Levantine · Breakfast
Labneh bi Zeit wa Za'atar
- Easy
- 15 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, toasted, nutty warmth throughout, ending saline and clean.
Ingredients
- 1 kg full-fat live yoghurt, with no added gum or starch
- 12 g fine sea salt
- 20 g dried wild thyme leaf (za'atar baladi)
- 20 g white sesame seeds
- 15 g ground sumac
- 3 g fine salt, for the blend
- 80 ml green extra virgin olive oil
- warm flatbread, to serve
The skills inside
Dry-pan toasting: spices, seeds and nuts
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: dairy · sesame
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Whisk the sea salt through the yoghurt, tip it into doubled muslin, tie the corners and hang it over a bowl in the fridge until it stops dripping and holds a peak, 12 to 24 hours. 600 min
- Toast the sesame in a dry pan over medium heat, shaking, until the seeds turn straw gold and begin to skip, then tip them out to cool completely.
- Rub the dried thyme between your palms to break the leaf, then stir through the cooled sesame, the sumac and the blend salt; it should smell resinous and sour, not dusty.
- Spread the labneh in a shallow bowl, hollow the surface with the back of a spoon, flood the hollow with olive oil and scatter the za'atar over only as it goes to the table.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Dry-pan toasting: spices, seeds and nuts 70 recipes
- A single layer on dry metal with nothing added: no fat, and nothing else sharing the pan or the tray and competing for the heat.
- It is kept moving: shaken, stirred, or turned. Anything left still scorches on the face touching the metal while the rest of it is barely warm.
- It is judged by smell before sight: once it is fragrant there are seconds left, not minutes, and the nose reaches that point well before the colour does.
- It leaves the pan the instant it is done, onto a cold surface. A hot pan keeps toasting whatever stays in it, and carryover here is the difference between done and ruined.
- The colour is even and light rather than patchy, with nothing black at the edges: one scorched piece taints the whole quantity it is ground into.
Where it goes wrong It was left alone for a moment while something else was attended to. Dry heat has no margin: the pieces against the metal go from fragrant to acrid inside a minute, and the bitterness cannot be picked back out of a ground mixture.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Mimosa (weekends only)
- Also Right
- Cava, straight
- From the Taps
- -
- Zero-Proof
- Fresh orange juice & café au lait
Morning food wants brightness and bubbles, or honest coffee: nothing that argues before noon.
Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.