date whatsoever (these fruits grow on just about the furthest things from palm trees as possible), the dried jujubes look similar to dates, hence the common nickname. Jujubes, are, again, Not-Dates, so the texture of a dried hong zao is the exact opposite of what you’re looking for in a good medjool – it’s dry and kind of spongy. But its looks (cheerfully paint-red) and flavor have no parallel, or rather, have parallel but no better. Jujubes are very sweet, although a notch less sweet than date-dates (which are the sweetest fruit I can imagine), but have an underlying zippy current of tartness to them. Try throwing them in plain white rice congee, so that they can rehydrate and flavor the porridge.
Eid mubarak!
Soph
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