MC Logo

Search Results


This is an excerpt from An Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook
(Andalusia, 13th c. - Charles Perry, trans.)
The original source can be found at David Friedman's website

Preparation of Khubaiz (Little Bread) that is Made in Niebla. Take good wheat, put it in a washtub, and cover it with good, fresh water. Change the water after two or three days so that the wheat softens and makes talbina [releases its starch into the water], as is done for starch. Then remove the water and press with the feet in the bottom of a rush basket, or by hand if there is only a little of it. Sieve into a bowl what comes out of the pith. Then pour a little fresh water over the wheat bran to wash it. Squeeze it until none of the pith remains. Put all this in a bowl and leave it in the sun until it binds together. Strain from it the flour water that is left over, time and again, until it thickens. Then pour it in a cloth and hang it so that it drips until it dries, and expose it to the sun if you want to make starch. This is the recipe for starch. Do not let it get near dew or it will spoil. When the khubaiz has been made, take some of it before it dries -- it will be like yogurt -- and beat it with your hand until it is smooth. If you wish, dissolve dry starch in fresh water so that it comes out according to this description, and make from it.
Then put a frying-pan over a moderate fire, and when it has heated, smear it with a cloth soaked in oil. Then take some of the dissolved starch with a spoon and pour it in the frying-pan. With your hand, move it around in the pan so that it stretches out thin. When it has bound together and whitened, take it to a board or a cloth and grease the frying pan with oil. Pour in another large spoonful until you have a sufficient quantity. Leave it on the cloth in the sun until it dries. Then put it in a rush basket or a sack, and beat it all over so that it whitens until it forms crumbs the size of grains of wheat, or a little larger.
Then put a frying pan full of fresh oil over a moderate fire. When the oil is boiling, put in fresh cheese while the oil boils. Remove it right away in a sieve so it does not burn and drain off the oil. Have prepared filtered skimmed honey, thickened in a pot on a weak fire. Leave it on the hearthstone so that it remains fluid. Every time you take this khubaiz from the frying-pan, drain it of its oil and throw it into this melted honey, and overturn the cheese into it with a spoon, adding to it little by little, and stir it with a spoon until they are mixed one with the other, it hardens and forms one mass, and remove it.

autodoc