A Recipe for Goodness

So I recently got to experience my first hands on Albanian cooking class! It was very exciting! Carol, Eileen and myself all took ourselves round to the house of one of the local families to immerse ourselves in traditional Albanian cooking, and then of course eating.

A lot of the food here is based on dough and pastry, and the most popular dish is pita (say it like pitta, but more like peeta. Or something). Eileen's tried making it before and I'd watched the making process, but this was our first hands-on culinary lesson. And now I'm going to pass on my knowledge to you.

Step one: Get some flour. By "some" I means "lots":

Mix up the flour and some warm water until you get a nice dough. Knead.

Step 2: Roll the dough into a long roll and then cut bits off. Then shape them into balls. I tried this, it was trickier than it looked.

Step 3: Roll the balls into flat circles and then brush with oil.

Step 4: The fun bit. To open the dough out into a bigger circle, throw it around in the air like when they make pizza. Check me out:

Step 5: Where the magic happens. Lay your dough on a low round table (a sofran) on a piece of cloth and then stretch it out so it's nice and big. Probably a metre in diametre. Don't put holes in it. Harder than it looks.

Step 6: Spread out required filling, in this case spinach.

Step 7: Lift up either end of the cloth and let the dough roll in on itself, but don't let the two sides meet in the middle. You've ruined everything if you do that. Dramz.

Step 8: Separate the two rolls of dough and spiral them up. Place in dish. Repeat from step 4 until you've used up all the dough. Place dish in stove.

Step 9: A bit later get them out of the stove.

Step 10: EAT.

(I don't have any pictures of me eating it - which is probably just as well - but I did and it was GOOD).


So there you are, now you can all get out your sofrans and wood burning stoves and cook up an Albanian culinary feast! Let me know how you all get on....