Beginner
Turkish
Menemen (Turkish Scrambled Eggs)
Source: Home cook
20 min2260 kcal
VegetarianGluten-freeHalal🌶️
Malawach
Dough rolled paper-thin, smeared with fat, coiled and flattened again, then fried in a dry pan until it shatters into leaves — Yemenite Jewish bread, eaten with grated tomato and a boiled egg.
Source
Recipe by Jewish diaspora kitchens · 🏺 Traditional · Recipes carried to one country from twenty others — Yemen, Iraq, Morocco, Poland, Turkey — and cooked side by side until they became a shared table.
Yemenite Jewish · flatbread — An ownerless traditional dish, so no cook is credited. The cited article confirms it as a Jewish Yemenite flatbread traditional in Yemeni cuisine, the laminated dough and the tomato, zhug and egg served with it. That the dish is Yemenite rather than Israeli in origin is stated rather than glossed over. Quantities and method are this book's own.
Watch it being made · 3 videos
⏱ 150 min🍽 6 servings🔥 420 kcal🇮🇱 Israel🌶️
HalalKosherVegetarianDairy-freeNut-free
Steps
Mix the flour, water, salt and sugar into a soft dough. Knead 10 minutes until smooth, then rest 30 minutes.
Divide into 6. Roll each one out as thin as you possibly can — thin enough to see the counter through it.
💡 Thin enough to read through. Every layer you can see later comes from how thin you got it now — this is the entire technique.
Smear the whole surface with a thick layer of the soft shortening, right to the edges.
Roll it up into a tight rope, then coil the rope into a flat spiral like a snail. Chill 1 hour.
Flatten each spiral with a rolling pin into a 20 cm round, pressing gently so the layers do not tear.
Fry in a dry pan over medium heat, 4 minutes a side, until deep gold and crisp. Serve with grated tomato, zhug and a boiled egg.
💡 Dry pan — the malawach has all the fat it needs rolled inside it. Adding oil to the pan fries the outside before the layers separate.
💡 Tips
- It freezes raw beautifully, which is exactly how Israeli supermarkets sell it. Stack the flattened discs with paper between them.
- Jachnun is malawach's overnight sibling — the same laminated dough rolled and baked at very low heat for twelve hours instead of fried.
- Grated tomato, not chopped. Halve a tomato and grate the cut face against a box grater — the skin stays in your hand.
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