Cardamom and Tea

When I was a kid, we would often go to Andersonville to see my great grandfather, his sister, and my great uncle’s family. Umtie Yasmi would make a big pot of chai and thaw some kadeh. She would cut it into a beautiful trapezoidal design.

The freezer was always packed to the brim with loaves of kadeh, some with a middle layer of martookhah, or golden-brown roux, and some without. I was thinking about these memories recently, so I asked my Aunt Masy to teach me how to bake kadeh. And I’m so glad I did, because this is the kadeh of my childhood in all its buttery glory.

The most important thing in learning to bake like your elders is making sure you record the butter carefully. Because there is always more butter than you could ever imagine. Don’t let the adorable granny demeanor fool you: they will lie about this to protect you from knowing how much butter you’ve really eaten in your life. So instead of asking Masy how to make kadeh, I watched her make it and took careful notes. And I’m so glad I did, because I would have never guessed two and a quarter sticks.

But if you’re looking for a way to help two and a quarter sticks of butter become their best selves, kadeh is the answer. It is a love letter to butter. The dough is a rich brioche, with so much dairy fat that you don’t use flour to roll it out. There’s just enough flour to hold everything together and to give the yeast something to nosh.

As if a rich-brioche dough weren’t enough, the inside gets filled with a buttery roux, which might sound strange if you’ve only ever encountered roux when making béchamel or gumbo. But if you’ve ever licked the spoon early on while making mac and cheese, I’m sure you’ve thought to yourself, “wow, this would make a really good sandwich.” And I’m here to tell you that you can totally make a roux sandwich, and it’s just as delicious as you’ve secretly dreamed.

There’s not much more to say about kadeh, since it speaks for itself. It goes great with chai, as a not-too-sweet dessert. And my mom loves to split hers open and spread some grape jelly over the martookhah.

Kadeh is particularly beautiful when you cut it the traditional way. Just slice a few chunky strips horizontally, and then cut each strip in half on a bit of a diagonal to make little trapezoids.

It’s great the first day, but it stales just like any homemade bread. So you should store it in the freezer and then reheat before serving. Kadeh freezes beautifully, especially before slicing, so don’t feel like you’re losing anything by doing so.

kadeh | roux-stuffed brioche

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Prep Time: 1 hour
Total Time: 4 hours 15 minutes
Yield: 2 loaves (cut into about 18 to 20 pieces total)

Ingredients

For the dough starter (khmira)
1 1/2 teaspoons yeast
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons vegetable oil
1/4 cup 115° F water

For the dough (leasha)
15 ounces flour (about 3 cups unsifted, 3 3/4 cups sifted)
3/4 teaspoon salt (add an extra 1/4 teaspoon if you prefer saltier kadeh)
1/4 cup sugar
9 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted (1 stick and 1 tablespoon)
1/4 cup + 3 T milk (115° F) (plus more, if necessary)

For the roux (martookhah):
10 tablespoons (divided into 1 stick + 2 tablespoons) unsalted butter
1 tablespoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup flour

To assemble the loaves:
Cooled martookhah (above)
2 risen dough balls (above)
1 egg beaten with 2 teaspoons water
2 teaspoons sesame seeds

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Instructions

Make the starter: Combine the yeast, sugar, vegetable oil, and water and mix to dissolve.
Cover and let it sit for 15 to 20 minutes, until it’s very foamy.
Make the dough: Sift together the flour, salt, and sugar.
Make a well in the center of the flour mixture, add the butter, 1/4 cup milk, and starter/khmira, and stir together to combine. As it starts to come together, add one more tablespoon of milk at a time until it comes together into a soft, flexible dough. Knead by pulling the sides of the dough into the center of the bowl. If it looks a little dry, add another tablespoon of milk, let it sit for 5 minutes, and then continue kneading until it comes together into a pliant dough. Knead until it’s elastic and smooth.
Cover the dough and let it rise for 1 hour and 15 minutes while you make the roux/martookhah.
Make the roux/martookhah: Melt the stick of butter with the sugar and salt in a small saucepan over medium heat.
As soon as the bubbling becomes a little quieter (about 3 minutes after the butter melts), immediately add the flour and whisk continuously for about 5 to 10 minutes.
The martookhah might be clumpy in the beginning, but it should thin out after a few minutes of cooking. Once it thins out, determine whether to add the extra 1 or 2 tablespoons of butter. The martookhah should thin-out into a slow-flowing viscous liquid that is thick enough that you can leave a trail with a spoon. If it is clumping together, it needs more butter. Add the additional one or two more tablespoons of butter if you need to, and continue cooking.
The martookhah is ready once it is golden-brown (according to your preference); make sure you pull it off the heat when it’s about a shade lighter than you’d like it to be; it will continue to cook for another minute or two.
Let the martookhah cool while the dough finishes rising.
Assemble and bake the loaves: Once the dough has risen, divide it into two equal pieces and shape each piece into a smooth ball. Let the dough balls rest, covered with plastic wrap, for 30 minutes.
Once the dough balls have rested for 30 minutes, preheat the oven to 350° F.
Roll each ball of dough out into a circle with a thickness between 1/8 and 1/4 inch. ** Try to make the circles as symmetrical as possible by lifting the dough and rotating it as you work, and let them rest for about 3 to 5 minutes if they’re really stretchy and difficult to roll out.
Move the rolled-out discs to a sheet pan.
Divide the cooled martookhah evenly between the circles of dough. Smooth it out so that the martookhah is covering half of each disc, with a margin of about 1/4 to 1/2 inch around the edges. Brush a light layer of the egg wash along the border around the martookhah.
Fold the dough over like you’re making a calzone and press down around the edges to start to seal them shut.
Finish sealing the edges either by crimping the dough with the back of a fork or your fingers, or by folding it over on itself as you work your way down the edge.
Dock the dough with a fork. Pierce all the way through to the bottom and over the entire surface of the filled part of the dough. After you fully dock the dough, gently pat the surface to make sure that all the air bubbles have been pressed out.
Brush the surface of each loaf with a light layer of eggwash.
Sprinkle each loaf with a teaspoon of sesame seeds.
Let the loaves sit for 10 minutes.
Bake for about 25 to 30 minutes, until the surfaces are golden brown and the loaves have puffed up and cooked through.
Let the loaves cool for at least 30 minutes before slicing. To cut traditionally, follow the pattern pictured above. First slice it into about 5 pieces vertically, and then cut each vertical piece in half diagonally, so that you end up with a bunch of trapezoids (and a few triangles toward the ends). Or you can cut it up however you’d like, if you don’t want to go the traditional route. Store at room temperature for up to 12 hours, or the freezer for up to 3 months.

Notes

* If you overcorrect by adding too much butter, you’ll see a lot of butter pooling on the surface. Simply catch the problem toward the beginning, and add 1 or 2 more tablespoons of flour. The measured amounts in the ingredients list are tested, so you should be fine with just 10 tablespoons of butter and 3/4 cup of flour. But always trust your common sense more than ingredient quantities.

** if you’ve kneaded the dough into a smooth ball, you should not need any flour to do this, since it will be both buttery and glutinous.

Booshala is the heart of Assyrian food. This fact is embedded in the name itself: “booshala,” literally translated in some dialects of Assyrian, means “cooked.” To me, it was always just the name of this yogurt and swiss chard soup, but I learned about this complex etymology when I met up with Chaldean blogger, Candice, from the blog Boushala.

At the time, I had just developed this recipe, based on the booshala of my grandfather’s mother as well as the booshala of my grandmother, and I was curious what Candice’s recipe for booshala looked like, so before we met, I checked out her recipes page, which had several really delicious stews and soups, but I didn’t see a recipe for booshala. When we met, we had such a wonderful conversation about food, family, photography, and graphic design, that before we had to go our separate ways, I almost forgot to ask her this question.

So I (probably a little rudely and abruptly) asked Candice why she had a blog called “Boushala” without a recipe for the dish, thinking maybe her boushala was a well-kept family secret. She gave me a puzzled look and asked what I meant, and we eventually fumbled toward realizing that this word meant something completely different to each of us. In Candice’s language, “boushala” means cooked food, but in my family’s dialect, “booshala” means a very specific kind of food.

In other words, according to my own folk etymology that I’ve dreamed up, at some point in our history, if you vaguely asked for food, this soup is what you’d get. It is Assyrian cooking in its most essential form.

Like gurdthu, booshala takes the two main staples of our cuisine, yogurt and rice, and cooks them together into something delicious. But this dish can be a little bit of an acquired taste for people who aren’t used to cooking with yogurt. I think there are two major stumbling blocks: the temperature and the flavor pairings. Allow me to assuage your anxiety, if you’re having trouble wrapping your head around what this might taste like.

You might not be used to the idea of eating yogurt in something warm instead of something chilled. But eating a yogurt soup isn’t too far a jump from eating chili with a big dollop of sour cream mixed in, or eating a baked spinach dip with loads of cream cheese, parmesan, and sour cream. I think another part of the anxiety over the temperature is a technical one, that the yogurt will curdle if you heat it. But when you add an egg, bring it to a simmer while stirring constantly, and then cook it over low heat, you have nothing to worry about. It will stay creamy and velvety. And moreover, booshala can be served either warm or chilled, so feel free to start by chilling it if you’re nervous about eating a warm yogurt soup.

But I guess cold yogurt soup still might not entirely sell you on the concept, because I think the more fundamental hangup is the idea of eating yogurt with savory flavors. In Middle Eastern food, this is a common and very delicious pairing. Yogurt is often dolloped on prakhe and enjoyed with za’atar or herbs. And indeed, there’s no reason that yogurt should be limited to sweet flavors, since it’s such a neutral ingredient. Consider the analogous flavor pairings of french onion dip, bagels with lox and cream cheese, and crème fraîche and salmon roe crêpes. All of these dairy products are fermented in the same way as yogurt, starting with just about the same ingredients (with varying degrees of dairy fat), and they’re all delicious with savory ingredients.

But as any parent knows, it’s impossible to give reasons and arguments to convince someone that they should try to enjoy a certain food. At the end of the day, learning to love a new thing just takes some combination of open-mindedness and exposure. And booshala hardly needs defending, since we love it enough for everyone.

The yogurt we use for booshala is traditionally made from scratch, although I’ve tested this recipe with both homemade and store-bought and each works just fine. Just make sure you find a yogurt whose flavor you like. Not to name names, but there are a couple yogurt brands out there that have a very particular flavor, which may work nicely with berries and sweetener, but doesn’t really work well in savory dishes. Look for any plain, unstrained, unflavored yogurt that you’d actually want to eat plain. I find that both Indian and Middle Eastern brands generally work really well here.

You can substitute another green in place of the swiss chard. Just avoid very bitter greens like dandelion, and if you use a more delicate green like spinach, reduce the cooking time and add a little more of the greens. You can also substitute barley in place of the rice, which is equally traditional. If you use barley, you’ll need to par-cook it ahead of time, since it takes much longer to cook than rice. Just simmer it in some water until it is still a little crunchy and unpleasantly chewy, and then add it to the soup to cook the rest of the way.