summary: Wild Lebanese Morning Bread based on a recipe in “Savory Baking from the Mediterranean” by Anissa Helou; brief review of the cookbook; definition of corn; who me?? almost late to my own party?? Nah… there’s plenty of time at noon; information about Sourdough September; a Bread Baking Babes (BBB) project;

It WAS morning when I started this….

Bread Baking Babes: Lebanese Morning Bread (Khobz al-Sabah), September 2023

Bread, of course, is the real staff of life, and nowhere more so than on Mediterranean streets.
– Anissa Helou, Introduction, Mediterranean Street Food, p.xxii

Throughout the pandemic, I have been raiding our public library shelves and reading bread book after bread book. One of the books was Anissa Helou’s “Savory Baking from the Mediterranean”.

Now, three years later, with the WHO cautiously saying that it is no longer a pandemic and things relaxing, in mid-July, I flew to the UK to take a course. When I was there, I ate like royalty. Most of that eating was in the dining hall at the school. But there were three nights when I was on my own: one night in York just before the course started, and two nights in Edinburgh just after the course was finished.

In York, I chose the fabulous restaurant “Yemen Heaven” on Walmgate just inside wall of the old town near the Walmgate Bar.

(Note the little cat above the archway;
it’s one of several cat sculptures in York.)

In Edinburgh, on the first night, I chose to eat at a Bengali restaurant, “Vinyasa” on St. Mary’s Street, just off the Royal Mile. I had the best ever chicken biryani. The staff was very very friendly, and everyone around me was happy. While I was waiting for my dinner, a table not far from me got the most spectacular looking naan – clearly made in a tandoor.

Then, on the second night, I went to Daika Kurdish Grill House on Johnston Terrace, also just off the Royal Mile very close to Edinburgh Castle. The view from the window looked down on King’s Stables Road.

Daika Kurdish Grill House is the red one,
3 establishments over from the church

I had THE most fabulous dinner there.

J’adore Middle Eastern food! (Yes, I did have Scottish food while I was in Edinburgh; I had a full Scottish breakfast, complete with tattie scone, mushrooms, tomato, egg, sausage, back bacon, toast, and – of course! – haggis.) I LOVED the haggis; it was the best.

But I cannot stop thinking about that excellent Middle Eastern Food I ate.

Which leads me back to Anissa Helou’s lovely book.

I learned how to make this bread from a wonderful, old-fashioned baker, Jawad Yussef Daher, whose bakery is in Kfar Rumman in south Lebanon.
 
– Anissa Helou, ‘Lebanese Bread from the South’, Savory Baking from the Mediterranean, p.79
Jawad Yussef Daher […] told me about this Lebanese variation on the pita theme. I never asked him why he calls it morning bread, but presumably it is because it is eaten mostly for breakfast. The two different flours and the cornmeal give the bread more texture and make it mor interesting than pita.
 
– Anissa Helou, ‘Lebanese Morning Bread Khobz al Sabah‘, Savory Baking from the Mediterranean, p.76
I thought it would be fun to make my own ka’keh and I decided to use an interesting recipe from my baking book for khobz al-sabah (morning bread) instead of one for pita which I would then shape into the handbag-like ka’keh.
 
– Anissa Helou, Anissa | ka’keh

Annoyingly, not only are there zero gram equivalents in the cookbook (Anissa’s blog does give the equivalents), but water does NOT appear in the ingredients list at all. How dumb is that?!

cookbook: “Dissolve the yeast in 1/3 cup warm water and stir until creamy. Combine the flours, cornmeal, and salt in a large bowl […] Add the yeast, then gradually add 1+1/4 cups warm water, bringin in teh flour as you go along. Knead until you have a rough ball of dough.”

Anissa’s blog: “Mix the flours, yeast and salt in a large mixing bowl. Make a well in the centre. Gradually add 400 ml warm water, bringing in the flour as you go along. Knead until you have a rough ball of dough.”

Below is the BBB recipe for September. Please use whatever “corn” meal and/or flour you prefer. (We really like the barley ones)

corn noun […] (FOOD)
[…]
UK (the seeds of) plants, such as wheat, maize, oats, and barley,
that can be used to produce flour.

Wild Lebanese Morning Bread
based on the recipe for khobz al-Sabah (Lebanese morning bread) in “Savory Baking from the Mediterranean” by Anissa Helou

makes 6 pitas

Leavener

• 1 dessert spoon culture (whole wheat 100% hydration starter) from the fridge (about 40 grams)
• 50 grams [50 ml] room temperature water (plus more if needed)
• 50 grams [1/3 cup] ‘no-additives’ 100% whole wheat flour (plus more if needed)

Dough

• 250 grams [1+2/3 cups] unbleached “no additives” all-purpose flour, sifted
• 50 grams [1/3 cup] cornmeal (or barley, millet, etc. etc.)
• 160 grams [160 ml (1/2 cup + 8 teaspoons)] water
  all of the leavener from above (when it floats – showing that it’s as strong as it can be)
• 7 grams [generous teaspoon] seasalt + 10 grams [2 teaspoons] water (Anissa Helou calls for far more salt: 24 grams for the full recipe in the book, but 18 grams for the full recipe on her blog !!! Whoa, that seems like far too much salt! I made an executive decision to reduce it.)

1. Leavener: Late in the evening on the day before you will be making the bread, put a spoonful of culture from the fridge into a small bowl. Stir in 50 grams water and 50 grams whole wheat flour. Cover with a plate and put into the cold oven (if the night temperatures are cool, turn the oven light on) to leave overnight.
2. Actual Dough: On the day you will be making the bread, check to see if the leavener floats in a small bowl of cool water. If the leavener is domed but it doesn’t float, wait for 30 minutes or so and try again. If the leavener is bubbly but flat or concave on the surface, stir in about 5 grams each of whole wheat flour and water. Cover with a plate and leave it on the counter out of draughts. Check again again for floating about 20-30 minutes later. It will probably float. Proceed with making the actual dough.
3. Using a bowl that is large enough for the dough to triple, sift in all-purpose flour. Whisk in corn meal. Add 160 grams of water and all of the leavener. Using a dough whisk or wooden spoon, stir just enough to mix it together. Cover with a plate and leave on counter for about 20 minutes.
4. Kneading and adding the salt: Whisk salt and 10 grams water into a small bowl and pour on top of the dough. Wash your hands and leave one hand wet. With the back of your hand against the side of the bowl, reach down into the bowl to the bottom of the dough and pull it up to the fold it over the top. Turn the bowl with your other hand and repeat 4 or 5 times. Cover the bowl with a plate and set aside on the counter for about 20 minutes.
5. Repeat the previous step 2 or 3 times more. You’ll notice that the dough becomes smooth and silky to the touch. It may also seem a little dry. Don’t be overly concerned. Just add a splash more water and squoosh it in.
6. Proofing: Cover with a plate and leave on the counter. (Check the dough every so often as the afternoon progresses into evening. If you’re not ready to bake the bread, wet your hands and gently fold the dough whenever it has doubled.
7. Preheat: Around dinnertime on the day you will be baking pita in
   • the barbecue Light the barbecue, close the lid, and turn it to high.
   • the oven place a pizza stone on the middle shelf of the oven set at 450F.
8. Pre-Shaping: While the bbq/oven is preheating, pour the risen dough onto a lightly floured board. Divide the dough evenly into 6 pieces.
   
   Using floured hands, shape each piece into a round. Cover with a damp tea towel and allow to rest for about 5 minutes.
9. Shaping: Starting with the first round made, using a rolling pin, roll the round out into a disc about 15cm in diameter. As you roll, make sure that the disc can be lifted up easily. Repeat with all the rounds.
   
10. Baking: When the bbq/oven is hot hot hot, carry the board of rounds and, using a dough scraper, if using the
    • barbecue: place each round directly on the grill and close the lid of the barbecue. After a minute or so, use blunt-nosed tongs to move the rounds from place to place, to account for uneven heat. Be thrilled the the bread puffs up. Don’t get too worried if a balloon bursts as you move the pita and enjoy the show of steam escaping. Even if it is flat, the pita will still taste good!
    • oven: place each round on the hot stone on the middle shelf of the oven still turned to high heat (450F).

    It takes 5-10 minutes to bake pita. When they balloon up, gently turn them over. Also, move them around from time to time to account for uneven heat in the barbecue and oven. USE OVEN MITTS AND TONGS!!
    
    To check to see if the pitas are done, use blunt-nosed tongs to gently lift them up. They should be light weight and puffy. As they are done, put them into a basket.

Serve immediately. (The bread can be frozen, then reheated in the toaster or toaster oven.)

Notes:

Water: Anissa Helou’s recipe is quite shy with the water, creating a dough that is around 52% hydration. It was quite dry. I have altered the recipe. But, of course, feel free to play with the amount of water.

Cornmeal: The first time round, I used finely ground corn meal. However, medium ground would probably work too. But it occurs to me that because of the fact that corn is a relatively (in the grand scheme of things) new addition to Lebanon, and the British definition of “corn” being “grain”, it may be possible that this Lebanese Morning Bread could be made with barley meal or rye meal. Or maybe millet. Doing a quick search of the internet, I came across the following:
One of the first cultivated grains of the Fertile Crescent, barley was domesticated about 8000 BCE from its wild progenitor Hordeum spontaneum. Archaeological evidence dates barley cultivation to 5000 BCE in Egypt, 2350 BCE in Mesopotamia, 3000 BCE in northwestern Europe, and 1500 BCE in China.
 
– Britannica | barley cereal
The Fertile Crescent is an ancient geographic region comprised of three primary geographic zones:
   • Mesopotamia, mostly located in modern-day Iraq, defined by the alluvial plain of the rivers Euphrates and Tigris
   • Upper Mesopotamia in the foothills of the Taurus and Zagros mountains in the north
   • The Levant, in modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and Palestine on the Mediterranean seaboard to the west […] The first agricultural evidence comes from the Levant, from where it spread to Mesopotamia, enabling the rise of large-scale cities and empires in the region. […] Mesopotamian Crops The main types of grain that were used for agriculture were barley, wheat, millet, and emmer.
 
– Jan van der Crabben, World History Encyclopedia | Agriculture in the Fertile Crescent & Mesopotamia
Barley has a mild and nutty flavour and contains more fibre than wheat. It has a lower gluten content — and, indeed, fewer calories — than wheat, so it is often combined with other strong flours to impart its nutritional qualities and flavour, usually in a ratio of one-quarter barley to three-quarters wheat. It is often used in flatbreads, and in Scotland for bannocks.
 
– Jane Eastoe, ‘Ingredients | Barley’, Bread Making: Advice and Recipes for Perfect Home-made Bread, p.16

Wild Starter (aka culture): Our starter is a 100% hydration, liquid levain. It takes about 5 days to create. (Please see our take on Jane Mason’s Natural Starter made with Whole Wheat Flour.) Of course, if you don’t have a wild starter going and want to use commercial yeast to make same-day pitas, try this:
• 3 grams dry yeast [1+1/8 teaspoons] + 15 grams [1 Tablespoon] water
• 250 grams [1+2/3 cups] unbleached “no additives” all-purpose flour
• 50 grams [1/3 cup] 100% whole wheat flour
• 50 grams [1/3 cup] cornmeal
• 195 grams [195 ml] water
• 7 grams [generous teaspoon] seasalt + 10 grams [2 teaspoons] water

Leavener and the float test: In the summer and early fall, our leavener can be quite active. We find that with the extra warmth in the kitchen, dough made with it tends to rise very quickly. Therefore, we feed it late at night and again in the morning. Many people state categorically that the float test is unreliable, useless, and/or “bogus”. I have been tricked when merely looking at our starter – it appears to have doubled and be quite aerated. But it does NOT float. I feed it with a small amount of flour and check it about an hour or so later. The starter then has a slightly domed shape and DOES pass the float test, indicating that it is at its peak.
The most reliable indication that your leaven is ready is if it floats in water, a result of the carbon dioxide gas produced by wild yeast activity. To test the readiness of your leaven, drop a spoonful of it into a bowl of moderate room-temperature water. If it sinks, it is not ready to use and needs more time to ferment and ripen. You can expedite the fermentation by putting the leaven in a warm place and checking again after half an hour. Or you can [feed] the leaven […] [to give] it fresh resources to ferment and ripen. Let the new mixture ferment until it passes the float test.
 
– Chad Robertson, Tartine Bread, p45-47
I bow down to all those intuitive sourdough bakers out there who are producing brilliant bread after brilliant bread without doing the float test. But for me, it is an easy and important step to ensure that our bread dough rises rather than sitting like a lump for hours.

• Other References:
  » Kalofagas: How to Make Pita Bread
  » Serious Eats: Homemade Pita Bread Recipe
  » The Kitchn: How To Make Pita Bread at Home
  » TastingTable: Flour Guide – Everything you need to know about types of flour
  » Calculator Site: Cups to Grams (various commonly used baking ingredients)
  » CoolConversion: Volume to Weight Converter – Cooking (various commonly used baking ingredients)
  » Little Spoon Farm: Baking Conversion Chart (volume to grams for various ingredients)

And what to serve with your Morning Bread? Here is what I found online:

[B]read is a traditional Lebanese breakfast option […] often served with eggs, hummus, cheese spread, or just za’atar spice
– Nomads Unveiled | 15 Lebanese Breakfasts: A Look at Breakfast in Lebanon
Nothing beats this traditional Lebanese breakfast made up of thick, creamy labne and olive oil, cheese (baladi, halloumi, akkawi… or all of the above), olives, zaatar, cucumbers, tomatoes from the “day3a” [village], fresh mint leaves, Lebanese bread, and tea
– Christina Naim, Beirut.com | 9 Lebanese Breakfasts Ranked In Order Of Deliciousness
Foul (ful) medames is a hearty Lebanese breakfast made from cooked fava beans, lemon juice, crushed garlic and cumin served with fresh vegetables and eaten with pita bread. Most often, it is simply referred to as “foul”.
– Iman, Simply Lebanese | Foul (Ful)
Homemade pita is amazing, but couple that with some fresh produces to prepare a lavish Lebanese breakfast to make it the best. […] I love to have a healthy and big breakfast. […] Lebanese Breakfast Spread:
   • Fresh colorful peppers, julienned
   • Labneh, drizzled with olive oil and garnished with parsley
   • Hard Boiled Eggs
   • Persian Cucumbers, chopped
   • Honey
   • Tahini
   • Fresh Tomatoes
   • Olives
   • Cumin, Salt and Chile powder mix for eggs
   • Tea and Sugar for tea.
– Dolphia Nandi Arnstein, Story of Cooks | Pita and Lebanese breakfast

look how it puffs!!

Here is how things went making this September’s BBB project:

BBB Lebanese Morning Bread diary:

6 August 2023, 16:21 I was up on our garage roof cutting tree branches, and saw the following growing out of our neighbour’s garage roof eves trough!! (I’ve transplanted it. Do you think I’ll be able to make my own corn meal from the harvest? )

18 August 2023, 13:40 I’m still planning to make this bread again, using barley meal instead of cornmeal. And I will double-check the water amount too. I’m really surprised at how little water Anissa Helou calls for! (Maybe her measuring cups are larger. Or something.)

But. Will I make the bread again before two or three days before our posting on 16 September? With my track record??

5 September 2023, 16:17 I hope that everybody isn’t a) melting, b.) dealing with flooding, or c.) choking from inhaling too much smoke from wildfires.

I still haven’t made the bread again using coarsely ground barley instead of cornmeal. Maybe, by a miracle, I’ll do that before the 16th. If this heat wave goes away. And if I can convince T that he really does want to have wild whole-grain pita instead of bread made with only all-purpose flour and commercial yeast. (I swear that he must have read Heidi and really really really identified with the Grandmother who could only eat soft white bread….)

Meanwhile, remember the “corn” that I rescued from our neighbours’ eavestrough? It turns out that it ISN’T corn (as in maize).

This is what appeared in mid August. Google Lens thinks it’s millet or sorghum.

And below is what it looks like today. I’m thinking it must be sorghum.

And see the sunflower behind the pole? This is the hazard of planting a garden in the lane. Yesterday, there WERE 3 sunflowers at the top of the plant. A creature (either a very tall creature, or a small one that could easily climb the stalk without bring it down, or a bird??) snipped off the flowers. Nice, eh?

Here’s why I think the mystery plant is sorghum. One of the suggested links from Google Lens was to University of Maryland Ask Extension with the heading “Weed that looks like cornstalk #593266”:

Asked August 30, 2019, 11:11 AM EDT
I have three of these in my yard where I never planted anything.
[…]
Expert Response Hi – These are sorghum plants. In some areas of Maryland, they are grown as a commercial crop and you’ll see fields of them. Sorghum is included in some birdseed mixes too, so sometimes uneaten bird seeds will result in volunteers like this.
 
– Christa, Home and Garden Information Cent University of Maryland Extension Replied August 30, 2019, 12:52 PM EDT (https://ask2.extension.org/kb/faq.php?id=593266)

There are zillions of birdfeeders in the neighbourhood…. Although… I guess it could be millet too because there is often millet in birdseed mixes. What do you think?

19:28 We baked the bread in the barbecue about an hour ago. It took NO time at all. When I was shaping the bread, I decided to experiment. I used our rolling pin for three of the breads, and fingers to dimple and flatten into rounds for the other three.

The rolled ones puffed right away in the barbecue! The dimpled ones took their time puffing.

12 September 2023, 15:32 Yay!! The old fridge is gone. The new (to us) fridge is installed. It was not at all an easy task, especially for the two delivery guys who had to work together using all their muscles (legs and arms) to get the doors off so that the old fridge could be removed from the house.

AND all the contents from the old fridge are jammed haphazardly in. The freezer is the most nightmarish. There is one tiny adjustable shelf there. Really?

Tomorrow, we will look into how many lazy susans and shelves we have to get; whoever designed the inside of the freezer and the fridge had no concept of how best to use the space. It’s ridiculous right now. Especially the doors, with no guards to stop things from falling when they are opened and closed.

We baked the barley bread last night in the barbecue. It took NO time at all. When I was shaping the bread, I decided to experiment. I used our rolling pin for three of the breads, and fingers to dimple and flatten into rounds for the other three. The rolled ones puffed right away! The dimpled ones took their time puffing.

We served two of the rolled barley breads – they split apart perfectly! (did I remember to have the camera with me? You MUST be joking) with green and red chile (hot hot hot!!) omelettes for breakfast.

The tiny needle-like Thai chiles are from our garden (they really are insanely hot, but beautifully citrussy too) and the coriander is from the market because our garden coriander has all gone to seed.

There was still a little bread left on each of our plates after we had finished eating our omelettes. We drizzled honey on the last of each piece of bread. It was delicious!

We made fuhl to have with the rest of the bread. (J’adore fuhl.)

The finger-shaped breads didn’t puff as well and refused to split apart after they had cooled a little. But today, the bread was still just as good with fuhl for breakfast!

In fact, I loved it! Alas, the resident critic decreed that the bread was too chewy. Ha. It means there is more for me.

I put the rest of the bread into our new (to us) freezer. There’s room!! There’s no frost!!

AND even though 3 of the buds were torn away, the sunflower has now blossomed!

Life IS sweet!

 

Pita, commonly referred to in Arabic as khubz (“bread”), is the most widely available bread throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. Unfortunately, in thse days of mass production, even there the khubz that makes its way to restaurant tables is often the same ubiquitous too-quick-to-go-stale white pita served in restaurants in North America.
 
– Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford, ‘Pita khubz, baladi * Eastern Mediterranean‘, Flatbreads and Flavors, p. 181

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  » converting recipe for wild yeast to one with domestic yeast (and vice versa)