Kak: a cookie with barakah

Disclaimer: the directions below are useless...

The Bentounes family lives in what is considered by thousands a sacred place. It is the mother zawiyya to the Alawiyya tariqat. Both the group and the place have continued to grow in number and in square meters since the sheikh Alawi founded both the early 1900s. Almost 100 family members live in various apartments in the house now and hundreds more come regularly for religious ceremonies or on pilgrimage to the burial place of the 3 generations of sheikhs. As this is the subject of my masters thesis, which I am currently doing my best to avoid, lets skip to the food.  

Tasks are shared in the community, especially the most important ones. Making Kak, for example. Think of a british cookie: sweet but crunchy and best with tea. We made hundreds. They made hundreds, I should say. Everyone giggled and said I must be tired and should go... and eventually I went... and they were still at it when I came back hours later.

Ingredients for infinite Kak

(do not, under any circumstances, try to make a full recipe!)

2 kilos flour

4 eggs
500g sugar (2 1/3 c)
1/2 liter vegetable oil
6 tsp baking powder
1-2 cups sesame seeds
l'eau de fleur

Directions
In a blender the size of your little sister, mix the flour, sugar, sesame seeds and baking soda.

With the blender going, add one egg at a time, then the oil progressively till it looks a bit like sand, working it all the while as needed to keep it even.

Slowly add the flour water (its a north african ingredient that tastes like the drop of juice you pull out of honeysuckles as a child) until the dough just sticks together in a big ball. It should be a fairly heavy dough, slightly sticky but firm and not stretchy.

Let the dough sit for about 10 minutes, then start breaking into chunks about the size of said little sister's fist.

It seems the key to Kek is this mysterious machine through which the women forced the dough, but hats off to whoever figures that one out because they immediately rolled it back out into a rope.

There is a perfect ratio of length to thickness as you roll. I know because I was corrected many, many times. What is that ratio? I'm pretty sure it is part of the mystical secret that one only receives upon initiation into the tariqat. Something like "here is the prayer you should recite 100 times every morning to get closer to god, and the perfect ratio for kak is 2:13."

Once the dough is rolled back into tubes, cut regularly around the edges, connect into a circle and place on oiled cookie sheets. Note: there is also a perfect distance for each cut. best of luck to you.

Bake. Can't tell you how hot or how long, but don't let them brown or generally overcook, they will get too dry. I would guess 175C for 12 minutes. Do a few batches and find your right ratio.

Share with hundreds of friends and send them around the globe in suitcases destined for distant relatives. Thankfully, they keep fresh for weeks on end. Its probably the Barakah.

Makrout - Algerien Date Cookies

I am going to jump right into this recipe, because otherwise I will spend a number of paragraphs explaining my new found, deep love for all things Algerian cooking. With five amazing meals in my stomach, my first algerian wedding under my belt, and a conviction that moving to Algeria next year is a very good idea, I have returned from my weekend with Sabrina and her family in Orléans (an hour or so south of Paris). I will be back soon. To follow are a tajine, a traditional semoule bread recipe, a roasted chicken, and of course, these cookies for you :)

My apologies if the recipes aren't exact or easily replicable. I did what I could to get good measurements, but have you ever asked your grandmother how she makes that amazing old family recipe that generations have adored? Yeah, try. She will tell you 'oh its just a pinch of this, and that and voilà.' 

These cookies are known all over the place, but according to Sabrina the Tunisians and Moroccans usually fry them, while Algerians bake them and then dip them in honey. We skipped the honey.

Cookie dough:

400g melted butter

~they actually said margarine is better, melted, and only using what rises to the top, and not the sediments

750g fine semoule 

1 large tablespoon salt

1 cup heated orange blossom water

~should be easy to find in an international market

more water as needed

Throw together the salt and the flour. Make a well in the flour and pour in the melted butter. Rub in the butter until it resembles a pile of moist sand. Pour in the heated orange blossom water and continue rubbing together. 

This will be almost more of a crust dough than a smooth bread/pasta dough. Meaning, you don't want to overwork it (making it too smooth by forming gluten bonds) or the cookies wont be flaky. 

You know its done when a handful of dough, squeezed tightly in your fist, forms a kind of ball. 

Pat the dough into a ball and set it aside for about 30 minutes.

Date filling:

1/2 kg date paste

a generous pour of olive oil

a generous 1/4c (or more?) orange blossom water

~ in the US, you'll probably have to visit an international grocery for this

1generous teaspoon of cinnamon

Work all this together like a dough until it is uniform and set aside.

To form the cookies: make hotdogs

Taking a fist sized chunk of the cookie dough at a time, roll it into a log then press into it with your fingers to form a hot dog bun shape. Roll the appropriate size of date paste into a hotdog and place it in the bun. With great finess, close up the bun and roll out the log.

There seem to be a variety of stamps available, and all kinds of dos and don'ts with shaping, but I won't pretend to know anything. These seemed really nice to me. We stamped them, cut them, and placed them on a cookie sheet. It made easily a hundred cookies...

After stamping and placing them, a small sliver of almond went perfectly in the middle, and had a surprisingly delightful taste in the finished product!

Bake at really high heat, maybe 400ºF/205ºC, but maybe much hotter. Their oven said it was 260ºC, but it didn't feel that hot to me. 15-20 minutes, juuuust until they start to brown.

Traditionally, they're dipped in and dripping with honey, but we all preferred them without.

Biscotti (be glad you can't hear my bad Italian accent from wherever you are...)

Turkey and I agree on one main fact of life: everything tastes better with nuts. In some way that I cannot possibly fathom, my Turkish roommate disagrees, and so we made these biscotti half with pistachios and half without.


I promise my next recipe will be something Turkish!! Maybe tea or sutlac...

2 eggs
3/4 cup sugar
1-2 tsp vanilla (unfortunately they only have packets of vanilla sugar here..)

1 3/4 cup all purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
a dash of salt
Lots of nuts and dried fruit! We used:
- almost a cup of pistachios
- about half a cup of white raisins
- some cut up dried apricots (everywhere here)
Parchment paper and a baking sheet

for some really nice ideas for combinations of fruits, nuts, flavors you can check out the bottom of this King Arthur's Flour recipe.

Preheat oven to 350 (or 177 celcius) and cover a baking sheet with parchment paper. Combine the above ingredients into the two groups, wet and dry ingredients with wooden spoons. This is always the basic pattern in baking because you want to mix them as little as possible. By mixing dry and wet separately first, you make sure the ingredients are evenly combined without overmixing the final dough.

Fold in (read: stir together gently till combined) the nuts and berries.

Pour onto the parchment in a long, thin shape and wet your hands with cold water (you might have to keep wetting them as your work). Use your hands to shape the log into a 1/2 inch - 1 inch thick, long log shape. You really, really can't go wrong with this. When I was researching the recipe i saw all kinds of possible shapes.

Bake for about 25 to 30 minutes. It will start to brown around the edges. Let cool for 10-30 minutes and using a sharp knife, cut them into thin - about 1/2 inch - strips on the diagonal.

Bake again!! Some sites said lay them on their sides, others said try to leave them standing the way they were cut, but spread out a little bit. We did these laying down (as you can see) but i think they would get crispier if they were sitting up right because they could cook longer before they start to brown.

This time, bake them for about 25 minutes or until browning.

Cool completely. Store in a tin box. Look at that! I just happen to have a pretty tin box that they fit in PERFECTLY... It came as a "gift" with my favorite cookies a few weeks ago. Finding out it was perfect for these made me ALmost as happy as when I first got it. What could be better than a Turkish cookie tin box?! I found the answer. A Turkish cookie tin box with biscotti in it.

Final thoughts? A lot of websites made this look really intimidating and complicated. It is not. Just wet your fingers and play with the fun sticky dough.

Shortbread Cookies; buttery goodness

Happy New Year! I landed back in Saint Louis this week and am trying to clean out my life before the semester starts. With that goal, I decided to return the three foot stack of cooking books I had checked out from the library. Two hours later I had photocopied 21 recipes before marching down to University City public library with two huge bags of books. Ill give you each five bux if I ever get around to all of them...

But I did one! Yom Tov Shortbread Cookies from A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking by Marcy Goldman. I've only changed the recipe by one ingredient, so all credit goes to her. Where I grew up there wasnt a distinct Jewish culture that I was aware of. Turns out I was really missing out. The two recipes I have tried from this book have been some of my all time favorites. Challah is next.

Cooking from scratch is basically a pain. Ready to bake stuff is way easier. So I stuck half the dough in the fridge so that later this week I will have ready to bake shortbread cookies :) Ill let you know how that goes.

Ingredients:

1 c unsalted butter

2/3 c firmly packed brown sugar (the original recipe uses white, so that's fine, too)

1/4 tsp salt

2 1/2 c all-purpose flour

a few drops vanilla extract (optional; potent stuff, so seriously, just a few drops)

a note on the butta: DONT USE MARGARINE! okay, thats one. The other is that you're going to cream the butter, so it needs to be softened (left sitting out until its about room temperature and very soft) before you can start. The thing is, I noticed the dough getting harder to handle the longer I worked with it, which I am guessing is because the butter was warming.

So, my suggestion is to leave it out so that its not rock hard as it is coming straight out of the fridge, but to keep it a little cold, work quickly to get them in the oven, and if it gets too hard to shape the cookies, stick the dough in the fridge for a little while.

TO BEGIN: cream the butter. I use a fork and bowl. Most recipes have the hard method; fork and bowl, and the easy method; a food processor. I don't have one. Boo. If you do, you can just pulse the butter and sugar, then add the salt and flour, pulsing all the while. Once it is crumbly, remove it from the processor and use your hands to knead it all together.

Its hard to get all of the flour in this dough because its really stiff, as you can see from the picture of the dough up top and the fact that I could press a little in it :) But just add it slowly and it will work fine.

Preheat oven to 350 and shape the cookies.

On a slightly flowered surface roll the dough out (fear not for lack of a rolling pin - I used my hands) until it is about a half an inch thick, and cut it into shapes. Goldman suggests 3x1 inch strips, marked by the tines of a fork. I thought that looked like little keyboard, hence the name. I tried some other variations and liked the way the little triangles browned the best.

Bake for 25 minutes, or until the edges start to brown, and cool on a cooling rack (this allows the bottoms to get crispy instead of soggy, as they might if they are pressed up against the baking sheet, trapping the moisture it will sweat)

The brown sugar gives it a great, rich flavor and they have a fabulous, buttery, crumbly texture.

Seriously, these are good.

Toll House Butter Chocolate Pecan cookies

Okay... the whole chocolate or pecan thing is optional... pick which ones you want. or try heath drops!

*BEAT together in a mixer until creamy:
1c butter
3/4 c sugar
3/4 c brown sugar
1 t vanilla extract

*BEAT in 2 eggs

*COMBINE:
2c flour
(optional" 1/4 c oatmeal)
1 t baking soda
1 t salt

Many baking recipes have 'wet' and 'dry' parts that are added together right at the end. Like this one...

*AFTER beating eggs into the wet mixture, gradually add the dry mixture

*ADD whatever nuts (1 cup), chocolate chips (a whole 12 oz package of nestle toll house semi-sweet chocolate chips) or whatever you like, and blend in.

*PLACE tablespoon sized chunks of batter onto an ungreased cookie sheet far enough apart so that they have room to spread as they cook and not touch

*BAKE at 375 degrees for 7-10 minutes on the 2nd rack, or until they start to brown

Makes about 30 palm sized cookies!

(Complete list of ingredients for the traditional recipe users:
1 c butter
3/4 c sugar
3/4 c brown sugar
1 t vanilla
2 eggs
2 c flour
1 t baking soda
1 t salt
nuts, chocolate chips and oatmeal as you like)