Bint al-sahn

Ingredients

• Flour500 g
• Eggs3
• Dry yeast7 g
• Warm milk200 ml
• Ghee300 g
• Honey250 g
• Nigella seeds2 tsp
• Sugar1 tbsp
• Salt1 tsp

Salt and spices grow more slowly than the rest: doubling a dish does not double the pepper.

Weight converts to ounces and volume to cups. Grams of flour are not turned into cups, because that depends on how tightly it is packed.

Method

1. 1

   Dissolve the yeast and sugar in the warm milk and leave it ten minutes.

   12 min

2. 2

   Knead a soft dough from the flour, eggs, yeast mixture, salt and two spoons of ghee, and work it fifteen minutes.

   18 min

3. 3

   Let it rise somewhere warm for an hour, until doubled.

   62 min

4. 4

   Divide it into ten balls, oil them and rest them twenty minutes under film.

   25 min

5. 5

   Stretch the first ball by hand to the size of the tin, lay it in and brush it generously with ghee.

   15 min

6. 6

   Repeat with the rest, buttering every layer. Brush the top one too and scatter it with nigella.

   25 min

7. 7

   Bake at 190 °C for thirty-five minutes and pour the honey over immediately, while the bread is hot.

   38 min

About the dish

Between eight and twelve layers are made, each stretched by hand until translucent. The count of layers is what separates a good bint al-sahn from a mediocre one.

Only ghee goes between the layers, with no filling. It both separates the dough and makes it crumble as it bakes.

The honey is poured onto the bread while it is hot so it soaks in. On a cooled loaf it sits on the surface and runs onto the plate.

Worth knowing

• — Do not stint on the ghee. Being sparing with it fuses the layers and gives a dense bread instead of a crumbling one.
• — Do not patch holes in the stretched sheets — they are normal, and the ghee spreads regardless.
• — It is eaten by hand, pulled apart in layers. The Yemeni custom is to serve bint al-sahn at the start of a meal rather than at the end.

Nutrition

Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.

Calories

620 kcal

Protein

9 g

Fat

34 g

Carbs

70 g

More from Yemen

• Saltah — A meat stew served boiling in a stone pot under a whipped fenugreek froth called hulba.