Making Khabees for the first time
It’s 2021 and I look back at a year that didn’t give me many opportunities to travel and equally as few chances to explore new foods. So I’m setting myself up on a journey to try dishes from different countries.
What counts as a dish? I’m not committing to prepare a full meal, but rather a food item (e.g soup, drink, side-dish) that is associated with the randomly-selected country.
This week, the random country selector on random.country assigned Bahrain to me.
Khabees (Bahrain)
The Kingdom of Bahrain, is a small island country situated near the western shores of the Persian Gulf. Many of the dishes I looked at consist of rice and some type of cooked meat (chicken, mutton, etc.). As this is my first attempt, I chose something that looked easier and didn’t require me to buy special ingredients — and it’s a dessert: Khabees.
More information about typical food from Bahrain on Wikipedia.
How it’s supposed to look (source):
Ingredients:
- 5 cups of plain flour
- 2 cups of sugar
- 1 pinch saffron
- ½ cup oil
- 1 teaspoon green cardamom powder
- 4 cups water
- 5 almonds, blanched and sliced, to garnish
Instructions
- Brown the flour in a flat pan on medium heat without the oil
- Separate pan: water, sugar, saffron
- Cook on high heat until it boils
- Add the browned flour and mix well.
- Now add the oil and cardamom and mix well.
- Let the mixture thicken until it gains a sticky consistency.
- Remove from heat, garnish with almonds, if desired and serve.
- Enjoy!
Experience
- Brown the flour: It’s an interesting process that isn’t widely explained. When adding flour to the pan I realized that 5 cups (625 grams) of flour would add up to a lot of Khabees (or Khabee?). So I decided to make half the amount of it. The tricky part of getting the flour brown is getting the temperature right. It took me about 15–20 minutes of constant stirring and changing the temperature to avoid the flour smelling burned.
- Adding browned flour to the boiling sugar-saffron-water ended up being a bit messy. Flour was flying through the air. Turn down the heat before adding the flour.
- What type of oil? I used Olive Oil due to the lack of specific instructions. People with a more sophisticated sense of taste might prefer a more neutral type of oil.
- My Khabee ended up a bit dry, at least comparing it to the picture. It reminds me a bit of what Swiss people call “vermicelles” (chestnut puree)
- Forgot the cardamom— When my wife asked which ingredients I used, she noticed that I forgot the cardamom. So we cooked it up again, added some more water, oil, AND cardamom. The cardamom gave it some more flavour.
Overall I would rate this first approach of cooking something from a random (literally) country a success. While the consistency of my Khabee ended up a bit dry, the taste was good. It has a subtle flavour with a bit of a nutty taste and is not overly sweet. The first two bites were a bit underwhelming, but then it grew on me and I went for seconds.
If (after these covid lockdowns are over) I get invited to a party and the host asks for a vegan dessert — I’ll bring Khabee.
