Msemen

I made this bread because it is shredded and used in Chicken Rfissa, however it was fantastic by itself and I would recommend making it for general eating purposes. For this bread, I more or less followed a recipe exactly. The recipe recommends making a syrup of butter and honey which I did not try because I think it sounds gross. I also highly recommend checking out the tutorial for preparing the squares.

You can really taste the olive oil in this, so I recommend keeping that in mind and using a mild one if you don't like strong olive oil flavor. Also, you'll need a lot so don't use your $50 bottle either. I'm copying and pasting the recipe here in case About.com goes the way of the dodo.

Prep Time: 30 minutes
Cook Time: 30 minutes
Total Time: 60 minutes
Yield: Approx. 20 msemen (4" square)
Ingredients:

* 3 1/2 cups flour (340 g)
* 1/2 cup fine semolina (90g)
* 2 teaspoons sugar
* 2 teaspoons salt
* 1/4 teaspoon yeast
* 1 1/2 cups warm water (approx. 1/3 liter)
* * * *
* For folding and cooking the msemen:
* 1 1/2 cups vegetable oil
* 1/2 cup fine semolina
* 1/4 cup very soft unsalted butter

Preparation:

Mix all the dry ingredients in a large bowl.

Add 1 1/2 cups of warm water, and mix to form a dough. Add more water if necessary to make a dough that is soft and easy to knead, but not sticky. If the dough is too sticky to handle, add a little flour one tablespoon at a time.

Transfer the dough to a lightly floured work surface and knead by hand for 10 minutes, (or knead the dough in a stand mixer with dough hook for 5 minutes), until the dough is very smooth and elastic.

At this point, I recommend looking at the aforementioned tutorial about how to fold the msemen but I'm going to include my pictures below because there can never be too many pictures.

Dough balls and initial folded squares

Flattened squares. Unlike the tutorial, I chose to use a rolling pin.

Cooking in the pan. These did indeed take several minutes and I just rotated them out as they were done. If you have a pan that heats evenly (the one above does not), I'd suggest using that one.