Moroccan breakfast rolls studded with sesame and scented with anise and orange-blossom water
Origin: Fez & Casablanca, Morocco
From the journey of Anise.
Krachel, sometimes written krachels or krechel, are the small enriched rolls that a Moroccan household eats at breakfast and again at the late afternoon hour when mint tea is poured. They are sold from every bakery in Fez and Casablanca in high stacks, still faintly warm, and they are the closest thing Morocco has to a brioche, though they are less rich and considerably more aromatic than that comparison suggests. The aromatics are the point, and there are three. Anise, called ḥabbat ḥulwa in the Maghreb, the sweet grain, is the leading one and goes in whole so that each roll is speckled with it. Sesame goes in whole too, both through the crumb and on the crust, toasted first so that it tastes of something. Orange-blossom water, distilled from the bitter orange blossom of the Souss and the Gharb and made in enormous quantity every spring, supplies the perfume that makes the roll unmistakably Moroccan rather than merely sweet. The pairing with mint tea is deliberate rather than incidental. Moroccan tea is green, heavily sugared, and sharply mint-scented, and it wants something warm and seed-scented beside it, not something buttery. Krachel are dry enough to be eaten with the fingers, they keep well for a day, and they are equally at home split with butter and apricot jam, or dipped. Some bakers add a pinch of ground mastic or a little gum arabic, which gives a faint chew, and some add saffron for colour. What no baker leaves out is the anise, which arrived in the Maghreb with the agricultural expansion that followed the Arab conquests and has been grown in Moroccan gardens ever since.
Krachel are best on the day but keep acceptably for two, and stale ones are excellent split, toasted, and spread with butter and apricot jam. They freeze well: refresh from frozen in a 160°C oven for eight minutes. Orange-blossom water varies enormously in strength between brands. Moroccan and Lebanese distillations are usually much more concentrated than supermarket versions; start with two tablespoons of a strong one and taste the dough. A common addition in Fez is a quarter teaspoon of ground mastic worked into the sugar, which gives a faint resinous chew. Some households add a pinch of saffron steeped in a tablespoon of the warm milk, which turns the crumb pale gold and is worth doing for a feast day. The rolls are also made in a smaller size, about 40 g, for Ramadan, when they are eaten at ftour alongside harira and dates.
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