Sumac & Quinoa Lavosh

 I am addicted to the magic of baking and all things sugared but when it comes to eating, I prefer salty foods.

Add crisp and crunch and I’m your valentine.

Oh Oh and a little bit of sour?  That’s it, I’m a goner!And all my highbrow la dee da dee da, ‘this place is too small’, ‘this place is too big’, doing my best impersonation of Goldilocks.  Yea well all that goes out the window.  I’ll eat anything salty, crunchy and sour.  Well almost anything.  I won’t eat the ubiquitous paprika flavoured chips they favour here or those weird puffed up concoctions that dissolve in your mouth and adhere  to every crevice in your teeth.

I’ve been struggling with my cravings here, there is no where I can get my fix.  Sometimes it get’s so bad, I shake a little Furikake (a salty Japanese condiment for sprinkling onto rice) into the palm of my hand and eat that.  Without rice or even plans to eat any time soon.

Hmm.  Have I said too much? Maybe.

Listen, that’s it - I swear! No other questionable habits in the closet.This recipe from Anna Hansen’s: The Modern Pantry is a happy find.  Although whenever I’ve made a batch, I hover around its general vicinity like one of those annoying wasps until I’ve finished the whole thing.

The recipe claims that if you mix the stated ingredients you get a very loose dough.  I’ve made this lavosh a few times now and even leaving out 30 ml of milk still leaves me with a bumpy batter rather than anything even vaguely resembling a dough.  Not that it’s a big deal, it just means that ‘rolling’ it is an impossibility and the best way to tame it is with an offset spatula.  The trick is to get it as thin as possible, be generous with the sumac and olive oil and bake it until it’s golden.

Also, the flavour and texture improves from a week in the fridge so make the batter a few days before you plan to bake it.

Sumac and Quinoa Lavosh
Adapted from  Anna Hansen’sThe Modern Pantry

Ingredients:
240g plain flour
200g cooked quinoa (a little less than 100g uncooked quinoa)
1 tsp poppy seeds
3 tsp fennel seeds
1 tsp table salt
1/4 tsp sugar
300ml milk (original recipe calls for 330ml)
50g butter, melted
olive oil or vegetable oil for rolling out and drizzling
sumac for sprinkling (lots!)
Maldon salt or other flaky sea salt

Method:
1. Sift the flour into a bowl and add the quinoa, poppy seeds and fennel seeds, salt and sugar. Whisk the milk and melted butter together, add to the dry ingredients and mix thoroughly with a wooden spoon until the dough becomes elastic (this never happened for me, even after 10 minutes in the kitchen aid with a dough hook). Allow to rest in the fridge for an hour (dough/batter will live happily in the fridge for up to a week).
2. Scoop out a large handful of dough on to a baking sheet lined with a silicone baking mat. Use an oiled offset spatula to spread the batter out evenly, you are aiming for 1-2 mm thick. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with a lot of sumac.
3. Bake at 180°C in a pre-heated oven until golden all over. Pale Lavosh is not as tasty.
4. Allow to cool and then break into shards.

8 Responses to Sumac & Quinoa Lavosh

  1. foodyrach says:

    That looks really good!

  2. joshuafagans says:

    Wow, these sound great. Quite an interesting mix of ingredients. Have to say I love salty and crunchy too!

    • I was surprised to find milk in the list of ingredients and the quinoa but it works. And despite the quinoa it doesn’t taste healthy in that off putting way. You know, eating styrofoam and soldiering through it because it’s good for your skin or whatever.

  3. berlinplants says:

    wow, this sounds absolutely delicious! we just wrote about sumac in our new blog, so i’d love to try out this recipe :)

  4. Just wanted to say that I’ve made this a few times now and it is brilliant. In fact, I’ve made it so often I got through a large jar of sumac within a few weeks.

    And last Friday, I finally got round to making it for our supper club guests and it was a big hit with them as well. Really great recipe.

    • It’s great isn’t it? Somewhat scary when initially dealing with that runny yeasted batter but once you get over that. It’s great. Will pick you up a bag of sumac when I’m in Jordan as it’s much cheaper there and of course - better!

  5. Aw, thanks for that. Looking forward to trying Jordanian sumac!

    I forgot to take photos of my own lavosh, is it ok when I take a picture off your website and stick it on mine? I’ll credit it to you, of course.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

Please log in to WordPress.com to post a comment to your blog.

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 732 other followers