Kleicha

Iraq's national biscuit, a cardamom and rose scented dough coiled around a buttered date paste, sliced and baked, and made by the tinful for every Eid

Origin: Baghdad and Basra, Iraq

From the journey of Date.

Kleicha is the biscuit of Iraq in the way that no single biscuit is the biscuit of anywhere else. It is baked in enormous quantities for Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, and by Iraqi Christians for Easter and Christmas, and the making of it is a household event: several kilos of dough, several kilos of date paste, and everybody in the kitchen rolling. The dough is scented with cardamom, and often with rosewater, mahleb, or nigella; the classic filling is kleichat tamur, a paste of stoned dates worked with butter and more cardamom. A walnut version, kleichat joz, and a folded half-moon of sugar and coconut, khfefiyyat, are made alongside it in the same session. The date version is the one people mean. Its ancestry is Mesopotamian in substance if not in provable descent. Date paste enclosed in a dough is what the Basra date forest and the wheat of the northern plains suggest to a cook, and the Abbasid cookery books of Baghdad describe things very like it. The commonly repeated claim that the coiled shape descends from Mesopotamian sun symbols is charming and unproven; the coil is also just the easiest way to fill a long biscuit quickly. The dates come from the Shatt al-Arab, where the tidal reach of the Tigris and the Euphrates once carried the largest date forest on earth. Much of that forest was destroyed in the fighting of the 1980s, and Iraqi dates are now a fraction of the world trade they once dominated, but kleicha did not change.

Ingredients

Dough

  • 500 g plain flour
  • 200 g unsalted butter or ghee, softened
  • 2 tsp ground cardamom
  • 1 tsp fast-action dried yeast
  • 1 tbsp caster sugar
  • 0.5 tsp fine salt
  • 150 ml warm whole milk
  • 1 tbsp rosewater

Filling

  • 500 g date paste, or stoned soft dates blitzed to a paste
  • 60 g unsalted butter, softened
  • 1 tsp ground cardamom
  • 0.5 tsp ground cinnamon
  • 1 tbsp vegetable oil, if the paste is stiff

To finish

  • 1 egg yolk beaten with 1 tbsp milk
  • 2 tsp nigella seeds or sesame seeds

Method

  1. Warm the milk to blood heat, stir in the sugar and yeast, and leave for ten minutes until it froths.
  2. Rub the softened butter into the flour with the cardamom and salt until the mixture looks like coarse breadcrumbs. Pour in the yeasted milk and the rosewater and bring it together into a soft, rich dough. Knead lightly for two minutes only.
  3. Cover the dough and rest it in a warm place for forty-five minutes. It will not double in size and is not meant to.
  4. Meanwhile beat the date paste with the softened butter, cardamom, and cinnamon until it is smooth and spreadable. Work in the oil if it is stiff enough to tear the dough.
  5. Divide the dough into four. Roll each piece on a floured surface into a rectangle roughly 30 cm by 20 cm and about 4 mm thick.
  6. Spread a quarter of the date paste over each rectangle, leaving a clear centimetre along one long edge. Roll up tightly from the other long edge into a log, sealing the bare edge underneath.
  7. Cut each log into slices about 1.5 cm thick and set them cut side up on lined baking trays, leaving a little space between them. Brush the tops with the egg wash and scatter over the nigella seeds.
  8. Bake at 180C (fan 160C, gas 4) for eighteen to twenty minutes, until the dough is pale gold at the edges. Do not let them brown properly.
  9. Cool completely on a rack before storing. They keep for three weeks in a sealed tin and are always better on the second day.

Notes

Mahleb, the ground kernel of the St Lucie cherry, is used in many Iraqi kleicha doughs alongside the cardamom and gives a faint almond and cherry note. Add half a teaspoon with the cardamom if you have it. For kleichat joz, replace the date paste with 300 g ground walnuts mixed with 150 g caster sugar, 2 tsp ground cardamom, and enough rosewater to bind, and shape the biscuits as folded crescents rather than spirals. Iraqi date paste is sold in blocks by Middle Eastern grocers and is far better than anything made from dry supermarket dates. If you can only find whole dates, use Medjool and expect to work the paste harder. The dough freezes well, filled and rolled into logs. Slice from frozen and add three minutes to the baking time.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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Ingredient originTrade or transit route
Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
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