Ghrayba Tunisian Homemade Steps For Beginners

Ghrayba (غريبة) is a type of cookie prepared in the Maghreb and other parts of the Arab world. It is a round, shortbread cookie made with flour, sugar, butter, and usually almonds. It is often served with coffee or mint tea.

Prepare the ghrayba dough

Mix the flour and sugar. Pour the melted margarine and stir well: it gives a fairly hard dough.

The trick: Pass the dough several times in a manual meat grinder. 3-4 times, it makes the dough very light and easy to handle. Not being able to turn the chopper crank because of pain in my fingers, I passed the dough through the electric chopper, with the knives.

That’s the dough before you chop it.

prepare the ghrayba dough

Then, you have to shape the dough into “fingers”, it’s tradition, but you can cut it with a cookie cutter.

Make the ghrayba fingers

I find that the best technique is to take the dough in the hand, work it a little, then start to make a roll in one of the 2 hands, to “pack” the ends with thumb and index finger with the other hand.

Make it turn around with a small movement of the first hand, tamp down a little by pressing on the roller that forms in the hand and repeat the operation : roll in the hand, pack the ends etc …

Until we have a small enough “packed” roll that we can then roll a little on the work plan.

prepare the ghrayba fingers

ghraiba finger

We cut the ends without dropping the dough in the other hand.

Cut the ends.

cut the ends of the dough

Cut pieces (“fingers”) not too long and finely cut the top with several cuts.

Baking steps

Bake in the oven, barely 180 °, 5 minutes and start monitoring: they should be barely yellow and sometimes start to crack. Remove them from the oven immediately, otherwise they will be hard as stone.

baking the ghrayba

Wait for it to cool before handling the cookies. Otherwise they fall apart.

Place them in an airtight metal box. Do not eat too much (when you start, you do not stop anymore) because it is very constipating. Excuse the detail, but you have to know it.