Sfiha: Another Spin on Meat Pie

These were the finished product of my version of the Lebanese meat pies. We didn't have all of the ingredients in some of the recipes I found -- shocking, I know -- and so I just relied on the smell and the taste of the meat topping. This was the first time I made it, so I was a little worried about the final product.




Before I mixed the meat, I whipped up a double-batch of a yeast dough recipe I found. It almost had a 1:1 ratio of water to oil. The dough was wrapped up and allowed to rise. Then I focused my attention to the meat.

These were some of the ingredients in there: ground beef, ketchup, salt, ground nutmeg, ground cinnamon, ground cumin, cayenne pepper, and diced tomatoes. Legit, I know.


Once the dough was allowed to rise after a few hours, the dough was divided into portions, rolled out, and topped with the meat mixture. We don't have a pizza stone or anything, so I turned one of our oven pans upside down and used that as a cook top in the oven. We didn't have a pizza peel either, so I looked around the house and just used a long piece of cardboard from our Mama Instant Noodles. The cardboard was then wrapped with tin foil. Although it looked funny, it worked.




They didn't take longer than 10 minutes each. Once out of the oven, they were allowed to cool before being devoured. We probably ate half of what we made. The sfiha actually tasted similar to the real stuff at the Aladdin Bakery. The dough turned out like a crispy crumb crust, which reminded me of Joe's Pizza's aromatic crumbly dough. They were so addictive!