Notes about Recipes in this book

• The dough (Al-'ajeen)

  • Yildiz100 on April 24, 2017

    Made this with 2.5 cups AP flour and 1 cup bread flour. Added an extra tablespoon of oil and used 2.5 tsp salt. Salt balance was good and bread texture was good. I increased the oven temp to 425 (most recipes in other books call for 500!) and at that temp, with topping (a fairly heavy, wet topping) it needed 9 minutes too cook through.

• Arabic bread (Khobz 'arabi)

  • Yildiz100 on November 25, 2015

    This was basically the same dough as her "the dough" recipe but it had half as much salt. Sadly, it really needed the additional salt. It was pretty bland as is.

• Hot cheese pie (Jibneh wa harr)

  • Yildiz100 on April 24, 2017

    I cut the recipe in half and made two of these pies. One flat, and one shaped into a little canoe as she suggested. This filling is WAY to wet for the canoe shape-it came out full of liquid. The flat version was good though. These need to be rolled VERY thin if they are to be thin enough to fold. Each one would need to be larger than a dinner plate. (You'd probably need to divide the original dough recipe in 5ths instead of 4ths.) Also, if folding is the goal, they need less filling than this recipe calls for. Note that this is not spicy at all, and I used the full tablespoon of pepper paste. I will add parsley for some brightness and color if I make this again.

• Bulgari cheese pie (Bulghari)

  • mjes on September 22, 2019

    First, in a local cheese making class I tasted some fantastic feta totally changing my opinion of the cheese. Second, a local Croatian restaurant makes incredible pogacha "pizza". Third, a Kurdish instructor taught me to make Turkish lahmacun "pizza" ... which was excellent. Somehow, it added up to this cookbook and this recipe. Highly recommend for each delicious bite if, and only if, you have access to good feta. However, next time I'll replace the parsley with something a bit more interesting - thyme or oregano come to mind.

• Strained yogurt pie (Labneh)

  • mjes on September 22, 2019

    Labneh, cucumber, mint, tomato ... sound a bit more like a dip than a bread topping to me. But this is another winner from this cookbook. It also works with a za'atar if you have no mint.