A Brush with Middle Eastern Bread

though out of fashion, I still like buying new recipe books ...
... some I buy only to read, never to cook from ...

My goal was to make za’atar bread, the kind that Pouria used to make and share with Elianna. 

She liked to eat it with double yogurt and olives on the side for breakfast.

I made a tactical mistake the first time I tried to make this on my own. Thinking the dough was too soft I added 1 ½ more cups of flour more than the recipe called for. “Too soft to handle I wrote beside the recipe. “Add flour.”

But soft is the whole point of the bread. That softness which I was later to discover – when trying to use the exact recipe, results in a beautiful product. How many years will it take to make me believe that the recipe in front of me probably is written with more facts than reside in my imaginarium. 

One tip that helped me was a hamburger recipe, also soft, which said, “The dough will be so soft to handle that you should do it with wet hands”. Now that is a soft dough I have never made –I have resorted to flour my hands, but not water on them. And after successful hamburger buns, my memory harkened back to the only partially successful za’atar* bread of my past

Bonnie ate some of my perfect product. I ate the rest.

That was a couple of weeks ago. Yesterday that bread came back to her memory and she told me that her first taste of that bread made her nose crinkle. Too bitter. The spices too unfamiliar, but she kept eating it to get a sense of its difference. And now she finds herself thinking about it and wondering when it will be on the breakfast menu again.

The answer is … soon.

Arta

*Za’atar, a mixture of spices: 1 tablespoon ground cumin, 1 tablespoon ground dried thyme, 1 tablespoon sumac,1 tablespoon toasted sesame seeds, 2 teaspoons dried marjoram,1 teaspoon fine Kosher salt, 1 teaspoon freshly-ground black pepper. Or any alternative recipe for za’atar. Even better, just buy a pre-mix. of the spices at a middle eastern grocery store.