[Sca-cooks] Sca-cooks Digest, Vol 125, Issue 40

[Terry Decker]

There are a couple of modern recipes I have encountered where semolina is 
mixed with water to make a paste in order to soften the fibers in the 
semolina.  It should produce a less chewy finished product.

Bear

-----Original Message----- 

Ok, the Arabic word translated as remoja is بل (bal), which according Lane's 
Lexicon means moisten. I think that's much more likely than soak. 
Interestingly, I've been looking at the couscous recipes in Ibn Razin, the 
most basic of which also says that the semolina is to be moistened. However, 
the Arabic words translated as "moistened" are different in the two recipes.

I think that part of what might be going on has to do with how to interpret 
the instructions in the recipe. I have little direct experience as a baker, 
but I've watched my wife make bread for decades and over the years have had 
a lot of conversations with her about the process. Based that experience, I 
would guess that a 13th century Andalusian baker reading Ibn Razin's recipe 
would think, "I need to add enough water to make a dough of the correct 
consistency."

-- Galefridus