The shalité I made today got my whole family speechless…

Today I tried to make the second recipe my aunt gave me – one that I’ve incidentally never had as a kid. This one uses eggs and milk instead of water to make the dough.

Similar to the first time… my aunt’s recipe was very informal and I had to make some modifications to make it work. Here are the details:

Ingredients

Below is what came straight from my aunt:

• 4 teacups of flour
• 2 eggs
• 1.5 teacups milk (or until the dough doesn’t stick to your fingers)
• 1 tablespoon dry yeast
• Just under 1 tablespoon of salt
• 1 tablespoon of sugar

Here are my modified ingredients, for a smaller batch. Note that my ingredients are in grams. I used a standard Iranian teacup for my initial volume measurements

• 113 g wholewheat flour¹
• 133 g 405 wheat flour²³
• 1 medium egg
• 114 g of 3.5% (full fat) milk⁴
• 0.5 tablespoons of yeast
• 0.5 tablespoons of salt
• 0.5 tablespoons of sugar. For the tablespoons I weighed 1 tablespoon then added half of the amount in grams

Instructions

• Add the dry ingredients to a bowl and mix
• Add the egg and milk
• Keep mixing until you form a dough ball
• Cover the dough and let it rise (e.g. until doubled in size)
• Make mandarin sized balls from the dough and flatten them into disks
• Let rise for ~15 mins
• Add a layer of oil to a pan, heat until hot then lower to 4 on the electric stove
• Add the flattened dough disks, flip once they have puffed up

My Attempt

I was a bit taken aback by how wet the mixture was. The ratios my aunt gave initially really don’t work. The egg always gives this sticky consistency to the mixture that it feels like a cake (or even a pancake which was worrisome…). Do feel free to keep adding flour until it does become a bit “dry”.

Also when making the disks, make sure to make them THIN. Mine were slightly thick so during cooking the shalité puffed up so much that they could’ve been brioche buns! I had to take them off the heat, then slice them in half⁵. The picture below kinda showed how thick mine were (some 1.5 cm).

While cooking them I learnt from my mistake last time, so didn’t burn anything!

Finally… some nice shalité I can be proud of.

Next Steps

I was really happy with the outcome this time, and so was my family!

My mum and dad were both really impressed with the flavor. My brother liked it, and while my sister was taken aback that it was crunchy, she said the rest was perfect. Also… she was slightly unsure which shalité was mine when I put it side to side with my aunts… that’s a massive victory in my books!

Now onto things to improve, and things to experiment with next:

• I did unfortunately mess up with the salt content slightly. I added more than half which made the shalité a bit too salty for my taste when served with mahveh (although just perfect without)
• Even though making them thick was a mistake, it did occur to me that these might work very well as burger buns! So one thing I am curious about is to make them thicker on purpose, and then bake them!
• On that vein, I’d like to experiment with using less oil next time… so maybe glazing them and then putting them in the oven might work? Definitely something I need to try

Comparison with the shalité I’m used to

This alternate recipe was completely new to me, but I really enjoyed it. In terms of flavor, I’d say that the most dominant flavor is still that of a shalité, but the egg just enhances the “breakfasty” flavor. I quite liked this. It was really really good.

I did notice that it was a bit dryer than the other shalité though. Perhaps I can try an experiment where the dough ball has more hydration… and go against my aunt’s most understandable and reliable rule?

1. Note: 1 teacup of wholewheat flour roughly came out to be 67 grams (in case you want to try doing this by volume) ↩︎
2. Type 405 is a German type of flour. An equivalent to this is pastry/cake flour. Note that when I made shalité last, I had 1:1 ratio of wholewheat to 405 flour. Based on my intuition from last time, I decided to have a bit more of the pastry flour. Seems my ratio of 113:133 worked (46% wholewheat). ↩︎
3. Also… the reason for the weird measurements is because I kept adding flour until the dough “stopped sticking” as per my aunt! ↩︎
4. This was 1 teacup (same as for the flour). Clearly my aunt’s ratio of 1:1:1.5 teacups of wholewheat : white flour : milk was off! ↩︎
5. Actually though this gave them an interesting crunchy consistency! ↩︎