rghaif

My cooking challenge this week was to make something called rghaif (the first bunch of syllables is pronounced like a cross between a French R and the sound a cat makes when they ¨mgrrrrow¨). It´s a very common treat that people eat for breakfast or with afteroon tea, made with very simple ingredients, only water, salt, flour, semolina, butter, and oil. They are flat, square crepes (but can be round in different recipes), although crepes does not describe them well, because there are many thin layers folded over each other with semolina and butter where the air gets trapped while cooking. This adds a very unique, chewy, slightly crispy on the outside texture. They are truly amazing spreaded with Laughing Cow cheese and honey with a hot cup of tea.
There´s only one place in town that sells them. A lady makes about 20 of them in her home each morning and then takes them to the butcher shop to sell. Each one sells for 1,80 and a normal serving for one person would be two to three. Each time I would buy them, I´d spend about 10 euros on something that would cost me 50 cents or less to make at home. I wanted to make these special treats so badly because I figure I can do whatever I want, right?

I saw so many recipes online for them because they are a very popular treat and foreigners who have tried them quickly become addicted to their exquisite texture. To make a long story short, I tried several recipes and ended up failing three times before I got it right. The secret to these beautiful treats is the kneading, which I always wanted-but-never-knew-how to do. The dough needs to be sticky and worked without little flour until it is very elastic-y and not webby. Here to the left is what my dough looked like on one of my failed attempts. I stopped kneading here, thinking I was done because it was ¨elastic-y¨ but it still was webby and not smooth and satiny. They turned out ok but weren´t chewy, but rather crispy and the thin layers tasted like buttered baked filo dough, it was tasty, but not rghaif. On the right, is what the dough should look like. See how its texture is like one solid mass and isn´t grainy or webby? The fourth time was the charm and they turned out very nicely.

When the dough is ready, it should be kneaded into a ball and coated with oil so that you can squeeze off smaller dough balls, cat-head style. Then the dough should be covered and left to rest for 20 minutes. After twenty minutes, the fun part comes in.... spreading the dough with lots of melted butter and semolina and forming the rghaif. The super-elastic dough is thinly stretched into a large circle, sprinkled with semolina, and folded into a square the way you fold a towel.

Once all your dough balls have been spread and shaped into squares, let them rest an additional 30 minutes. They should be sprinkled with semolina to give them a nice texture, kind of like how corn meal is used on the bottom of pizza dough. After 30 minutes are up, heat a skillet, but if you have one, a flat cast iron griddle is ideal. Don´t oil your cooking surface because the rghaif are already oiled. Now that you have your squares, you will be spreading them out (without flattening). You want to cook them on medium high heat quickly. They should be slightly browned, but still flexible and definitely not hard.

The rghaif was a success and everyone was impressed.