Little Tripoli in Altona

When I first moved to Footscray, I had been working in Thornbury and had spent many a lunchtime stuffing myself full of Lebanese pizza from nearby High Street and beyond.  One of my first tasks was to find the local Lebanese bakery, if there was indeed one.  Much fruitless Googling ensued until I finally came across a promising link on Google Maps to "The Circle" in Altona.

So one morning I navigated hesitantly under the West Gate and down Blackshaws Road until I came across this little oasis in the backstreets, a hub of the Lebanese community and a treasure trove of good food.

Starting at one end, Al Ameena butcher for lamb cutlets (the nice rack-of-lamb sort) for $20/kg.  Other butchers, TAKE NOTE!  It is bloody outrageous the $50/kg I have seen charged elsewhere.  Kenny also gives Al Ameena's halal hot dogs a big thumbs up.

International Foods is a simply fantastic Lebanese and continental supermarket.  One half of the shop is fruit and veg, the other is a very well-stocked and well-organised dry goods section, complete with aisles.

I could quite happily spend a good hour in here.  Tahini in all grades and sizes, kitsch Eastern European chocolates, obscure Polish jams.  I even used to buy bargain pomegranate juice here from Azerbaijan.

Love this - just as "regular" supermarkets have a choice between Tip Top, Sunblest, Helga's etc, here you can choose your favourite Lebanese bread.  I personally like Kadamani or A1.

The chiller cabinets have all sorts of Middle Eastern cheeses including shanklish, a kind of aged feta rolled in herbs, haloumi and bargain yoghurt.  Behind the counter the pine nuts are great value (or as good value as pine nuts can be).  Recently International Foods have started selling pastries from the venerable Balha's of Sydney Road but the day I went they looked a bit tired.  Stay tuned for a great local baklava shop.

Yes yes yes, the Holy Grail, the Lebanese pizza shop!  I actually haven't been back to this one that much after discovering Amanie's in St Albans and they have evidently undergone some changes.  There used to be a fish and chips/hamburger station in here too but that has been removed.

I have to say, I prefer it gone.  Who needs a floppy hamburger when you have all this goodness to choose from?  A good Lebanese pizza shop should have a small range of its offerings out, which are pies or flat "pizzas" folded into various shapes.  These are then tossed into the long, flat oven which is absolutely searing in temperature, as evidenced by the mere 60 seconds it takes to have your choice heated up.

I highly recommend the kaak here, which is an almost bagel-like, sesame-seed encrusted roll filled with grated haloumi (you can see them in the picture above, at the front, in a little stack).  A no less tasty but much less decadent option is the plain spinach, which this bakery do a great version of.  The spinach is fresh and cooked with onion, allspice and perhaps sumac to make a fabulously tangy and healthy snack.

Last stop is Fruit Fiesta for gorgeous fruit and veg and a range of continental dry goods.  There's a little cafe in the strip too called "Inner Circle" which I think is cute.  It's the kind of place where everyone knows everybody and you feel compelled to take your empty cup back to the counter, just as everyone else does.

 

The coffee is unspectacular - get one from Spotswood on the way home, but first pull into Victoria Sweets which is just on Blackshaws Road.

When the Lebanese do something, they do it 110%.  More glitz!  More tulle!  I love it - it's so OTT.  Balha's in Sydney Road is the same, all glinty gold and the sweets displayed on enormous pedastals.

Everything is sold by weight, so start by asking for the type of container you wish to fill, whether a small box or a huge circular plastic plate to keep.  Finding which type of baklava you like is trial and error.  Greek baklava is very syrupy and almost soggy, whereas Lebanese can veer towards being too dry depending on the shop and the variety.

Phwoar, check out the chocolate baklava on the right side of the photo!  One of my favourite Lebanese sweets is znoud.  They are fat spring rolls filled with clotted cream, deep fried, soaked in sugar syrup and dolloped with more cream.  Holy heart attack!

Here we have my favourite variety of baklava - triangular in shape and filled with a pine nut/cashew mixture (not sure but that is what it tastes like).  On the left is harisa which is a dense cake of semolina.  These were not up to Victoria Sweets' normal standards - the syrup had far too much rosewater for my taste.

Top marks though to this freebie shortbread I scored, stuffed with date paste.  It had that perfect shortbready moist/dry thing going on with sweet, thick date paste in the middle.  Does anyone (yasmeen?) know if this is maamoul or not?  If so, I might be a convert as I normally dislike the more traditional date-stuffed pastries that I associate with this name.

I hope you enjoy exploring The Circle.  Rayna recently lamented the lack of independent shops in the newer outer suburbs.  I agree; nothing depresses me more than row after row of franchises.  I love these unique shopping strips which have developed autonomously over time.  Most of the shoppers here are older people - I hope that the young people in the area continue to keep The Circle alive.

Find a map to The Circle here.

A foul breakfast from Syria

I remember being told at school, "Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, and wit is the lowest form of intelligence".  I thought it sounded so debonair, so Oscar Wilde, and liked to roll it around in my mind like a boiled lolly in my mouth.  The truth was I didn't really know what it meant and now I probably agree with the former but not the latter.  I don't know where my love of puns would fit on this scale although I think it would be fairly subterranean.  Anyway, I find the most common transliteration of the Arabic "ful" or broad beans - "foul" - inordinately funny.  These come canned and some tins read "foul medammes" (from mudammas, Arabic for stewed) which of course looks like "foul madams" and is rather amusing.  Well, to me anyway.  Moving right along...

Ful or dried broad beans are served many different ways across the Arab world, from the more Levantine whole version to thick, rich mashes in Egypt and Sudan, often mixed with red lentils aka masoor dal (masoor from Misr, Arabic for Egypt, hence "Egyptian lentils").  This is a recipe from my friend S who is a Kurd from Syria.  It is a gorgeous, fast, healthy, vegetarian breakfast.

Ful
1 425g can broad beans
1/3 cup natural yoghurt
1 Tb (20 mL) tahini
30 mL lemon juice (about 1/2 lemon, juiced)
Salt
1 tomato, diced
1 clove garlic, crushed
Finely chopped parsley
Olive oil, about 1 Tb

Buy canned ful from any Middle Eastern-style grocer - these were from Big Trade, the supermarket in Footscray Market, but also try John's Nuts in Paisley Street.  Tip out the liquid quickly but don't drain them fully (fully, LOL), rather, fill the can back up with water so you have about half juice, half water.  Tip into a pot and heat slowly.

Meanwhile, make the sauce by mixing yoghurt, tahini and lemon, beating well to get rid of lumps and seasoning with a little salt.  Incidentally if you add crushed garlic to this, you have the best-ever sauce for felafel wraps.

Put hot beans in bowl, top with sauce, sprinkle with tomato, parsley and garlic and drizzle olive oil all over.  Eat with pita bread (buy it fresh daily from Masters Fruit & Vegie in Footscray Market or the halal butcher on the corner of Irving and Nicholson).  We had actually eaten all the pita bread the night before - really fresh pita is so delicate and seductive, and really needs no sauce at all - so we made do with this fabulous ciabatta from Blu Cow Deli (made even more fabulous by costing $2.95).

Eating the ful with ciabatta reminded me of once in New York eating a very similar breakfast dish made with marinated chickpeas.  I was at the home of a beautiful Lebanese family and early that cold winter morning, the father went out and returned with a huge bag of bagels.  Eating traditional Jewish bread with an Arab salad, pinching up tangy, garlicky chickpeas with a poppyseed bagel, was just a small expression of a desire for sectarian harmony and a memory that has stayed with me ever since.

Lebanese pizzas at Amanie's Bakery

I first discovered Lebanese pizza when I was studying Arabic at a primary school in outer suburban Melbourne.  A Saturday morning "ethnic" school ran out of there each week and I had been placed into Year 9.  If you thought high school was awkward, try being 23 years old and in a class full of 15-year-olds for whom Saturday Arabic school is the definition of pure torture.  The classes were good, but what truly kept me going back was the canteen at break time.  Parents would lug bulging cardboard boxes into the playground and line them up on card tables.  Everyone would forget how much they did not want to be there and rush to form a long, jostling line.  In the cardboard boxes lay pocket after pocket of warm, savoury Lebanese pizza, each wrapped in a single square of greaseproof paper.  There were only two choices - cheese or za'atar, a special herb - and they were ridiculously cheap.  I could never decide which to get so I always got both.  Those pizzas, eaten on an old bench seat under a peppercorn tree, are still the best Lebanese pizzas I've had in Melbourne.

Sadly I no longer attend that Arabic school and am none the wiser where they sourced their pizzas from.  The biggest choice of Lebanese bakeries or makhaabiz (singular: makhbaz) is in the northern suburbs but we have a few options here in the west.  There's the bakery at the Circle in Altona North, a small range at Babylon as well as Al Nada in Spotswood, but none are really a match with what is on offer in the north.  That is, until I found Amanie's.

This is a very traditional Lebanese bakery dealing in man'oush or Lebanese pizza.  There are a few classic types and they are always insanely cheap.  The owner here is really lovely, very friendly.

There will be some pizzas ready-made and lying behind the counter, often protected by a long sheet of paper.  Make your selection and they will be placed deftly on the floor of the long, flat oven using a special long-handled slidey tool.  They seriously only need 1 or 2 minutes before they are piping hot - the oven is kept at such a scorching temperature.

This is one of my all-time favourite drinks - I only know it by its Turkish name, ayran.  It's the original drinking yoghurt - thin, salty yoghurt that is tangy and surprisingly refreshing.  You can make it easily at home but it's somewhat of a tradition to always get it when I have Lebanese pizza.

Jibnee (haloumi cheese), $3

The mothership Lebanese pizza pie.  Salty, rich, creamy, almost squeaky on the teeth melted haloumi cheese, sometimes with a little butter, soft and melty in a delicate bread pocket.  Sometimes the dough can be way too heavy or there is too much cheese (sounds strange, I know, but haloumi is pretty intense) but Amanie's was 100% perfect.

Sbanegh ma'a jibn (spinach and cheese), $3.50

This was a perfect example of what is actually one of my least favourite pies.  Often the balance is not quite right - there's too much spinach which gets bitter and overpowering, or the bread becomes wet and claggy from the wet vegetables.  This really was excellent, though - tender, just-cooked spinach with just enough mild feta-style cheese.  The plain spinach is also really excellent - it doesn't have any cheese but the spinach is sweated with onion and allspice and is so tasty and healthy.

Lahmi (meat), $3

Another classic done superbly.  A flat disc of dough is thinly topped with a lamb mince and tomato mixture that is heavy on the onion and allspice.  Indeed, allspice is probably the most used spice in Lebanese cooking - something I found quite remarkable at first as I always associated it with cakes.  Traditionally this is sprinkled with lemon juice and chilli powder before folding in half.  There is always some on the counter; just ask them to add it!

Za'atar ("oregano"), $1.80

The original and always the best.  Za'atar is both the name for this indigenous Middle Eastern herb, a kind of local oregano/thyme often translated into English as one or the other.  Here za'atar means the spice blend made with the dried herb, sesame seeds, salt and the optional addition of other spices such as lemony sumac berries or cumin.  Here it is smoothed onto a simple circle of dough along with olive oil.  At around $1.50 each, this is probably the cheapest lunch in Melbourne.  They can be filled with tomato, cucumber and other salad items to make a sort of wrap.  We like to use them as pizza bases!

Kishik, $4

I was so excited I mistakenly ordered this instead of shankleesh which is a spherical, aged feta-style cheese, rolled in herbs, that is quite delicious when smooshed onto a pizza.  Kishik, it turns out, is a fermented and dried grain/yoghurt product that is then rehydrated as a kind of porridge or paste.  It tasted to me a bit like mashed potatoes.  It was sprinkled with raw onion, lemon and chilli.  I wasn't really a fan but it was fun to try something different.

Toum, $3

Wait til you try this.  It is Lebanese aioli or toum and it is totally divine.  Silky, garlicky, rich yet light.  Amazing!  This is eaten lots of ways including with grilled meats or just as a dip.  It apparently keeps up to a month if you use a clean spoon to take some out each time.  We ate it with fresh Lebanese bread from Amanie's - speaking of which, Lebanese bread really should be eaten that day or the next day in a pinch.  When fresh it is so fantastic, chewy yet light, and is a million miles away from the horrible stale specimens the supermarket sell up to five days past when they were baked.

I am so stoked to find such a wonderful Lebanese baker so close to home.  Now the only question is deciding which pizza to choose.  You can always try the Mr Baklover special - take za'atar pizza, open, insert cheese pizza, close.  Eat.  Genius!

Amanie's Bakery
Shop 4, 280-284 Main Road East, St Albans (map)
Phone:  9364 5333
Hours:  Mon - Sat 7.30am - 7pm, Sun 7.30am - 5pm

For more Lebanese delights, check out Sydney-based Fouad's modern as well as traditional takes on the food of his homeland, augmented by his gorgeous photos and cheeky style, at thefoodblog.com.au.

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I'm very happy to be participating in From Cup to Crop, a new initiative by Plan International to raise both awareness and funds to fight hunger in the developing world.  You can either take part in the Cup to Crop Challenge - living on $3 for food per day, one day per week for one month or choose to donate $3 on top of your bill at participating venues.  That $3 will feed a child for a staggering 10 days!  As my contribution, I pledge to donate $3 for every meal I have out over the campaign month, 14 March to 14 April.  I will keep a tally at the bottom of each post and perhaps you too could consider supporting From Cup to Crop.