Ingredients

　　

Step 1

In North Africa, large ever-so-thin pancakes—called ouarka in Morocco, brik in Tunisia, and dioul in Algeria—are used to make large round pies and small ones in the shape of cigars, cornets, and square packets.

　　

Step 2

Making them is a highly skilled operation which requires a great deal of patience. A dough is made with hard-wheat or bread flour, a pinch of salt, and warm water, kneaded for a long time as you work in more water to obtain a soft, very moist, spongy elasticity; then the dough is left to rest for an hour covered with a film of warm water. Lumps of dough the size of an egg are picked up with one hand and dabbed on the oiled surface of a round tray placed bottom side up over a fire. As the dough touches the tray with repeated dabs, a thin, almost transparent film of pastry is built up and gradually expanded into a round about 12 inches in diameter.

　　

Step 3

In North African markets the pancakes are sold by weight, covered in plastic wrap. In France, where they are mass-produced and sold in vacuum packs, they have become very popular with the top chefs, who use them as we use fillo. I hope they will be sold in the United States sometime in the future.

　　

Step 4

You can use Chinese spring-roll skins or a fine fillo pastry instead of ouarka, although the result is not quite the same. I started using fillo for Moroccan pies more than thirty years ago, but I always felt a little guilty about it until a young Moroccan cook, who had been sent to Disneyland to demonstrate Moroccan cooking at an international festival of tourism, told me about her team’s experience. They had not anticipated the extent of the demand for briouat (pies) and ran out of pastry. A Lebanese contingent nearby lent the Moroccan cooks fillo, and they went on to make the pies with fillo. They turned out to be perfectly satisfactory.

　　The New Book of Middle Eastern Food Copyright © 2000Knopf