Sofra Bakery & Café, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Boston’s best bakery for sweets doesn’t serve a single blueberry muffin. Instead, the treats lining Sofra’s white-marble counter are inspired by the flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East: Persian spiced doughnuts, Egyptian bread pudding, pistachio olive-oil cake. The pastries look so decadent and tantalizingly come-hither that most patrons don’t even bother parsing the […]
Boston’s best bakery for sweets doesn’t serve a single blueberry muffin. Instead, the treats lining Sofra’s white-marble counter are inspired by the flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East: Persian spiced doughnuts, Egyptian bread pudding, pistachio olive-oil cake. The pastries look so decadent and tantalizingly come-hither that most patrons don’t even bother parsing the hand-scribbled menu overhead. That’s too bad, as the bakery’s sleeper hit isn’t a baked good at all but, rather, a savory masterpiece.
An Israeli spin on huevos rancheros, Sofra’s shakshuka is a pillowy dream of stewed tomatoes ramped up with hawaij, a currylike Yemeni spice blend, and zhoug, a coriander-spiked Syrian chili paste, topped with farm-fresh eggs poached right in the sauce. That a multicultural breakfast dish might compete gamely with the pastries here won’t surprise fans of chef/co-owner Ana Sortun’s celebrated restaurant Oleana (also in Cambridge), which put upscale Middle Eastern fare on the local map years ago.
Our advice: Load up on pastry chef Maura Kilpatrick’s baked goods to go (don’t miss her light-as-air morning bun) while your companion hovers near the tables, waiting for a vacancy. Two piping-hot shakshukas later, you’ll still have plenty of sweets to tide you over on the trip back home.
RECIPE
Amy Traverso
Amy Traverso is the senior food editor at Yankee magazine and co-host of the public television series Weekends with Yankee, a coproduction with WGBH. Previously, she was food editor at Boston magazine and an associate food editor at Sunset magazine. Her work has also been published in The Boston Globe, Saveur, and Travel & Leisure, and she has appeared on Hallmark Home & Family, The Martha Stewart Show, Throwdown with Bobby Flay, and Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Amy is the author of The Apple Lover’s Cookbook, which was a finalist for the Julia Child Award for best first-time author and won an IACP Cookbook Award in the “American” category.
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