Weekend Cooking: Khaliat Nahal (Beehive)
To me, cooking is a way to destress after a long week slogging at the office. Making bread, however, is what I find most enjoyable. When a bread recipe appeared in Saudi Food Eman’s Facebook feed, I knew I had to try it ASAP. I mean, bread stuffed with cream cheese and drizzled with syrup? Sign me up!
Because I was adamant about using my breadmaker for this, I had to make a few adjustments to the recipe. I didn’t notice that the recipe uses a lot more yeast relative to the flour (which was really silly in retrospect, but ah well that’s how we learn), so after letting the Dough cycle run its full course, my dough literally looked like foam. While I managed to save the dough by adding more flour, the bread turned out heavy and had a strong yeasty taste. At this point, I still didn’t realize that the cause was my overproofing the dough. I instead blamed it on the plain flour I used, and switched to bread flour for my second attempt.
While the dough was a lot less wet this time around, and the bread was a lot fluffier, the yeasty flavor remained. Finally it dawned on me that I was using the same amount of yeast but a little more than half of the flour compared to my roti paung recipe. Since the whole point of using a ton of yeast is to cut down prep time, I must have been letting the dough sit for far too long. I then realized waiting for my normal breadmaker Dough cycle to fully finish isn’t suitable for this recipe, so I simply let the machine do just the kneading and took it out right after, without resting the dough. True enough, this dough rises so fast, the earlier rolls doubled in size by the time I finished working on the last few.
The results? Lovely rolls which were bite sized and fluffy, with no unpleasant yeasty taste. I also loved the amazing combination of exotic flavors and textures. Creamy cheese inside fluffy bread, topped with crunchy, herby black seeds (habbatus sauda) then drizzled with sweet syrup infused with the distinct flavor of saffron. I just couldn’t stop eating this.
Try it out!
Read More