Soframiz: Vibrant Middle Eastern Recipes from Sofra Bakery and Cafe [A Cookbook] Hardcover – October 11, 2016

The authors' passion for the richness and bounty of Middle Eastern cuisine, as well as their meticulous research, shine through in every recipe. This is an ethnic cookbook, so the ingredients and the names of the dishes themselves may seem exotic to us, but that's exactly what we want when we buy a book about another cuisine. However, the authors--with the help of outstanding editing--have clearly made it a priority to make the dishes accessible in terms of availability and affordability of ingredients and simplicity of cooking to the vast majority of readers.The Kindle format is unique and superb. Everything is clickable: TOC, Index (with alphabet clicks), embedded recipes, and the "Friends and Resources" chapter, which highlights websites for some of their favorite purveyors. Here's the unique: "exotic" ingredients in recipes are clickable to a note explaining the ingredient including, almost always, where to find it, and the note may be clickable back to at least one recipe that uses the ingredient. Most, but not all, recipes have color photos, and there are occasional photo segments demonstrating technique.I expected many of the ingredients to be exotic. However, in addition to the links mentioned above, there is an "Essential Ingredients" section explaining some of the key Middle Eastern ingredients the chefs use, almost always providing sourcing suggestions or telling us how to make our own labneh, for example. In addition, the authors frequently provide substitution suggests (for example, whole-milk Greek yogurt for labneh). The result is that virtually every ingredient is either available today in your average supermarket or amazonable (z'atar and sumac, for example). I found sujuk (a dry-cured sausage) on Amazon. They recommend store-bought yufka dough (I checked: it's amazonable) in one recipe; however, they also provide a recipe to make our own to use in other recipes.So many of the recipes are delightfully exotic, such as "Lamb Sausage Katmer with Pistachio Yogurt." The recipes reflect the authors' travels in Turkey, Israel, Lebanon, Greece, Syria, Morocco, and more. Every recipe has a headnote that explains the authors' discovery of the dish, usually in a Middle Eastern home. For example, "....the farm of my friend, chef Musa Dagdaviren outside of Istanbul...." They tell us how they may have adapted the dish since that first encounter. Headnotes also discuss the ingredients and, often, the history of the dish (one recipe's headnotes takes us right back to Noah and the Ark). Headnotes are signed by either Ana (mostly savory) or Maura (mostly pastry). I loved that a handful of beloved non-Middle-Eastern recipes, favorites in the Sofra bakery, snuck into the cookies chapter.For the most part, the recipes themselves are very simple and don't require a lot of active time. Naturally, yeasted breads will require time to rise, dried chickpeas will take time on the stovetop to cook, and an occasional dish is best rested overnight. I love a cookbook that makes me want to head into the kitchen to experiment and learn more about a new cuisine, and have bookmarked half a dozen recipes with which to start.

Baking bread is one of my favorite weekend activities. It is therapeutic and rewarding. You mix up a bunch of ingredients, and at the end you have a gorgeous, handmade loaf of bread.Soframiz is full of gorgeous photographs of enticing baked goods. I’m not against innovation and improvement, but I like to pay homage and respect to tradition. I love that the book clearly states that “the recipes may not be traditional, but they follow the spirit of the original dish.”I have a long list of recipes that I want to make from the cookbook: lamb katmer, flower pogaca rolls, raspberry-rose petal turnovers, Turkish simit, crick cracks, cheese borek pie with nigella seeds, spanakopita serpentine… I could go on and on.I have a go to brioche recipe, but I thought I would start with the Tahini brioche. It has a warm, nutty flavor and it’s perfect spread with salted butter and drizzled with honey. I used leftovers for French Toast. If you are a baker, I highly recommend the book. It is inspirational, the photos are enticing, and the recipes are really straight forward and not too complicated. I received a review copy of Soframiz in exchange for an honest review.

Several years ago, a fellow cookbook collector gifted me a copy of Ana Sortun's excellent Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean, and I fell instantly and madly in love. Sortun is the executive chef behind Oleana and Sofra. Classically trained at La Varenne, she decided to incorporate Mediterranean spices and the mezze mentality after studying in Turkey. Sofra Cafe and Bakery opened in 2008 and serves mezze and baked goods from Turkey, Lebanon, and Greece, all of which are amply represented in "Soframiz."I've long admired Turkish cuisine and have collected numerous books on the subject (including recent releases Istanbul Cult Recipes, Eat Istanbul: A Journey to the Heart of Turkish Cuisine, and Anatolia: Adventures in Turkish Cooking), so when I heard that Ana and Maura Kilpatrick were coming out with a Sofra cookbook, I was ecstatic. I've had the galley for several months, and have made numerous recipes from the book, including the spicy tomato bulgur salad, stuffed simit, Persian carrot and black eyed pea salad, and tahini shortbread cookies.The recipes include breakfast, meze, flatbreads, savory pies, cookies and confections, specialty pastries, cakes and desserts, and beverages. If you've never experienced a Turkish (or Israeli) breakfast, you're in for a treat; traditional breakfast spreads include many small bowls and plates of olives, tahini, stuffed flatbreads, egg dishes, vegetables and cheeses taking up the entire table. Breakfast at Sofra includes such staples as Shakshuka (baked eggs with spicy tomato sauce), rolled omelet with za'atar and labne, flower pogaca rolls, date orange brioche tart, pistachio toaster pastries with rosewater glaze, and morning buns iwth orange blossom glaze.The meze really shine and make for inspired snacking or afternoon pick-me-ups, from the whipped cheese spreads and hummus to hearty and healthy bean-based salads (Persian carrot and black-eyed peas, Egyptian-style pea salad with walnuts, barley and chickpea salad, yellow split peas with za'atar spiced almonds). I made several for this review and all were definite repeats.My true passion is baking, so the breads and baked goods were the real test. My first disappointment was that measurements are only given in volume, not weight; as a serious home baker, I much prefer the precision of weighing my flours, particularly as I live in an extremely humid climate (which affects the weight of flour). I also had some issues with several of the bread recipes I tried; the stuffed simit featured on the cover calls for 1 cup water to 2 1/4 cups of flour, and what initially greeted me was almost like pancake batter. I continued to add flour by the tablespoon, as well as a little olive oil, and eventually had a very soft (but workable) dough that was wonderfully moist. The Turkish method of brushing with pekmez (grape molasses) lends a sweet finish to the savory filling of feta and za'atar spiced almonds and the toasted sesame seed topping. The bread is delicious on its own or as an accompaniment to the salads in the book.Fans of Middle Eastern pastries will be in heaven; from pistachio bird's nests (a recipe I have not encountered in my many other Turkish books) to Persian love cake, kunefe, umm Ali with caramelized apples, chocolate hazelnut baklava, brown butter pecan pie with espresso dates, date espresso ma'amoul, and milky walnut-fig baklava, this is a baker's paradise.I encountered an issue with the tahini shortbread cookies, which calls for 2 tsp salt; I cross-checked the recipe on the internet, and the online version I found also called for 2 tsp. salt. My baker's instinct told me to start with much less; I went with 1/2 tsp salt, which is what most of the other cookie and shortbread recipes in "Soframiz" called for, and I'm certainly glad I didn't use the full amount as they would have been too salty for my taste. Also, I followed the recipe to the letter, and ended up with more like 3 or 4 dozen cookies. The recipe calls for 1/2 cup toasted sesame seeds but you are only instructed to use 1/4 cup. The resulting cookies were absolutely delicious and would be fantastic as part of a cheese tray as the sesame lends a savory edge.Gorgeous matte photography and clear, large font make this a pleasure to read and cook from (I prefer matte pages as it means no glare in my cookbook holder). I loved the recipes I tried, but found in several instances that there are small errors, so be sure to read through the entire recipe in advance and make note if an ingredient is mentioned that is not in the list, or an amount seems off.Overall "Soframiz" is one of my top cookbook picks for 2016 (I'll be releasing my 2016 cookbook roundup in the next month or two), and one that fans of Turkish, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cuisine will certainly want to add to their collections.

Chock full of delicious, unusual, multi-dimensional, AND doable recipes. Will be well used in our house.

I'm giving this 5 stars even though there are no weight measurements. I may feel it's more of a "4" later (another reviewer validly points out some errors in recipe writing), but yesterday I made Sofra's Gingerbread and that recipe alone will be worth the price of the book. It is a perfect gingerbread and probably something you're likely to skip over in a book with a Middle Eastern focus. I've looked for a "best" gingerbread for years, and this is it.