Khobez (Bread machine)

For Belleau Kitchen’s Random Recipes challenge I borrowed a copy of Sally Butcher’s Veggiestan: a vegetable lover’s guide to the middle east with the instruction to make her delicious Imam biyaldi recipe. She suggests serving the stuffed aubergine recipe with plenty of bread to mop up the juices and so I thought I’d try one of her recipes, khobez, an Arabic flatbread. The instructions involved a lot of kneading flour with very little water in it, so I adapted it for use in my new bread machine (why should I do the work when I now own a machine which will do it for me!). The following is my adaptation of her recipe.

I was rolling out the dough into small, flat circles when the OH arrived home from work. He asked me what I was making and I said, in my dreadful and embarrassing accent: “Co-bEZ”

“hhkk – clearing the throat sound – ubbs!” he says, “I remember khobez!”

“I remember once when we lived in Abu Dhabi,” he continued, “we drove to the bakery in an old Nissan Datsun to get some khobez and when we got back to the car Dad saw that the car keys were still in the ignition and the car door was locked. And yea, some guy got a wire clothes hanger and jimmyed the door open for us. There you go, that’s how I remember khobez!”

My bread machine adaptation turned out splendidly. The dough doesn’t form a fine, smooth ball, as regular bread dough does; it forms small clumps of dough in the bread machine. Don’t worry about this – once it’s risen and you’ve kneaded it before cutting it turns out fine. The bread cooks into perfect little breads with their perfect little bread pockets, perfect for stuffing with things (I can’t wait to try this with hummus), or sopping up tomatoey juices or served with fried dates with eggs, as we had the next morning. You could always make these slightly larger and oval in shape and then you’ll have pita breads. I’ll be making this recipe regularly, as unfortunately the only pita breads available to buy on Shetland are the dreadful dry supermarket varieties (and for some odd reason there’s only extortionately expensive gluten-free ones in my village shop!). Yes, I am very glad to have found this recipe.

I am entering this Arabic flatbread recipe into Fresh From The Oven, a round up of bread recipes alternately hosted by Purely Food and Utterly Scrummy. At the end of this month Michelle from Utterly Scrummy is doing the round-up. This month the theme is ‘flatbreads’.

Update: I have also entered this recipe into May 2013’s Alphabakes challenge, a food blogging challenge hosted alternately by The More Than Occasional Baker and Caroline Makes. Each month we’re asked to cook something featuring an ingredient or title containing a specific letter. This month it is the letter K.