Skip to main content

INFO: Ghotab

Ghotab
Ghotab,
originally uploaded by ktglick.
Ghotab (Ghotaab, ghottab, qottab) is a Persian pastry, which along with typical ingredients also contains yogurt, almonds and cardamom. It is basically a round piece of pastry dough folded over an almond paste/sugar/cardamom mixture and then lightly fried. Some versions of ghotab may contain other ingredients, since most of the best recipes are family secrets that are jealously guarded.

Ghotab is one of three types of sweets ("shirini") that the Iranian city of Yazd is famous for producing. Yazd is an ancient city that was once a center for Zoroastrianism and is now famous for its architecture (along with the shirini!). The confectioners of Yazd keep their recipes very secret and many have been passed down through several generations. Other shirini famous in Yazd are baghlava and pashmak.

Ghotab is relatively easy to make, although my ghotab was not homemade by me, but purchased from Mashti Malone's, which is also an excellent source for Iranian-style ice cream in flavors such as rosewater saffron, orange blossom with pistachios and the intriguing "herbal snow," an ice cream containing 14 different herbs and spices.

Here is a simple ghotab recipe, although the measurements are metric, which is confusing for us yankees, but if you need a guide, this site has metric measurement conversions.


Comments

Anyanka said…
Herbal snow is delicious! I can attest to that. I like the rosewater saffron, but am just not crazy about the vermicelli it contains. It looks like little worms (and so is aptly named)...specifically, little worms I once saw growing in day-old dog food. So...no vermicelli for me.
KT said…
They have rosewater saffron without it! The one with the little rice strips is called faludeh and those actually help you digest the ice cream (at least, according to the store owner).

But the scoop I got was just ice cream, and it had some little nuts in it, maybe pistachios, and it was rosewater saffron flavor.

Popular posts from this blog

ABOUT THIS BLOG

I've been evaluating my blog and have realized that, while I have lots of nifty posts, I don't really have a good overall explanation of what exactly this blog is all about, and what one can expect to find here. So I'm creating this post and will link to it in the sidebar for anyone who's interested. I am not a professional chef. I have not been cooking for years. I am not an expert who is going to make beautiful and amazing and complicated dishes to "wow" you. I am, in fact, quite the opposite. I am a total beginner. I've always lived in places with miniscule kitchens and concerned myself with schoolwork and studying and working and not paid the least bit of attention to what I was eating every day. And that's what this blog is all about. It's about me learning where my food comes from, how to make it properly, and how to enjoy it to the utmost. It's no fun to learn by myself, so I started the blog to keep track of what I learn, kind of like a...

LA.FOODBLOGGING: Groundworks Coffee

Our local foodblogging establishment, la.foodblogging , has seen fit to allow me to contribute. From now on most of my Los Angeles centered posts will be done there, and linked to from here, in order to avoid duplication. My first post is on my morningtime friend, Groundwork Coffee (as promised to Jeremy and my sweet Auntie). You can read it here: I'll Have the Works . Tags: LA.FOODBLOGGING

RESTAURANT: Pinkberry

So I finally tried this famous (infamous?) yogurt shop that has begun the conquest of Los Angeles. The yogurt that is called "crackberry" by many. What the L.A. Times calls "the yogurt that launched a thousand parking tickets" due to the notoriously bad parking situation in its original location and its customers tendency to wait in lines for hours. It's the newest thing, taking the place of cupcakes, it seems. It's a rebirth of the frozen yogurt fad of the late '80s, but this time it's different. This yogurt is different. So, my lazy ass might be persuaded to go there, even though it's outside my 2 mile radius of things around my apartment. If it's really that good, I would go the extra .1 mile. But I would not go the extra .1 mile, AND have to go crazy trying to find parking AND then have to wait in life until my hairs turn grey. Nothing is that good. But now there's one I can walk to, and the line is not that long, so we decided to try...