Maamoul – Recipes from a Traditional Lebanese Easter

Happy Easter! It’s really great to be able to share this recipe with you, and maybe from the photo above, you too will feel there are things worth coming back to this world for. This is my tray of maamoul, a traditional Lebanese sweet that is made especially for Easter. Maamoul is a semolina shortbread bound with butter, orange blossom water and rose water which on the inside holds a sweet filling. The filling is either buttery dates, or a concoction of walnuts or pistachios with sugar, more orange blossom water and rosewater. Now consider that for a minute. Imagine biting through that buttery, crumbly crust and getting the faint hint of roses and orange blossoms, followed by the chewiness of pistachios, nutty and sweet. Delicious opulence and comfortable luxury. Maamoul works on so many levels.

If you look through the photo series, you will get a basic understanding of how these Easter cakes are made. You can see the beautiful pattern that is formed when the filled dough is pressed into a traditional wooden mold. There is a shape for every flavour and that makes it easy to know which is which. According to Ludwig’s sister, who’s a real wiz with computers, there’s anecdotal evidence pointing to the tradition of making maamoul on Easter. Apparently the wooden mold symbolises Jesus’ cross, the mold’s pattern resembles the shape of the sponge with which Jesus was given vinegar to drink, the crust contains no sugar in reference to Christ’s death containing no happiness, and the inside is sweet and joyful to symbolise the resurrection. I’m not sure how steeped in tradition all this symbolism is, but at the least, it’s a nice story.

It’s been nine years since I’ve taken part in a maamoul making session, and this is actually my first attempt at it, as it was usually my mother who took care of the whole mission. Long distance phone calls with mom, mirrored by similar efforts from Ludwig resulted in the recipe we used. Just like we used to do, the dough was prepared on Good Friday and the maamoul was baked on Easter Saturday. But unlike being under the strict, observing eyes of our parents, this time we allowed ourselves to indulge in trying the maamoul as it was warm, instead of having to wait for Sunday as tradition requires. I am now convinced that eating maamoul warm is the only way to do it with the filling still gooey and slightly runny. The flavour warms my heart and the scent takes me back to my childhood, and the result is a maamoul I know even mom would be proud of!

Maamoul Recipe

Ingredients – Crust

• 900 g coarse semolina
• 150 g fine semolina
• 550 g good quality butter at room temperature
• 125 ml rosewater
• 30 ml orange blossom water
• 1/2 cup milk (used on the second day)
• Equipment – maamoul molds bought from a Middle Eastern supply store

Ingredients – Fillings

Fillings are tricky to give amounts with, because it depends on how many types you want to make. Use these ratios as a guideline, and make less/more depending on how much you want to make

• 2 cups dates and 1/2 cup butter combined in food processor
• 2 cups coarsely ground walnuts and 1/2 cup sugar with 2 tbsp rosewater and 1/2 tsp orange blossom water
• 2 cups coarsely ground pistachios and 1/2 cup sugar with 2 tbsp rosewater and 1/2 tsp orange blossom water
• Try the combinations and adjust the sugar and aromatic waters as you like

Method

• Knead the coarse and fine semolina with the butter until incorporated
• Gradually add the orange blossom water and the rosewater until all added
• Knead for 30 minutes
• Rest for 12 hours, kneading it around 3 times in between
• Before you start using the dough, you must knead it one last time, this time you wet your hands with the 1/2 cup of milk and kneading until all the milk is used up
• Now your dough is ready, create a little ball of dough and make a hole in it, making the sides even
• Look at the picture that shows the stages of filling the maamoul. Fill with your desired filling. If you are using dates, they should be formed into individual balls to fill the dough
• Close the dough so that the filling is totally covered by dough
• Put in the maamoul mold and push firmly but not overly so, otherwise the dough will stick
• Put a cutting board and cover with a kitchen towel
• Strike the top tip of the mold on the kitchen towel to release the maamoul
• Repeat and when you have a tray full, put into an oven that has been preheated to 220 degrees Celsius
• It will take around 15 minutes to bake, but what you are after is the slightest colouring. You don’t want it to brown
• Remove, cool down and eat when warm or cold

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Lebanese Breakfast

I remember breakfasts of Labneh, Zaatar, mint, tomato and cucumber with fresh, paper thin markouk bread. On weekends, when time was a luxury we could afford, it would be kishk and qawarma hiding full cloves of garlic in creamy whiteness speckled with shallow fried pine nuts. We burnt our tongues in impatience and never learned to wait. Eggs with sumac were fluffy and crunchy, slowly fried with olive oil in pottery and devoured within seconds with farm fresh home made goat’s milk yoghurt. Every once in a while, mom would send dad down to the baker’s with a variety of containers to be made into Lebanese pizzas and pies. The one for manakish would be full of her special zaatar mix – hand picked mountain thyme, dried and mixed with freshly roasted sesame seeds, sumac and of course, olive oil from our decades old olive grove. Another would have spinach and wild silver beet mixed with onions and used to fill the triangular Fattayer b’Sbenekh w Selek. Then there was Lahm b’Ajeen, mutton and beef mince mixed with onions, tomatoes, pine nuts, pomegranate molasses and spices served piping hot on top of the crispy golden brown pastry. A squeeze of lemon juice was all it needed to become the perfect meat pie. Let’s not get into an argument here.
Dad would drive on missions in search of the freshest produce. On his way back home, he would beep the horn, sending a special message that got us on to our feet and out to greet him. The three boys would help dad carry boxes full of the freshest produce upstairs where mom would complain. On a good day. electricity was only available for two or three hours if we were lucky, and that meant that produce needed to be bought and consumed very quickly. But Dad had a problem. Buying a kilo or less of anything was a strange concept he never embraced; and so mom got busy cooking three or four meals at a time, preserving what she could and handing out the rest to the neighbours, who were all too keen to repay the favour and offload their own husbands’ overzealous shopping habits, undermining mom’s evacuation efforts.
Over the next few posts, I want to cover many of the Lebanese breakfast foods we eat. I will aim to recreate the recipes using high quality raw ingredients sourced locally from Sydney wherever possible . Wish me luck.

(grapes from my father’s garden)

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Sous Vide

I want to buy a water bath but I can’t find one. I have been looking online, but I haven’t found a single company that sells them in Australia, and I am not yet desperate enough to ship one from the States.
A search for sous vide returns a similarly frustrating result set. Has Australia not yet caught up? I bet no one has figured our what the perfect temeperature for cooking kangaroo is. Why shouldn’t it be my discovery? Imagine, one of the world’s healthiest meats becoming one of the tastiest. And who does the world have to thank? Moi.
My usual gripe with roo meat, as you would hear any Australian complain is that it is too hard to cook without becoming tough. Kangaroos are fit animals with hardly any intra-muscular fat, so it’s hard to keep the meat moist. Have you ever had a kangaroo steak that’s been thrown on the barbie and treated like it were a beef steak? Shudder.
But not only do I want a water bath to cook kangaroo. I want to see how vegetables behave and if I can make a ratattouille in it. I also want to try that 65C egg (at 67C).
Follow this link: http://discovermagazine.com/2006/feb/cooking-for-eggheads/article_view?b_start:int=1&-C=

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Soy and Honey Pistachio Ice Cream – Dairy, Gluten and Sugar Free

I’m a pistachio nut. Let me rephrase that. I love pistachios. Growing up in a Lebanese home, our pantry had a section especially dedicated to Kloobat, a word that roughly came to mean “nut garnishes”: almonds, dessicated coconuts, pine nuts, walnuts and off course pistachios.
Mom would use them on dishes both savory and sweet. Rice dishes like Chicken with Rice (tastes much better than it sounds) and Stuffed Lamb would never be complete without a mixture of golden pan fried pine nuts and halved almonds and bright green pistachios. As for desserts, Mighli (a spicy rice dessert made to celebrate a new birth and Christmas), Mhallbiyyeh (a creamy and light milk based pudding) and even drinks like Jallab had their fair share of toppings. These nuts add a depth of flavour and texture to whatever they come across, lifting the dishes to new heights.
And so recently, while I was reading through David Lebovitz’s blog, I came across his recipe for pistachio ice cream. His description of that Bronte Pistachio Paste was so enticing, I knew I had to make that ice cream. However, I had a couple of problems. I looked everywhere in Australia for Bronte Pistachio Paste but I couldn’t find it. The other problem was the fact that I was on a gluten/dairy/sugar free diet under the strict orders of my naturopath. That meant that I had to substitute milk for soy milk and sugar for honey. I was up for the challenge, but first, I had to find my pistachio paste.
Weeks later, on my way back from work, I decided to venture on the realm of the unknown. I passed by Abu Hachem’s Lebanese grocery in Dulwich Hill and bought half a kilo of Pistachio kernels for $10. I got home, put 250 grams of kernels in the food processor and started it up. A minute later, I had something that resembled almond meal. Good, but not good enough. I wanted Marzipan texture. So I got 2 tablespoons of almond butter and whizzed that in. The texture starting transforming to something more like what I wanted, but it was not quite there. So I got some neutral oil (Canola) and in a pesto like fashion, I added a thin string to the mix while processing until I ended up with a perfect Marzipan like block of pistachio paste.
So to make the ice cream, you will need the following (based on David’s recipe)
500 ml soy milk (I use Bonsoi which is great)
2 Tablespoons of cornstarch
200 grams of pistachio paste
A squeeze of lemon juice
Honey (to taste)
1 Tea Spoon Rum or Vodka
Make a slurry from the cornstarch and half a cup of soy milk. Heat up the remaining soy milk, add and stir in the honey. Keep adding honey until desired sweetness is reached. Constantly stir and when the soy milk starts boiling add the cornstarch and soy milk slurry. Boil on a low heat for 2 minutes then take off the heat. In a blender or a food processor, liquidise the soy milk with the pistachio nut paste and a squeeze of lemon juice until well blended. Without waiting for it to cool down, churn in an ice cream maker. Five minutes before you feel it’s ready, add the alcohol. This will help keep the ice cream soft when frozen. Freeze overnight for a well set ice cream or consume immediately if you like it soft.
I tell you what. This ice cream is the bomb. You will not believe that something that tastes so naughty is actually OK on the healthy scale. On the down side, I think I should have peeled the pistachios because the skins make for a gritty texture, which is not too unpleasant – a smoother texture would be nicer, but I’m not sure I want to spend 3 hours peeling pistachios. Maybe sieving the liquid before churning might work.
David, thanks for the inspiration.

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Sweet Falafel? Why not?

What you see above may horrify and shock you, but yet, a part of you will be tempted to try these. I had the idea in a flash of brilliance. You see, to us Lebanese, tahini is a major major part of our diet. We make hommos and baba ghannouj with it, and we put it on top of fried fish, shawarma (Lebanese kebab, much better than the Turkish version, obviously) and falafels. We also use it in a limited way in sweets. We mix it with carob mollasses to make a nice sweet dip which we simply eat with bread, and we also butter cake tins with it, such as in sfouf, a yellow cake flavoured with tumeric. The Greeks also use tahini in their own way and they make tahinopita, a special pie made for Lent. The ingredient is without doubt Lebanese, or at least from our side of the med. The word itself signifies something that has been ground up, in this case sesame, which are ground as they are to produce tahini. Nothing else is used, pure sesame.
Now my idea as it ended up resulted in a very simple yet tasty dish, which at first glance looks very similar to falafels, but tastes very different. The falafel disks are made from white bread, tahini, salt and sugar, mixed with fennel seeds, with a small bit of water to help it come along. The mixture needs to be strong and not too sticky. As it is already edible, you need to taste it to make sure you have the right balance.
As a guidline:
4 large slices of white bread (not Lebanese bread)
3/4 cup tahini
2 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 to 1/2 cup water
2 tablespoons fennel seeds
Mix all ingredients except fennel seeds in blender/food processor. Work into a nice not too sticky paste, add the fennel seeds and deep fry in small batches. Make sure the oil is not too hot as you want the inside to cook a bit as well. These fellas will brown very quickly, so remove when nice and golden.
My initial idea was to make a sweet tahini sauce, which is what you see in the photo. I made that by mixing tahini, lemon juice, icing sugar, and water. You need lots of lemon juice and sugar. This completes the illusion that you are serving falafel, but this is also tasty with a simple syrup of sugar and lemon juice, with lots of lemon juice.
Apologies on the not too clear directions, but this is a first attempt. Try it, and taste the paste as you go along and it will not go wrong. A cheat’s recipe for dessert, and makes for interesting conversation!

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Soft Boiled Eggs with Dukkah – Best Eggs Ever

soft boiled eggs with dukkah
Was it Gordon Ramsay who decided if he would hire a chef based on how they cooked an egg? I’m not sure, but let’s say it is. I agree. And a boiled egg doesn’t give anything away, all happily encapsulated in an opaque shell, keeping its secrets to itself. Can you trust it? Has it cooked too much, or too little?
Obviously a 65 degree egg is a different story (see here), but cooking an egg in normal conditions requires attention and good judgment. Luckily though, attention is only required for a short period of time. In this recipe, inspired by Greg Malouf’s version, dukkah eggs would land you a job at Mr Ramsay’s.
Dukkah is a spice mix I got introduced to only four years ago. It originates from Egypt and has become popular, with many restaurants serving it with dipping olive oil and bread. It is similar to zaatar, but is quite heavy on the spicing, so I can’t have it in the same quantities I do with zaatar. Making dukkah is easy, and the recipe below can tolerate a large margin of error.
Traditionally, roasted hazelnuts are used, but I don’t keep hazelnuts around. I do keep pistachios though, and they can be used instead. So this is how you make dukkah, my way.
2 tbsp cumin seeds (heaped, roasted, crushed)
2 tbsp coriander seeds (heaped, roasted, crushed)
3 tbsp sesame seeds (heaped, roasted, crushed roughly)
3 tbsp pistachios (peeled, heaped, crushed roughly)
large pinch of salt (good salt, like Maldon)
large pinch of pepper (fine ground)
Instructions: mix all of the above

Dukkah spice mix
Now for the eggs. Its best to boil eggs that are at room temperature, so they don’t crack.

• Put the eggs in a pot, cover with cold water.
• Bring to simmer, and simmer for 2 minutes
• Take out of boiling water, and into cold water immediately. Keep there for 3 minutes
• Peel eggs, dust in white flour and deep fry for 1.5 minutes, until slightly golden
• Put some dukkah in a plate and roll eggs around in dukkah

Serve with nice crusty bread and goat’s cheese. Enjoy thoroughly.

tasty dukkah crusted eggs

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Shawarma – The real kebab

shawarma, the Lebanese kebab
Can I have barbeque sauce, extra cheese and tabbouli with that? Certainly not!
Imagine the horror upon my first encounter with the Aussie kebab! I don’t want to dig deep and talk too much about frozen reconstituted meat made from God knows what, impersonating as a poor excuse for a kebab. In fact, I want to avoid that all together. This quick post is about shawarma, the real kebab, and mainly about what goes with it.

the perfect kebab, shawarma only needs tahini, parsley, sumac rubbed onions and tomatoes
Making shawarma is simple. Just marinate some lamb in red wine vinegar, oil, salt (yes), all spice, cinnamon, black pepper and a bit of cumin. Wait for a day or two, then you can oven roast or pan fry the meat. But how do you eat it? The answer is simple, and so it should be, as the flavour of the meat needs to shine through, along with a cleansing freshness that comes from only 4 other ingredients: finely chopped parsley, onions rubbed with sumac, tomatoes and a slightly thin tahini sauce (tahini, garlic, water, lemon juice and salt, whizzed up in a food processor, made to taste). That’s all it needs. Try this combination, and you will never turn back. And please, no cheese.

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