SA Food Fundis II: Michael and Michele Karamanof

Say I had a choice: indulge in an exquisite meal at the finest restaurant in the city, or enjoy a home-cooked Sunday lunch, under a whispering tree, at the home of Parkview couple Mike and Michele Karamanof. No contest: I would head over to my friends' house with a bottle of wine and no regrets.

Maybe I'm getting old and crabby, but I'm fed up with restaurant food in Johannesburg. I can't afford to eat out often, and when I do, I almost always end up feeling ripped off. I do enjoy a slap-up meal at a good family steakhouse or pizza joint, if it's good value for money, but I really resent forking out R800 to R1000 - which is about what it costs to take five people to dinner at an upmarket restaurant these days, excluding wine - for a meal with absurdly stingy portions, pretentious stacked towers of food, dabs of this, drizzles of that, and shriekingly disgusting 'foamed' sauces that look and taste like spit.

All I want is a full plate - or several plates, for that matter - of honest, gutsy, delicious home-cooked food. I want it hot, I want it fresh, and I want it made in a home kitchen by a friend.

Chemical engineer Mike Karamanof and his wife Michele Botha (a graphic designer) have, for many years, and in their spare time, run a small home industry supplying several Johannesburg restaurants with top-quality home-made products, notably superior home-made pesto and tiramisu.

The Karamanofs are small fish in the Johannesburg-Foodie nibbling order: they're not caterers, chefs, restaurateurs or food professionals, but they are still among the best cooks I know. They have an instinctive love of food, they care about fine ingredients, and they understand simple combinations of brilliant flavours.

Welcome to the second of my new series about local South African food fundis!

Michael Karamanof is an ebullient, warm-hearted Greek with a passion for food that borders on obsession. His knowledge of food and ingredients is encyclopaedic: there are few butchers, greengrocers, fishmongers and wine merchants in Johannesburg with whom he isn't on first-name terms. He loves food, he adores wine, and Michael's idea of heaven is whipping on his apron and spending countless deliriously happy hours cooking for friends and family.

Actually, Mike is a complete know-it-all about food, and the only reason he gets away with this insufferable attitude is because he does actually know an enormous amount about food, and especially Mediterranean food. Mike speaks fluent English, Greek, German and French, and can hold a conversation in Italian and several other languages.

Michele Botha, the thoughtful, organisational, highly creative wing of this partnership, and a talented cook herself, is frequently maddened by Mike (the Karamanofs cannot prepare a meal for friends without having a good argument before everyone arrives).

But, back to the food: although they can cook anything, it's simple Greek food that Mike and Michele really adore. And this passion has accelerated since they bought, a year or two ago, a beautiful, tumbledown old house on the Greek island Kythera. The Karamanofs and their son, Leo, try to get back to the old house twice a year. Most of their time there appears to be spent arguing with builders and architects and each other, while they figure out how to to renovate the place, but they also do manage to spend a lot of time finding, eating, and thinking about food. One of the gorgeous desserts featured here - thickened yoghurt with sweet stewed grapes - is a speciality of Kythera.

For weeks, I've plagued M&M, as they are known among friends, for recipes for my SA Food Fundis section of this blog, and as they haven't produced the goods, on the grounds that they 'don't really have proper recipes' (and they genuinely don't, preferring to cook from their hearts) I'm giving you what they made me for lunch a Sunday ago. This represents a tiny portion of the wonderful food I've eaten at their home over the years.

Our meal started off with beetroot greens - the top leafy portion of beetroots, with their crimson stalks - simply cooked and dressed with olive oil, vinegar and salt, and a loaf of yeasty home-baked bread. Thin-crusted, crispy pizzas, freckled underneath with the black spots you get only from a proper wood-fired pizza outdoor oven (manned by Michael in his apron) and topped with gorgeous mozzarella, anchovy, tomatoes, herbs, mushrooms and the best salami, came next. Then, when we thought it was all over, two earthenware dishes of youvetsi - a dish consisting of rice-shaped pasta (orzo) combined with the tender rippings of lamb cooked for many hours with tomato, and topped with feta. And then, to crown it all, the yoghurt and stewed grapes.

All this around a wooden table, under a tree, in glowing autumn sunshine, and the scent of lemons drifting from a nearby tree in Michele's organic vegetable patch.

Does food get any better than this?

Want to go for dinner at Chez Auberge de La Mon Repose in Poshville, Sandton, for a Tower of Scottish Salmon with Rooibos Jus and Biltong Spit?

I thought not.

Here are the recipes:



- Stewed Sweet Grapes with Thick Yoghurt and Mascarpone, Kythera-style
- Beetroot Greens with Olive Oil
- Mike's Youvetsi


This post is the second in my series about South African Food Fundis. To see the first post, about Gilly Walters of Wedgewood Nougat, click here.

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A delight from the Greek islands: Kythera-style Yoghurt with Stewed Sweet Grapes

I never, ever, ever, ever, ever eat pudding, but I darn well ate this. Here is a most unctuous and intriguing dessert: sweet, late-season grapes, stewed in a light syrup, and served with a combination of thick, creamy Greek yoghurt and mascarpone.

 Stewed Grapes with Mascarpone & Yoghurt.

This unusual recipe comes from my dear friends Michael and Michele Karamanof, a Johannesburg couple who are superlative cooks.

Mike and Michele first tasted this dish on the island of Kythera, in Greece, this year. 'It's a distinctive dish of this island,' says Michele. 'The recipe uses the very last grapes of the season, which are very sweet, and just beginning to shrivel.'

She adds that the original recipe she and Mike tasted used only thick Greek yoghurt: 'But the yoghurt you get on Kythera is sweeter and richer than South African Greek-style yoghurt, which tends to be slightly sour. So I added a little mascarpone to the recipe.'

Kythera-style Yoghurt with Stewed Sweet Grapes

3 bunches of late-season sweet seedless grapes, such as Sultana grapes
2 cups (500 ml) water
300 ml white sugar
2 cloves
one x 2-cm-long stick of cinnamon
2 cups (500 ml) thick, full-fat Greek-style yoghurt
1/2 cup (125 ml) mascarpone

Pull the grapes from their stalks, rinse well in cold water, and drain. Heat the water, sugar, cloves and cinnamon in a saucepan and heat gently, stirring, until the sugar has completely dissolved. Bring to the boil, tip in all the grapes, and turn down the heat. Cook, uncovered, at a low simmer for an hour to an hour and a half, or until the syrup has reduced by a third. Remove from the heat, set aside at room temperature, and allow to cool completely.

Just before serving, whisk together the yoghurt and the mascarpone. Pile the mixture in a big billowing mound into the centre of a large flat serving platter. Using a slotted spoon, arrange the stewed grapes around the edges of the platter. Pour some of the syrup over the grapes, and splash some of it over the yoghurt mound.

You could dish this into individual pudding bowls, but I think you should do as Mike and Michele did, which was to pass it round the table, with some small teaspoons.

Serves 4-6.

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Tomatoes Baked with Garlic Butter and Cream

Glorious tomatoes in cream,
sequinned with butter.

A wickedly indulgent yet simple dish that is excellent with bacon and eggs, or with a cheese omelette. A first baking with garlic butter allows the garlicky, herby flavours to permeate the tomatoes; a second baking with cream produces a heavenly sauce spangled with little sequins of butter.

You can use any combination of fresh herbs here; good dried herbs are also fine, but use half the quantity as dried herbs are far more pungent than fresh ones.

If you like, you can bake these in individual ramekins, but you will need to shorten the cooking time by about 5 minutes. Don't cut the bottoms off the tomato halves, which will cause them to collapse.


Tomatoes Baked with Garlic Butter and Cream

8 ripe, sweet tomatoes
3 Tbsp (45 ml/45 g) softened butter
1 fat clove garlic, peeled and crushed (to taste)
a pinch of finely chopped fresh rosemary
1 tsp (5ml) finely chopped fresh oreganum
salt and freshly milled black pepper
2/3 cup (160 ml) single cream

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Halve the tomatoes and place them, cut-side up, in a single layer in suitably size oven-proof dish. In a little bowl, combine the butter, garlic, rosemary and oreganum. Place a dob of the garlic butter in the centre of each tomato, and season well with salt and pepper.

Bake the tomatoes in the hot oven for about 20 minutes, or until just softened. Pour the cream over and around the tomatoes, resisting the temptation to stir, or to disturb the garlic topping. Turn the heat down to 160°C, and bake for another 10 minutes, or until soft right through, but not collapsed.

Serve with plenty of toast or fresh bread for mopping up the juices.

Serves 4. Print Friendly

Easy Home-Made Tomato Ketchup

I used to despair about how much tomato sauce my kids ate until I read that it contains lashings of lycopene, a powerful antioxidant (these days I squeeze it down their throats while holding their noses). I joke, of course, but we do eat an awful lot of tomatoes in this house, mainly because of my addiction to tomato soup, which still shows no signs of abating.

I bought a lovely big box of tomatoes yesterday and decided to try my hand at home-made ketchup. I approached this recipe with some trepidation, because I didn't think it would taste the same as shop sauce, but I needn't have worried: it not only tastes exactly like ketchup; it tastes better. I love a recipe that delivers on its promises, and this recipe does - in dollops. The spice combination is spot on.

It's adapted from Preserved, by Nick Sandler and Johnny Acton. If you're into drying, salting, smoking, pickling and bottling, I can highly recommend this brilliant and inspiring book.

I was particularly impressed to see that the first recipe in the book is for our beloved South African delicacy biltong: 'Mention to biltong to émigré South Africans and their eyes will start to water with nostalgia,' they write. 'Dark, chewy, and frankly pretty tough, this air-dried, spiced meat is an acquired taste, but once acquired it is never forgotten. Americans already have a head start through their predilection for beef jerky, but never make the mistake of comparing the two in the presence of a South African!'


Easy Home-Made Tomato Ketchup

3 and 1/2 kg ripe, juicy tomatoes
4 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced
1 cup (250 ml) vinegar (I used half malt vinegar, and half white wine vinegar)
10 whole cloves
4 cardamom pods, lightly crushed
1/2 t (2.5 ml) white pepper
1/2 t (2.5 ml) ground black pepper
1/2 t (2.5 ml) ground mace (use nutmeg if you can't find mace)
1/2 t (2.5 ml) ground allspice
1/2 t (2.5 ml) ground cinnamon
2 t (10 ml) paprika
1/2 cup (125 ml) white sugar
2 t (10 ml) salt

Remove the stalk 'scar' from the tomatoes using a sharp knife or apple corer, but don't peel them. Cut them in quarters and feed them through the tube of a food processor fitted with a metal blade, together with the garlic. Process to a chunky mush. (If you don't have a food processor, roughly chop the tomatoes into 1-cm sized pieces). Put the cloves and cardamom pods onto a little square of muslin or cloth and tie in a bundle, like a bouquet garni. Place the bundle into a deep preserving pot or a thick-based pan and add the tomato pulp and all remaining ingredients. Mix well, bring to the boil, then turn down the heat and cook gently, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking, until the mixture has reduced by a third, or is slightly thickened.

This will take about two hours. Remove the spice bag, allow the sauce to cool slightly, and then whizz to a rough purée in your food processor. Pour the purée back into the pan and bring to the boil. In the meantime, sterilise four jars (about 25o ml each) and their lids (or wide-mouthed bottles if you have them). Pour the boiling sauce into the jars, filling to within a few millimetres of the rim. Screw on the lids tightly, and tighten again after half an hour hour.

I suppose you could sieve this sauce if you wanted a really smooth ketchup.

The authors of Preserved recommend that you store the sauce for eight to ten months before you eat it, but I don't think I can wait that long. Keep in the fridge after opening.

Makes 4 jars. Print Friendly