See Cedars's big brick ovens and fabulous flatbreads in our slideshow.
Troy Fields
Sojok, with its crumbled sausage, salty cheese and pita bread, is like Lebanese chorizo.
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It's high noon on a sunny Saturday and Cedars Bakery can't keep its packages of freshly baked pita bread on the shelf. Hijabi women are perched near the wooden shelves lining one wall, waiting keenly for more packets of the bread to be brought out from the open kitchen. In the middle of the bakery, two enormous brick ovens bellow and glow as two lean young men pump bread in and out of them like a pair of pistons. They heat up the inside of the bakery to temperatures close to those outside in the scorching July summer, but no one inside seems to care. They're here for the bread, and they'll wait as long as it takes.
At a table with my dining companion, we're waiting for our food to come out as we watch the men in the kitchen work tirelessly. I can see our zaatar and cheese bread already prepped on a large table in front of the ovens, and I watch its journey as my dining companion turns his attention to Al Jazeera on the flat-screen TV across the way. I hear him chuckling and turn to see why.
"Look!" He's pointing toward the flags mounted on either side of the TV. "They have a Texas flag on one side and a Lebanese flag on the other," he says, gesturing to the white and red flag with a signature green cedar tree in the middle. That cedar tree emblem is repeated throughout the bakery, even down to its name, a sign to other Lebanese that this is a true taste of home.
And with its short menu of mana'eesh (or manakish) — Lebanese flatbreads — and shawarmas, this isn't a menu truly meant for the masses. Cedars doesn't cater to wishy-washy Americans who make vague statements like "Oh, yeah, I love Mediterranean food. Hummus is so good for you." Cedars is still a bakery first and foremost, and it caters primarily to the large Lebanese diaspora in Houston. As such, there are a lot of things on the menu that aren't immediately familiar to folks raised on Fadi's buffets or Sabra hummus.
Which is, of course, why I love it. Middle Eastern food was the first ethnic food I was ever exposed to as a kid, dining off one of the few buffets in town with my father, the man who was the impetus of all my culinary wanderings throughout my adolescence. He taught me everything I could have wanted to know about tabbouleh and baba ghanoush, kibbeh and fattoush. So I'm always excited to find Middle Eastern food in Houston that I haven't tried yet, like the tantalizing flatbread that was finally making its way to our table.
When our mana'eesh came out, I set about explaining each one to my dining companion, whom I'd lured to Cedars under the pretense of having "breakfast pizza." I've found that identifying cognates like this is often the easiest way to persuade skeptics to try ethnic foods they otherwise might not. I pointed to the sojok (pronounced "suh-zhook") flatbread, ruddy nuggets of sausage crumbled atop a bed of salty halloum cheese on top of a pillowy piece of pita bread.
"It's like Lebanese chorizo," I explained to my friend. A familiar concept to any Houstonian, the Middle Eastern version of this sausage is crumbly and dry, with the same spice profile of cumin, garlic and red pepper, but is made with beef. It's used in the same contexts, too, scrambled into eggs for breakfast in some Middle Eastern countries. And in Lebanon, it's sliced and put into sandwiches. Cedars has those, too, but we were too busy concentrating on breakfast that day to try any.
We quickly put away the sojok flatbread — at four pieces in a "personal pizza"-type size, this is easy to do — and turned to the other flatbreads on the table: cheese and zaatar and one simply called "meat" on the menu. The meat turned out to be finely ground beef seasoned with nutmeg and tomato; neither of us cared for it, but the zaatar and cheese mana'eesh was a different thing entirely.
Cut into long strips instead of pie pieces, the idea behind the "half-and-half,"as it's referred to here, is that you fold the strip together, smashing the zaatar spice blend and the cheese into one piece that's bookended by light, fluffy pita bread on either side. The zaatar's predominant flavor is that uniquely tangy, sour taste of ground sumac in the spice blend along with salt, toasted sesame seeds and the sweet herbal currents of thyme and marjoram. It's traditionally eaten on pita bread with soft lebne, so the mana'eesh is really just taking all of those steps and condensing them into one beautifully flavorful dish.
I had ordered a bowl of lebne on the side and we greedily scooped the cheese up with our folded-over slices of half-and-half flatbread, salty and sour and tangy and chewy all mingling together happily. The lebne didn't taste homemade, however; a shame, really, since it's so easy to make. But that didn't stop us from enjoying the meal and the sight of women scrambling over fat, hot packages of pita bread that they stuffed into giant Macy's bags as each new delivery came out from the kitchen.
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