Kaak recipe: How to prepare the traditional cookies

If you want to have a different pastry, other than the usual ones served in Nowruz, on your Haft-Seen table, you can use the following Kaak recipe.

What follows is a brief look at Kaak recipe and instructions for cooking it.

Ingredients for Kaak:

Lukewarm water: 50 milliliters
Animal or solid oil: 1 teaspoon
Eggs: 1
Salt: ½ teaspoon
Sugar powder: 160 grams
Cardamom powder: 1 teaspoon
Pistachio or almond powder: ½ measuring cup

Kaak Recipe:

Pour the instant baker’s yeast, confectioners’ sugar and lukewarm water in a bowl and let the ingredients mix together for 10 minutes.

Melt the solid oil and pour it in another bowl until it cools down slightly. Break the egg in a dish, add some salt to it and stir the mixture well.

Then add the oil and instant baker’s yeast. Now, add the flour to the extent that the mixture [the dough] does not stick to your hands, and, then, knead it very well.

Then put down the lid of the dish or bowl [containing the mixture] and wait for two hours.

Then, roll up the dough and chop it into equal pieces. Mix the confectioner’s sugar, green cardamom powder and almond flour. Now, it is time to heat the saj – a domed or convex metal griddle on which bread is baked – until it becomes hot and, then, place the dough pieces, unrolled earlier with a rolling pin, on it.

the surface of the unrolled pieces with some confectioner’s sugar and roll them up again. Then, unroll the confectioner’s sugar-covered pieces with the rolling pin and cut them into equal smaller pieces while they are still hot. Let the pieces cool down and then ornament their top with pistachio flour.

Additional tips about Kaak Recipe

According to a Farsi report by Sarzamin-e Man magazine, among the main traditional dishes prepared and served on the eve or first day of Nowruz (wikipedia) are Samanu (an Iranian sweet paste made entirely from germinated wheat), Sabzi Polo Ba Mahi (a mixture of rice and chopped herbs with fried fish), Kaak (a pastry and souvenir of the western Iranian province of Kermanshah), and Reshteh Polo.

Supplementary tips:

• It will take around 2 hours and 20 minutes to prepare the ingredients and what is needed.
• The baking and waiting time is about 20 minutes.
• Kaak could be served as snacks.

Just like other people around the world, people in Iran cook their own traditional foods to mark the arrival of spring and the beginning of their new year.