Ouarka

In France it is almost impossible to find filo pastry, instead one is recommended to try another product from the supermarket shelves, Brick. Brick sounds vaguely Germanic to me but the product itself is North African and probably arrived in France via its stormy connection with Algeria. The name it appears is an adoption of the name for stuffed parcels more often transcribed as Brik.

I hadn't made the connection between Brick and Ouarka until today, when I opened the packet I'd bought as a trial, until then imagining that Brick was just the French name for something very similar to Filo that would serve for the spring rolls I had planned for dinner. It is, and it isn't. In Algeria this pastry is 'dioul', in Tunisia it's 'malsouqa' and in Morocco it's 'ouarka' (ouarqa). I know it as ouarka.

Ouarka (or Warka in some spellings) is a very difficult paste to master. Although its ingredients are the simplest, a fine semolina flour and water with a drop of oil added the method is remarkable, a ball of dough is touched to a hot plate in an overlapping circular fashion until a disk of vanishingly thin firm pastry is formed. This is quickly removed and placed between sheets of paper to preserve its flexibility and the process is repeated until all the dough is used. It is so difficult to make that even in North Africa is rarely or never made at home, the skill needed is too great.

It is incredibly thin, so fine that it can be difficult to see which side of the paper it's stuck to, but don't panic, if you can loosen an edge it is sturdy enough to peel easily from the paper. My next problem was that it comes in 30cm circles, much too large for the mini spring rolls I had in mind but not easy to cut into usable shapes. I decided to make larger pancake rolls.

I'd already made a filling of shredded carrots, haricots verts, wood ear mushrooms, bean sprouts and shredded ginger. I forgot the garlic and pepper in my panic which was a pity but you don't need to make my mistakes. Although the pastry didn't stick well to itself during rolling it stayed together nicely in the pan so I had no need to make a paste to glue the rolls closed.

I was so taken aback by the pastry that I decided against deep frying and instead shallow fried my rolls in a generous layer of oil in a frying pan. This actually worked pretty well as the picture shows.

It did make a good fried roll but it's not a real spring roll wrapper nor is it Filo which I've become accustomed to as a substitute. The texture of the ouarka is appealing and I can feel myself working on ways to use it in the deepest recesses of my mind which will no doubt surface in a day or ten.

And in case anyone is wondering, seven pancake rolls is a lot for one person at a sitting, so I have some in the fridge. They won't be as nice but it's been a long time since I had a take away breakfast.