Kleicha

Name: Kleicha
Total time: 2 h
Yield: Makes a large tray
Cuisine: Iraq, Baghdad, Basra, Mosul and the Kurdish North
Ingredients: 960ml (4 cups) plain flour; 360ml (1.5 cups) ghee and butter, mixed; 1 tsp salt; 4 tbsp sugar; 1 egg; 5 tbsp milk powder; 1 tbsp ground cardamom; 1 tbsp yeast; as needed warm water; 250g soft pitted dates, pounded with a little of the fat and a pinch of cardamom

Iraq, everywhere, at Eid

Kleicha, cardamom scented biscuits stuffed with dates: a tin tray of pale golden crescent and rolled biscuits, matt and baked to a light gold, some cut to show the dark date paste spiral inside.

Illustration

Time: 2 hours

Researched: Researched from 44 sources in the brief

Kleicha is the Iraqi Eid biscuit, scented with cardamom and filled with dates. Every recipe we read agrees on the cardamom and the dates. The dough is not one thing: an Iraqi press recipe column gives a yeast risen dough, a home cook on TikTok gives one of yoghurt, butter and baking powder, and both bake at 180 degrees. The dough below is the press column's. The fillings after dates are sesame with sugar and cardamom, walnut with cinnamon and cardamom, and coconut with sugar.

by Iraq, everywhere, at Eid

Dr Tofiq Rafiq Altunci, writing in Al-Taakhi in November 2023 after five decades in Kirkuk, describes a kitchen where Arab, Kurdish and Turkmen cooking meet, carried by housewives who folded Ottoman, Persian, Arab and Kurdish habits into one domestic repertoire. He names dolma, pacha, kleicha, imam bayildi and sheikh mashwi as Kirkuk dishes. He describes who cooks. He does not say who invented, and neither do we. Kirkuk's dairy has a dated fact of its own: the Riaz dairy factory reopened on 16 November 2022 after nineteen years, with 1.1 billion dinars from the United Nations Development Programme, three tonnes of milk a day planned for yoghurt, cheese, cream and qaymagh, and a hundred jobs. It had stopped after 2003 and its equipment was destroyed during the occupation of Hawija. The Kurdish outlet 964media headlined it as Kirkuk's yoghurt, cheese, cream and qaymagh coming back.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Makes a large tray. About 2 hours, including an hour and a half to prove.

Ingredients

For the dough

960ml (4 cups) plain flour
360ml (1.5 cups) ghee and butter, mixed
1 tsp salt
4 tbsp sugar
1 egg
5 tbsp milk powder
1 tbsp ground cardamom
1 tbsp yeast
as needed warm water

For the filling

250g soft pitted dates, pounded with a little of the fat and a pinch of cardamom

Method

Rub the ghee and butter into the flour, salt, sugar and milk powder until it is sandy.
Add the egg, the cardamom and the yeast, and enough warm water to make a soft dough. Knead it smooth.
Cover and prove about an hour and a half, until it has grown.
Pound the dates with a little of the ghee and butter and a pinch of cardamom to a paste that spreads.
Roll the dough thin, spread the date paste over it, roll it up and cut it in slices; or press it into kleicha moulds round a ball of filling. Both are made.
Bake at 180 degrees Celsius until golden. Cool, and keep in a tin for the Eid visits.

What a modern chef changes

The date filling taken seriously

Rung 5

Method

Pound the dates in a mortar with cardamom seeds cracked fresh, not the pre ground powder, which has lost the oil that carries the scent.
Add a spoon of dibs to the filling so it stays soft after baking; the dry date is what makes a bad kleicha hard.
Brush the top with egg yolk and bake on a stone, which browns the base in the time the top colours.
Weigh the dough into equal pieces so the tray bakes level.

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