Harcha

Tonight was another batch of one-pot rice cooker dinner. This time with char sui instead of the Chinese sausages. I plan on doing home-made char sui at some point and doing a write-up on it, but for tonight, we just got some ready-made.

Since I don't really have anything new to write about from tonight's dinner, I'll mention another recent (mis)adventure in food. TF's mom was going to be making a lovely lamb couscous meal for us at her place, so I thought it'd be nice to bring some flatbread to go along with the meal. Flipping through my cookbook, I came upon a harcha recipe: perfect! It requires no rising or kneading, has a fairly simple ingredient list, and just needs to be cooked in a skillet! So I grabbed some semolina flour and got started!

Harcha
1 1/3 c. pasta flour (medium semolina) + 2/3 c. for shaping and cooking
6 Tbsp. unsalted butter, softened
1 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
1 1/2 tsp. double-acting baking powder
1/2 tsp. fine salt
1 1/2 Tbsp. honey
1/2 c. + 2 Tbsp. warm herbal tea, strained
melted unsalted butter, for garnish
honey (optional)

1. Spread the 1 1/3 c. flour out on a work surface or wide wooden bowl.
2. Add the butter and oil and rub it into the flour with your fingers until crumbly and the texture of sand.
3. Add the salt and baking powder and toss lightly.
4. Combine the honey with the tea and gradually add it to the flour mixture. Work the liquid in with your fingers and gather it into a wet ball.
5. Press (without kneading) into a 12"×15" rectangle. Let stand for 15 minutes.
6. Use a pastry scraper to divide the dough in half. Lift each half and sprinkle a little pasta flour under it.
7. Flatten each dough half into a 6" round. Sprinkle with a little pasta flour.
8. Lift, flip, and press to make sure there are no air holes.
9. Set two nonstick skillets over low heat (or cook one at a time). Dust the surface of the skillets with pasta flour.
10. Slide each round into a skillet. Cook over medium-low heat, shaking the bread back and forth, until the undersides are golden (~10 minutes).
11. Slide each round onto a plate, invert a skillet over the round, and flip the bread back into the skillet. Repeat with the other round.
12. Cook until the second side is also golden brown. Brush the tops with butter (and optionally honey) and serve hot.

So, this all sounds pretty straightforward in theory. I mixed my ingredients and ended up with a very wet "dough", almost more of a thick batter really. But that's okay! She said it would be wet. That's why you're supposed to let it sit for a while. It needs time to magically transform into dough! Well, I came back and it was still pretty wet. So I let it sit for another five minutes. Which helped a bit, but it was still nearly impossible to handle.

Eventually I struck upon the technique of loading a lifter up with semolina flour and then very carefully wedging it under the "dough", allowing it to flour the underside as it went.

After a lot of fiddling, I finally managed to get them flipped and floured. Then the trick was getting them into the pan. Based on how wet and unmanageable they'd been so far, I decided that it'd be best to err on the generous side when flouring the pans... extremely generous. Getting them into the pan was... interesting, but I managed it!

The first one broke when I tried to check to see if the bottom was browned yet. It wasn't. In fact, I didn't seem to be getting anywhere with the browning at all! I suspect this may have had something to do with the large quantity of flour in the pan.

After a few more breaks and fractures, I managed to finish cooking the first round and extract it from the pan, now in several pieces. The second round was not so fortunate. I completely psyched myself out when it came time to flip it back into the pan and ended up slipping. Half of it ended up on the floor and the other half went into the lit burner. At which point it caught fire. I swore and turned the burner off, at which point TF came and blew out my little flatbread bonfire.

We did end up eating the round that didn't fall on the floor. It was nice spread with a blend of almond butter, honey, and sea salt. Not nice enough for me to want to give it another try without making some serious modifications though!

I think a large part of the problem may have been my flour. My cookbook mentions three grades of semolina flour: coarse, medium, and extra-fine. Coarse is for homemade couscous. Medium is "pasta flour". Extra-fine is generally used for pastries and the like. When I went to the store I found three types of semolina flour. One was extremely coarse, one was quite fine, and one was in between. I grabbed the in between one thinking that must be the "medium" flour I was looking for. It wasn't until I got it home that I noticed the partially rubbed out "coarse" label. I'm thinking that the finer flour must've actually been "medium" or "pasta" flour and is what I actually wanted. The extra-fine grade is apparently often sold as "durum" flour or "durum atta" rather than semolina flour, even though they're from the same grain.

So, if I ever try to make harcha again, I'll use finer flour for sure. I may also try making it with milk instead of tea. And I'll put less flour in the pan when I'm cooking it. I'll also try to be less of a spaz when I'm flipping it, but that's hard to predict!

I kind of wish I'd thought to snap a few photos of my sad and broken harcha rounds. I'm sure you can imagine an approximation though! It was sad. Next time I'll do better!