Esfiha

As tradition built it

Esfiha (aberta and fechada)

Makes 40 open esfihas. About 1 hour 30 minutes.

Ingredients

The filling

• 500g beef (capa de filé), minced
• 2 (245g) tomatoes, seeded and chopped
• ½ large (90g) onion, chopped
• 34g parsley, chopped
• 58g tahini
• 1 tsp Syrian pepper
• ⅛ tsp white pepper, freshly ground
• 60ml lime juice
• 70g pine nuts, toasted
• to taste salt

The dough

• 30g fresh yeast
• 500ml water
• 6g salt
• 33g sugar
• 30ml corn oil
• 1kg plain flour
• 140g fubá (fine maize meal), for dusting
• 30ml soya oil, for the tray

Method

The filling

1. Mix all the filling ingredients very well in a bowl.

The dough

2. Dissolve the yeast in the water and mix in the salt, sugar and corn oil.
3. Add the flour a little at a time, working it with your hands and beating it hard until even. Cover with a damp cloth and rest 5 minutes.
4. Knead again and roll it into walnut sized balls. Roll each in fubá, cover with the damp cloth, and rest 10 minutes.

Shaping and baking

5. Set the balls well apart on an oiled tray and open each with your fingertips into a round, thicker at the edge than the middle.
6. Put 2 tablespoons of filling in the middle, open the dough out further, and spread the filling with your fingers so only the rim shows. Rest 20 minutes.
7. Bake in an oven heated to 300°C about 8 minutes, until coloured, and serve hot.

Notes

Where exactly within the Levant the dish began is a genuinely live dispute: one long-established São Paulo restaurateur credits the area around Homs, Syria, spreading into Lebanon's Beqaa Valley, while noting many others claim the reverse direction of travel.

A well-known story holds that an elderly Arab cook taught Habib's founder Antônio Alberto Saraiva, a Portuguese-born baker with no Arab ancestry, the recipe that became his flagship product; the story rests on a single oral-history source and does not appear in Saraiva's own published biography, which credits his success to competitive pricing and range. It is a good story, and no more.

The recipe is chef Leila Kuczynski's open esfiha, for Tá na Mesa. Mohamad Hindi's family dough, on his channel, is enriched with egg, milk and butter and proved until doubled, and goes into a high oven. No recipe for the closed esfiha was found.

What a modern chef changes

A short cold ferment for a crisper base

Method

1. Build the aberta dough with a short, cold ferment, four to six hours in the fridge rather than a quick same-day rise, for a thinner, crisper base that holds a wetter filling without turning soggy.
2. Cook the minced-meat filling for the aberta version briefly sous vide with its own spicing before it goes onto the dough, so the meat is fully seasoned and just cooked through.
3. For the fechada, cheese version, pass a genuine requeijão through a chinois with a little lemon zest before filling, for a smoother, less grainy result than folding the cheese in cold and raw.