Lahoh

Like the other breads it resembles – Somali canjeero and Ethiopian injera, or even American jonnycakes and English crumpets – lahoh has some difficulty finding its place in this large family of breads. This ambiguity is due to how the recipe combines a method used for both traditional griddlecakes and pancakes and flat bread, which is what gives all the gastronomic charm to this bread that the Yemenis see as their daily bread. It is sold in the streets and can be used for multiple purposes.

So to get back to the difficulty of placing lahoh in a category. It is more of a batter, like pancakes, than a dough, and contains a ferment, yeast or leaven, which in all logic requires a more or less long fermentation time. It is traditionally the women who are vested with the responsibility of making the batter at nightfall and leaving it to ferment overnight. This particularity and the fact that the batter does not contain fat or eggs, seems to exclude the lahoh forever from the pancake category.

This being said, when you cook and taste it, the partitions that we tried to make between one family and another, namely pancake/griddlecake and flat bread, fall to pieces. Like pancakes, lahoh is cooked on hot metal plates, consisting of simple sheets of metal placed over a source of heat or in saucepans or frying pans, and not in the oven. There is then the fact that the way it is eaten also makes it not fit neatly into our categories. Lahol can be spread with butter and honey and rolled up like a French crêpe. It can be dunked in tea. It can be eaten with a meal consisting of meat, with ragout, etc. It is precisely this ambivalence that makes lahoh easy to eat with all snacks and tastings.