Tag: Mizrachi

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Date Ma’amoul Recipe: Levantine Jewish Filled Cookies

Date-filled maamoul cookies with decorative mold pattern
✔ Pareve
Yield: 24 cookies  |  Difficulty: Intermediate  |  Active Time: 1 hour  |  Total Time: 2½ hours  |  Bracha: Mezonot

Ma’amoul are the jewels of Levantine Jewish baking—delicate, crumbly cookies made from semolina and flour, filled with a luscious paste of dates, cinnamon, and cardamom, then shaped by hand or pressed into ornate wooden molds that give each cookie its distinctive patterned surface. These cookies have graced the tables of Syrian, Lebanese, Iraqi, and Egyptian Jewish communities for centuries, served at celebrations, holidays, and as a gesture of hospitality.

The ma’amoul tradition runs deep in Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish communities. In Aleppo, families of bakers prepared thousands of these cookies for Purim, filling them with dates, walnuts, or pistachios. In Baghdad, ma’amoul filled with dates were a staple for Shabbat. In Cairo, they appeared at every simcha (celebration). The art of making ma’amoul was passed from mother to daughter, and the wooden molds (tabi) were treasured family heirlooms, their carved patterns as distinctive as fingerprints.

This recipe focuses on the most classic filling: dates. Medjool dates, processed into a smooth paste and perfumed with cinnamon, cardamom, and a whisper of orange blossom water, are encased in a tender semolina shell that shatters on first bite and melts on the tongue. The contrast between the sandy, buttery exterior and the sticky-sweet, spiced interior is what makes ma’amoul one of the most addictive cookies in the Jewish baking repertoire.

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Za’atar Manoushe Recipe: Levantine Jewish Flatbread

Za'atar topped manoushe flatbread with olive oil
✔ Pareve
Yield: 8 flatbreads  |  Difficulty: Easy  |  Active Time: 30 minutes  |  Total Time: 2½ hours  |  Bracha: Hamotzi

Manoushe (also spelled man’oushe or manakeesh in the plural) is the quintessential Levantine breakfast bread—a soft, pillowy flatbread generously spread with a fragrant mixture of za’atar and olive oil, then baked until the edges puff and the herbs bloom into an intoxicating aroma. For Jewish communities across Lebanon, Syria, and Israel, this bread has been a morning staple for generations, eaten fresh from the oven with labneh, fresh vegetables, and strong coffee.

The beauty of manoushe lies in its simplicity. The dough is uncomplicated—flour, water, yeast, a touch of sugar, and salt—but the magic happens when that soft round gets slathered with the za’atar-olive oil paste and hits the heat of the oven. The za’atar topping, a blend of dried thyme, sumac, sesame seeds, and salt, transforms from a paste into a deeply aromatic, slightly crunchy layer that clings to the bread’s surface while the interior remains soft and chewy.

In the Jewish communities of Aleppo and Beirut, manoushe held a special place at the breakfast table, especially on Shabbat morning. Today, it’s one of the most popular street foods in Israel, where bakeries produce hundreds of these flatbreads daily. Making them at home is remarkably straightforward, and the results—hot, fragrant, and impossibly fresh—surpass anything you can buy.

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Laffa Recipe: Soft Iraqi Jewish Flatbread

Soft, pillowy laffa flatbread fresh from the oven
PareveDairy-Free • Egg-Free • Contains Gluten
Yield6 large laffa
DifficultyEasy
Active Time20 minutes
Total Time2 hours
BrachaHaMotzi

Laffa is the flatbread that puts pita to shame. Where pita is small and pocketed, laffa is large, soft, and pliable — a wide sheet of bread that wraps around shawarma, falafel, and grilled meats like a warm blanket. If you have eaten a shawarma wrapped in a large, thin, slightly chewy flatbread at an Israeli grill restaurant, you have eaten laffa.

Laffa (also spelled lafa) originated in the Iraqi Jewish community, where it was baked in a taboon — a clay oven where the dough is slapped directly onto the scorching-hot walls. Iraqi Jews who immigrated to Israel brought this bread with them, and it quickly became one of the most popular street breads in the country. Today, laffa is inseparable from Israeli shawarma culture.

At home, you can achieve excellent laffa on a very hot skillet, cast iron pan, or even an inverted wok. The key is high heat and quick cooking — 1–2 minutes per side until the bread puffs, chars slightly, and remains wonderfully soft and pliable.

For a smaller, pocketed alternative, try our Pita Bread. For another Iraqi-influenced bread, see our Sambusak.

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Onion Pletzl Recipe — Classic Jewish Onion Flatbread

Flat onion pletzl bread with caramelized onion topping
Pareve
Dairy-Free • Egg-Free • Contains Gluten
Yield2 large flatbreads
DifficultyEasy
Active Time25 minutes
Total Time2½–3 hours
BrachaHaMotzi

Pletzl is the Jewish flatbread that nobody knows by name but everyone loves at first bite. Imagine focaccia — but thinner, crispier, and topped with a generous layer of caramelized onions and poppy seeds instead of olive oil and rosemary. That is pletzl: a flat, dimpled bread from the Ashkenazi baking tradition that deserves to be as famous as its Italian cousin.

The name pletzl comes from the Yiddish word for “flat” or “board,” which describes both its shape and its essential character. It is a simple lean dough — flour, water, yeast, salt, and a touch of oil — pressed flat on a sheet pan, dimpled with fingertips, and covered with sliced onions and poppy seeds before baking. The result is a bread that is crispy on the edges, soft and chewy in the center, and covered in sweet, caramelized onions.

Pletzl is closely related to the bialy — both come from the same Ashkenazi tradition of onion-topped breads. But where the bialy is an individual roll with a filled crater, pletzl is a large communal flatbread, torn apart and shared at the table. It is the bread you put in the center of a Shabbat lunch spread, the bread that disappears before anything else on the table.

Love onion-topped breads? Try our Bialys for the individual-roll version of this same delicious tradition.

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Ka’ak al-Quds Recipe — Jerusalem Sesame Bread Rings

Jerusalem sesame kaak bread ring
Pareve
Dairy-Free • Egg-Free • Contains Gluten
Yield6 large rings
DifficultyIntermediate
Active Time40 minutes
Total Time3–4 hours
BrachaHaMotzi

Ka’ak al-Quds — the bread of Jerusalem. If you have walked through Jaffa Gate into the Old City, you have seen them: large, oblong bread rings encrusted with sesame seeds, carried on wooden carts or stacked on the heads of vendors who call out to passersby. Ka’ak (also spelled ka’ek) is Jerusalem’s most ancient street food, a bread so deeply woven into the city’s fabric that it is impossible to imagine one without the other.

These sesame rings are larger than bagels, softer, slightly sweet, and completely covered — every surface — in toasted sesame seeds. The dough is simple: flour, water, yeast, sugar, olive oil, and salt. But the technique of coating and the long, slow proof produce a bread of remarkable character — chewy but soft, fragrant with sesame, with a golden crust that yields to reveal a tender, slightly sweet interior.

Ka’ak is traditionally eaten with za’atar mixed with olive oil (dipped or spread inside), hard-boiled eggs, or simply torn apart and eaten plain. Street vendors also fill them with falafel, hummus, or grilled cheese. It is breakfast, lunch, and snack — the bread for all hours in the city of all faiths.

For more Israeli bread traditions, see our Pita Bread and Za’atar Bread.

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Lachuch Recipe — Spongy Yemenite Jewish Pancake Bread

Spongy Yemenite lachuch pancake bread
Pareve
Dairy-Free • Egg-Free • Contains Gluten
Yield8–10 lachuch
DifficultyEasy
Active Time20 minutes
Total Time1½–2 hours
BrachaMezonot / HaMotzi

Lachuch is the bread that bubbles. Pour the thin, fermented batter into a hot covered skillet and watch as hundreds of tiny craters form across the surface, creating a honeycomb pattern that is as mesmerizing to watch as it is satisfying to eat. Cooked on one side only, lachuch emerges spongy and soft on top, lightly crisp on the bottom — a bread of contrasts, like the Yemenite Jewish kitchen that created it.

In Yemen, lachuch (also spelled lahoh or laxoox) was an everyday bread, made from the simplest of ingredients: flour, water, yeast, and a pinch of salt. The batter ferments for an hour or more, developing a pleasant tanginess that gives lachuch its distinctive flavor. It is cooked in a covered pan, the steam trapped inside causing the top surface to cook gently while remaining pale and spongy. The bottom develops a thin, golden crust. The result is a bread that is simultaneously a pancake, a crumpet, and something entirely its own.

Yemenite Jews brought lachuch to Israel, where it became a beloved part of the country’s diverse bread landscape. Today, it is served in Yemenite restaurants throughout Israel alongside zhug (fiery green or red chili paste), crushed fresh tomato, hard-boiled eggs, and hilbeh (fenugreek paste). It is the bread of leisurely Shabbat mornings, of slow weekend breakfasts, of meals where the bread is not just an accompaniment but the centerpiece.

Lachuch completes the Yemenite bread family on our site. Pair it with our Kubaneh and Jachnun for a full Yemenite Shabbat bread spread.

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Jerusalem Kugel Bread — Caramelized Pepper Shabbat Loaf

Jerusalem Kugel Bread - KosherBreadPro.com
Pareve
Dairy-Free • Egg • Contains Gluten
Yield
1 large loaf (10–12 servings)
Difficulty
Intermediate
Active Time
45 minutes
Total Time
4–5 hours
Bracha
HaMotzi

Jerusalem Kugel Bread is a bread that captures the soul of Yerushalmi kugel — caramelized sugar, bold black pepper, and a sweet-savory-spicy warmth that is unlike anything else in Jewish baking. If you have ever tasted Yerushalmi kugel, you know the flavor: that deep, amber caramel that walks the line between bitter and sweet, shot through with enough black pepper to make your lips tingle. Now imagine those flavors woven into a soft, enriched, pull-apart bread. That is what we are making here.

This is not a kugel shaped like bread. It is a true yeasted bread — enriched with eggs and oil, layered with a caramelized sugar-pepper syrup, shaped into a pull-apart loaf that tears into glossy, amber-streaked pieces. The caramel melts into the dough during proofing and baking, creating pockets of bittersweet intensity. The black pepper, far more than a whisper, provides the signature counterpoint that makes Yerushalmi flavors so addictive.

Where classic challah is golden and mild, Jerusalem Kugel Bread is dark-streaked and assertive. It is the bread for the baker who loves contrast — sweet against spicy, soft against sticky, the familiar comfort of bread against the startling depth of burnt caramel. Serve it on Shabbat and watch it disappear before the main course arrives.

The combination of caramelized sugar and black pepper is ancient and unmistakable — the signature of Jerusalem’s Old Yishuv. This bread brings those flavors from the kugel pot to the bread basket, creating something entirely new yet deeply rooted in tradition.

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Sambusak Recipe — Iraqi Jewish Filled Pastries

Sambusak - KosherBreadPro.com
Pareve
Chickpea Filling • Contains Gluten • Meat option below
Yield
~30 pastries
Difficulty
Intermediate
Active Time
1 hour
Total Time
2–2.5 hours
Bracha
Mezonot

Sambusak are the golden, half-moon pastries that have graced the Shabbat tables of Iraqi and Syrian Jewish families for centuries. Imagine biting through a thin, shatteringly crisp shell — enriched with semolina for a sandy, delicate crunch — into a warm, fragrant filling of spiced chickpeas or seasoned lamb. These are not dumplings, not empanadas, not samosas, though they share ancient DNA with all of them. Sambusak are something entirely their own: the quintessential savory pastry of Babylonian Jewry.

In Iraqi Jewish homes, sambusak (sambusak, סמבוסק) were a labor of love, often made in large batches by mothers and grandmothers on Thursday or Friday morning, the kitchen fragrant with cumin and turmeric. The chickpea version — pareve and endlessly versatile — was the most common, served alongside Shabbat lunch, at kiddush, during holidays, and at every celebration from brit milah to Purim. The meat version, rich with spiced ground lamb or beef, appeared at more festive occasions.

What sets sambusak apart from similar pastries around the Middle East is the dough. Iraqi Jewish bakers developed a distinctive mixture of flour and fine semolina, bound with oil rather than butter, creating a crust that is simultaneously flaky, crisp, and tender — and always pareve. The traditional decorative crimping along the sealed edge is not merely beautiful; it ensures a tight seal that keeps the filling inside during baking and announces to everyone at the table that these were made by hand, with care.

Sambusak are one of the great unifying foods of Mizrachi Jewry. From Baghdad to Aleppo, from Calcutta to Tehran, variations appear under different names — sambousek, samsa, sanbusaj — but the spirit is the same: a humble pastry that transforms simple ingredients into something extraordinary through technique, spice, and generations of practice.

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Mufleta Recipe — Moroccan Mimouna Celebration Flatbread

Mufleta - KosherBreadPro.com
Pareve
Dough is Pareve • Dairy when served with butter • Contains Gluten
Yield
12–15 mufletas
Difficulty
Intermediate
Active Time
45 minutes
Total Time
2 hours
Bracha
Mezonot

Mufleta is the first bread after Pesach — and it tastes like freedom all over again. For seven (or eight) days, Moroccan Jews have lived without chametz. No flour, no yeast, no risen dough. And then, the moment Pesach ends — sometimes literally minutes after havdalah — the flour comes out, the griddle heats up, and the kitchen fills with the scent of something extraordinary: paper-thin rounds of dough, stretched by hand until nearly translucent, sizzling on a hot surface, stacking up in a warm, glistening tower drizzled with honey and melted butter.

This is mufleta (mufleta, מופלטה), the iconic bread of Mimouna — the jubilant Moroccan Jewish celebration that marks the end of Pesach and the joyful return to chametz. It is not merely a recipe. It is a ritual, a homecoming, a communal act of sweetness and abundance. In Moroccan Jewish homes from Casablanca to Fez to Marrakech, and today across Israel and the diaspora, mufleta is the bread that announces: the holiday is over, and the good life continues.

The dough itself could not be simpler — flour, water, salt, a pinch of sugar, and oil. No yeast, no eggs, no dairy. But the technique is everything. Each ball of dough is oiled generously, rested until supple, then stretched by hand on an oiled surface until it becomes a gossamer-thin disc — so thin you can read a newspaper through it. Cooked on a blazing-hot griddle for just seconds per side, the mufletas are stacked one atop another, the residual heat steaming them into pliable, silky sheets. Drizzled with warm honey and a generous pat of butter, rolled or folded, eaten with the fingers — this is Mimouna.

Mufleta is traditionally prepared and served on the evening immediately after Pesach ends (Motzei Pesach). The timing is deliberate and deeply meaningful: this is the very first chametz touching your lips after a week of abstention. The sweetness of the honey, the richness of the butter, the tender warmth of fresh-cooked dough — it is a sensory celebration of abundance, gratitude, and renewal.

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Lahmajoun Recipe — Crispy Middle Eastern Meat Flatbread

Lahmajoun - KosherBreadPro.com
Meat
Contains Ground Lamb/Beef • No Dairy • Contains Gluten
Yield
12 flatbreads
Difficulty
Intermediate
Active Time
45 minutes
Total Time
2–2.5 hours
Bracha
HaMotzi (as meal)

Lahmajoun is the paper-thin, crispy flatbread that proves the best pizza is the one you roll up and eat with your hands. Picture a round of dough stretched impossibly thin — almost translucent — spread with a vivid, spiced layer of ground lamb and tomato, then blasted in a scorching oven until the edges crackle and the meat sizzles. You pull it from the heat, squeeze a wedge of lemon across the surface, scatter fresh parsley and a few leaves of mint, roll the whole thing into a tight cylinder, and bite. The crunch gives way to spiced, tangy warmth. This is lahmajoun.

Known affectionately as “Jewish pizza” or “Armenian pizza,” lahmajoun (lahm bi ajeen, لحم بعجين — literally “meat with dough”) has been a cornerstone of Sephardi and Mizrachi cooking for centuries. From the bustling markets of Aleppo to the Jewish quarters of Istanbul, from the kitchens of Baghdad to modern-day Jerusalem, this flatbread has traveled with Jewish communities across the Ottoman world and beyond, adapting to local spices and traditions while keeping its essential character intact.

What sets lahmajoun apart from other flatbreads is its remarkable restraint. The dough is a vehicle — thin, crisp, and yielding — while the topping does the talking. A vibrant paste of finely ground meat, tomato, onion, and peppers, seasoned with cumin, paprika, and the gentle warmth of Aleppo pepper, spread so thinly that the dough beneath crisps in the oven’s fierce heat. There is no cheese, no heavy sauce, no excess. Just meat, dough, fire, and lemon.

Lahmajoun is always rolled, never sliced. Squeeze fresh lemon juice over the surface, add a handful of flat-leaf parsley and fresh mint, then roll it into a cylinder and eat it out of hand. Some add pickled turnips, sliced radishes, or a drizzle of tahini. This is street food at its most elegant.

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