SC - Moroccan Bread
lilinah at earthlink.net
lilinah at earthlink.net
Wed Jan 31 16:32:25 PST 2001
I'm no baker. I can do brownies, cookies, sweet breads, cakes, and
pies from scratch, but i've never felt that yeasted breads were worth
the trouble
This partly comes from student living. I lived in a house with about
a dozen people. A friend there loved to bake. He'd make 4 loaves of
whole wheat-oatmeal bread and they wouldn't last 1 hour after he
pulled them out of the oven.
And partly because i'm not a big bread eater. I go for weeks without bread.
But the bread in Morocco intrigued me. I've looked through all my
Moroccan cook books and none gives a recipe for the most common bread
in Morocco.
It's a round and fairly flat loaf - maybe about 6 inches in diameter
and less than 2 inches high. It is made, my daughter said, of hard
wheat/Durham wheat. I say semolina flour because it is a lovely pale
yellow from the color of the flour and has a distinct flavor -
there's no egg and no colorant in the dough. Or are hard wheat flour,
Durham wheat flour, and semolina flour the same thing?
My daughter watched it being made but has never baked bread, so isn't
exactly sure of the method. Basically the dough is made - they use
powdered yeast these days-, kneaded for some time, then pulled into
even pieces and formed into round loaves (i'm not sure if it is
kneaded again), covered with a cloth and left for a certain amount of
time... 1 hour? The bottom is dusted with finely cracked grain - my
cookbooks suggest cornmeal, but i think it's fine semolina. It is
then baked. It is not given a second rise.
I assume that it is just made of the special flour, water, salt, and
yeast - but as i said, i'm a bread ignoramus - a tiny bit of sugar to
feed the yeast?
The bread is not crusty and crunchy on the outside like a French
loaf, just brown and chewy. The inside is a lovely pale yellow with a
particular fragrance and flavor of semolina - it is also rather chewy
- - but then, it is not made for eating in slices, but for scooping up
salads and dips and sopping up sauces, so being firm is a good thing.
Any ideas on how to recreate this?
Thanks
Anahita
More information about the Sca-cooks
mailing list