Tag: Mizrachi

Pareve

Ma’amoul are the celebration cookies of the Sephardi and Mizrachi world — tender, crumbly shortbread shells stuffed with sweetened nuts, pressed into decorative molds, and dusted with powdered sugar. If the date version is the classic, the walnut version is the showstopper: fragrant with cinnamon, orange blossom water, and toasted walnuts, each cookie a small work of edible art.

For Syrian, Lebanese, and Iraqi Jews, walnut ma’amoul were the cookies of Purim, Shavuot, Rosh Hashanah, and every simcha in between. Families would spend days making hundreds, using carved wooden molds (taabi) to stamp each cookie with an intricate pattern that identified the filling: elongated ovals for walnuts, round domes for dates, flat circles for pistachios.

The dough is made with semolina and flour, enriched with oil, and scented with rose water or orange blossom water. It has a sandy, melt-in-your-mouth texture unlike any other cookie dough — tender enough to crumble at the first bite, yet sturdy enough to hold its molded shape.

Pareve

Tahini cookies are the cookie that Israel gave the world — chewy, nutty, deeply sesame-flavored, with a crackled top and a soft center that borders on fudgy. They require only five core ingredients (tahini, sugar, egg, vanilla, salt) and come together faster than you can preheat your oven. No flour, no butter, no dairy — just pure tahini magic.

These cookies have taken kosher bakeries and food blogs by storm, and for good reason. They are naturally pareve, easily adaptable to be gluten-free, and have a flavor profile that is entirely unique — nothing else tastes quite like a tahini cookie. The sesame paste creates a texture somewhere between a peanut butter cookie and a French macaron, with beautiful crackled tops that form naturally as they bake.

Roll them in sesame seeds before baking for extra crunch, or press a square of halvah into the center for a decadent variation. These are the cookies that disappear from the plate first at every kiddush, every bake sale, every holiday gathering.

Pareve

Baklava is the crown jewel of Sephardi and Mizrachi pastry — dozens of paper-thin phyllo sheets layered with crushed nuts and drenched in a fragrant honey-citrus syrup that soaks into every crevice. The result is at once shattering and sticky, nutty and sweet, a pastry so ancient that its origins are claimed by every culture from Istanbul to Baghdad.

For Sephardi Jews, baklava was the celebration sweet — present at every brit milah, every engagement, every Shabbat where guests were expected. Syrian Jewish baklava often uses pistachios; Turkish Jewish versions favor walnuts; Iraqi Jewish baklava sometimes includes cardamom and rose water. This recipe gives you a classic pistachio-walnut blend with a honey-lemon syrup, but the template works with any nut and any flavoring.

The key to great baklava is three things: high-quality phyllo dough, generously applied oil or butter between every layer, and a syrup that is cold when poured over hot baklava (or vice versa). The temperature contrast ensures the syrup is absorbed without making the phyllo soggy.