Fantastic Flatbread!

We used this Egyptian flatbread recipe to make our own flatbread in class. After we had made them we thought about the sort of ingredients that would have been available to the people of ancient Egypt and how we could include these in our bread recipes in order to make them more flavoursome. We developed our own, new recipes and followed them to make a new batch of flatbread. After we had done this we tasted our flatbread and thought about how we could improve them further. We then came up with a final recipe, that we developed based on the areas of improvement that we had identified.

We would love to try out our recipes at home over the holidays so that we can see how well our recommended improvements work. Please find the basic bread recipe below and ask your child about the changes they made to it.

Basic Egyptian Bread Recipe

This earliest version of this recipe was found on the wall of Senet’s tomb in Luxor, Egypt.

Ingredients

• 170 ml warm water
• 1 tea spoon dry yeast
• 250g wholemeal flour
• 1 tbsp olive oil

Method

1. Measure out the flour.

2. Create a well in the middle of the flour and add the yeast.

3. Gradually combine the water, mixing it in with your hands.

4. Leave the mixture in a bowl to rest for 2 hours.

5. Oil the baking tray.

6. Divide the bread mixture into evenly sized balls so that each person in your group has one.

7. Roll out your dough and place on the baking tray.

8. Bake in the oven at 200’c for 10 minutes.

We have been tasting some traditional Egyptian ingredients that would have been available to the people of ancient Egypt. We tried cumin, tumeric, olives, figs, and honey. We used our food tasting experience to decide on how we would modify our Egyptian flatbread recipes. We are looking forwards to seeing how our new recipes turn out later this week.