The Gulf and Arabia · Volume 09, The Terrace, the Wadi and a Kitchen Carried Out
Shafoot
The highlands, Ramadan especially
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 20 minutes
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Lahoh, torn or laid whole into a wide shallow dish, is soaked with a blended cold buttermilk sauce flavoured with coriander, garlic, salt, chilli and cumin, optionally with cucumber, tomato and leek, blended until pale green. Built in a single layer or repeated in stacks, each layer soaked in turn, and served cold, specifically associated with Ramadan iftar tables.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 20 minutes, plus making the lahoh.
Ingredients
- 4 lahoh (see Dish 5), torn
- 500ml buttermilk or thinned natural yoghurt
- 30g fresh coriander
- 2 cloves garlic
- 1 green chilli
- 0.5 tsp ground cumin
- to taste salt
- as available cucumber and tomato, diced, to serve
Method
- Blend the buttermilk, coriander, garlic, chilli, cumin and salt until smooth and pale green.
- Lay a third of the torn lahoh in a wide shallow dish and pour over a third of the sauce.
- Repeat in layers, finishing with sauce.
- Chill briefly, then top with diced cucumber and tomato before serving cold.
What a modern chef changes
A sharper, greener sauce, built for real eyes to hold
Rung 5, adapted
Method
- Use lahoh made specifically to Rung 5's fuller-eye standard: a flatter, eyeless bread simply sheds the sauce rather than holding it in its surface pitting.
- Blend the sauce in a high-power blender until genuinely smooth, rather than roughly chopped, for a sauce that coats rather than sits on top of the torn bread.
- Build the layers no more than 20 minutes before serving: shafoot's appeal is the contrast between the bread's own texture and the cold sauce, which a long soak erodes.