Bint al-sahn

Yemen's layered honey bread: paper-thin sheets of dough stacked with clarified butter, baked and flooded with honey and black seed

Origin: Sana'a & the Yemeni Highlands

From the journey of Wheat.

Bint al-sahn means daughter of the plate, and it is the dish a Yemeni household makes to honour a guest. Dough is rolled or stretched into sheets thin enough to read through, each brushed thickly with samn, clarified butter, and stacked eight or ten high before baking. It comes out layered and faintly crisp on top, then honey is poured over the whole thing at the table and black seed scattered across it. It is served at weddings, at the birth of a child, and at Eid, and it is eaten with the fingers by tearing down through the layers. Whether it is a bread or a sweet is not a question Yemenis find interesting: it arrives with savoury food as often as after it, and at large gatherings it appears alongside the meat. Yemeni honey is the reason the dish is what it is. The sidr honey of the Hadhramaut and Wadi Do'an, produced from the flowering of the Christ's thorn jujube, is among the most expensive honey in the world, and pouring it over bread in quantity is an act of hospitality with a price attached that everyone at the table understands. The black seed on top is nigella, habbat al-barakah, the seed of blessing, which carries a long medicinal reputation across the Islamic world and gives a faint bitter and oniony note against the honey. The technique of stacking buttered leaves belongs to a wide family that includes Levantine and Central Asian layered breads, and the same logic produces flakiness in all of them: fat between sheets, steam pushing them apart in the oven.

Ingredients

Dough

  • 500 g plain flour
  • 7 g fast-action dried yeast
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 tbsp sugar
  • 250 ml warm milk, approximately

Layers

  • 250 g samn or clarified butter, melted

To finish

  • 200 ml honey, ideally Yemeni sidr
  • 2 tbsp nigella seeds

Method

  1. Mix the flour, yeast, salt, and sugar. Beat in the eggs and enough warm milk to make a soft, smooth, slightly slack dough. Knead for ten minutes.
  2. Cover and rest for an hour, until risen and relaxed. The rest matters more than the rise; the dough must stretch without tearing.
  3. Divide into eight or ten balls. Coat each generously in melted samn, cover, and rest a further twenty minutes.
  4. Take one ball and flatten it on a well-buttered surface, then stretch it outward with the flats of your hands until it is thin enough to see the surface through, roughly the size of your baking tin. Small holes do not matter.
  5. Lay it in a buttered round tin and brush it thickly with samn.
  6. Repeat with each ball, stacking and buttering every layer generously. Do not economise on the butter; it is what separates the layers.
  7. Brush the top thickly and bake at 200°C for twenty-five to thirty minutes, until deep gold and puffed at the edges.
  8. Pour any remaining samn over as it comes out of the oven.
  9. Flood the surface with honey while it is still hot, scatter over the nigella seeds, and serve warm, torn by hand.

Notes

Stretching rather than rolling is what gets the sheets thin enough, and the buttered surface is what makes it possible. Be generous with the samn between every layer; under-buttered sheets fuse into one bread and the whole point is lost. The honey goes on hot and at the table, not baked in. If sidr honey is beyond reach, use the best single-flower honey you can find rather than a blended one.

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