A Blessed Shabbat Yemenite breakfast

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Jewish cuisine skews heavily toward the festive foods eaten at the Sabbath dinner and on the High Holy Days. Unlike breakfast, these meals carry ritual and symbolic significance, and they represent the primary times we gather together with family to “eat Jewish.” It makes sense, then, that dishes like chicken soup, hamantaschen and potato latkes, which make regular forays into the spotlight, would be the ones to stick in our memory. Meanwhile, aside from Yom Kippur’s post-fast breakfast-for-dinner spread, virtually no Jewish holidays focus on the morning.,While Jewish breakfast foods are categorically underappreciated, a global look at what Jews eat at the beginning of the day — both during the week and on the Sabbath — actually reveals some of the cuisine’s most interesting and eclectic culinary traditions.,Yemenite French Toast,Yemenite Jewish breakfast means one thing: bread. As a community with few resources, cooks had to find creative ways to turn the same humble ingredients into different recipes. Two of their primary morning dishes, jachnun and malawach, are made from a flaky, puff pastry-like dough called ajin. Jachnun is traditionally rolled into tight cylinders, baked overnight in a very low oven (today some people use a slow cooker) and served warm for Sabbath breakfast. Malawach, meanwhile, is fried in a skillet, like flat, savory French toast, and topped with fresh tomato sauce and the hot chili paste s’chug. A third Yemenite breakfast bread, kubaneh, is made from a yeasted dough that gets steamed in a covered pot overnight at very low temperatures until it puffs and grows tender and dense. It was traditionally served on Sabbath morning with hard-boiled eggs and butter. ,Thank you to Leah Koenig,Read more: http://forward.com/food/186062/why-breakfast-is-most-jewish-meal-of-the-day/

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