Choreg

Choreg is a soft, sweet Armenian bread that we eat for dessert or breakfast or with appetizers. This recipe isn’t exactly like my great-grandmothers, but it’s close and it’s delicious.

5 cups flour

1 cup melted butter

1/3 cup sugar

3 eggs + 1 egg separated, beaten

2 packets of yeast

1/2 cup warm water

1/2 cup milk

1 1/2 tsp. kosher salt

sesame seeds for sprinkling over the top

Dissolve the yeast in the warm water and set aside. Melt the butter and beat the 3 eggs. Mix together the flour, sugar and salt well. Add in the butter, 3 eggs, yeast mixture and milk and mix together. You can knead it right in the bowl just until the dough comes together and isn’t sticking to the sides of the bowl anymore. Clean the bowl, coat it with butter or oil and put the dough back in. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise 2 hours.

Now it’s time to shape the dough. Take a key lime sized piece and roll it out with your hands into a long worm shape. Bend into a horseshoe shape and then braid the two sides. Place on a greased aluminum baking sheet. Do not use teflon, non-stick or any other dark bottom pan or they will burn on the bottom.

Let rise 30 more minutes. Brush with beaten egg and top with sesame seeds. Bake in a 375 F oven for 13 minutes. Take out and eat warm. If you’re not going to eat them all at once, you can freeze them and microwave them to heat them back up.

Taheenly (Armenian Tahin Bread)

The Art of Armenian Cooking says tahin bread is “a favorite Armenian Lenten pastry”. My great-grandmother just made it whenever she had dough leftover from making lahmajoon.

Dough: – see dough ingredients below for lahmajoon with one change: instead of 1 Tbsp. sugar, use 3 Tbsp.

Filling:

1 16 oz. jar tahini

2 cups sugar

1 stick butter, melted for brushing the pastry

Make the dough according to the lahmajoon directions below up until the point when it doubles in size. Punch down and divide into tangerine sized balls. Let the balls rise for 15 minutes before adding the filling.

Filling: Just mix the sugar and tahini together very well, making a paste. Melt the butter and set aside with a pastry brush.

Now comes the hard part to explain – forming the dough and the filling into what you see above. I’ll try to do my best but if you have any questions, feel free to comment and I”ll answer them.

Get a ball of dough and roll it into a long rectangle. It should be about half the width of your hand. Roll it out as thinly as possible. Brush lightly with butter. Put about two heaping Tbsp. of the filling in a thin row down the length of the rectangle. Leave a 1/2 inch with no filling at the ends. Now fold a third of the dough over the filling from the left side. Repeat with the right side, sealing the filling in. Roll out lengthwise again to flatten, being careful not to squish out the filling on the ends. Now you want to coil the dough around like a snail’s shell into a circle. Roll out once more to flatten. Place on a cookie sheet and bake at 350F for 20-25 minutes. After 15 minutes, keep watch on them because they go from raw looking to brown very quickly.

Tahin bread is kind of an acquired taste. You really have to like tahini. If you don’t, I suppose you could substitute peanut butter or any nut butter.