Anyone who’s ever lived abroad craves foods from home every once in awhile (if you’re American the words ‘peanut butter’ are probably flashing through your head right now). Then inevitably, after a few weeks at home you start to crave the foods you ate while away. There are worse dilemmas. Still, one July morning in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan while watching the Great British Bake Off and debating if going to get groceries was worth braving the 115-degree heat, I found myself with a desperate craving for an American breakfast sandwich.
There’s an Iraqi bread called samoon–it has a texture similar to pizza dough, is shaped like an eye, and can be sliced open and stuffed like a pita. Day after day, I would walk by the small bakery near my house and attempt to resist buying a bag of it, and day after day I would fail. Fresh out of the oven it was warm and soft and just a little salty. I would rip off bites on the walk, then at home dip it in olive oil and za’atar, baba ganoush, hummus, and labneh. My boyfriend Nathan and I ate multiple loaves a day, to the point where we had to put limits on how much we were allowed to buy. If one of us came home with a bag, we would scold the other, pretending to be exasperated while secretly waiting for a chance to dig in. One samoon cost about 15 cents, but a six cost 1000 Iraqi Dinar, or 84 cents, so we pretty much had to buy a whole bag.
When my breakfast sandwich craving hit, what I had in mind was an everything bagel, sharp cheddar cheese, an egg, bacon, and maybe tomato and lettuce. What I had in supplies was nothing similar, but we did have a bag of samoon, which Nathan suggested I fill with labneh and an egg. We added a layer of schug–a spicy red pepper and garlic sauce– a sprinkling of za’atar, and a new favorite breakfast sandwich was born.
We named it Sobh Bakher, which means ‘good morning’ in Kurdish, and made it often throughout the rest of our time in Erbil. We told friends, excitedly, and made it for our families in the states. No one seemed quite as enamored, but I promise you it is one of the best breakfast foods I’ve ever had. It’s the perfect mix of American breakfast and Middle Eastern flavors, the za’atar and schug adding a kick to the familiar flavor of egg and cream cheese (which is what labneh basically is, but tangier). Maybe to appreciate it you have to have lived abroad and know the feeling of craving something for months, of living somewhere where international ingredients aren’t easily found and innovation is necessary.
Of course, once back in the U.S. where bagel sandwiches are plentiful, I missed sobh bakher. I yearned for the sour labneh and fragrant zaatar, and mostly for warm, pillowy samoon. Luckily, I lived in an area where Middle Eastern food was plentiful. The first time I saw samoon at a bakery in north Chicago I shrieked in delight and scared the owner. Now I live near Detroit, where it’s easy to find sobh bakheer ingredients. Except, the schug isn’t quite the same, and the samoon isn’t quite as addictive. Or maybe that’s just nostalgia. When I eat sobh bakher from my kitchen in Michigan, I think of the flour-covered boys at the street stall bakery in Erbil, moving loaves of samoon in and out of a brick oven with long wooden paddles; of tubs of homemade labneh at the corner market; of huge bags of za’atar it seemed impossible to ever go through; and about how foods are ever-evolving, and the more I move around, the more flavors I find to love and miss.
What are the foods you miss most while abroad? Have you invented any amalgamations of your favorite foods from home and the place you’re currently living? Let us know on Instagram–tag #CuriosityMag–and we’ll feature your creations!
