If you enjoyed our Arabic rose pudding, we have another delicious oriental dessert for you: meghli. It’s a light rice pudding packed with Lebanese spices and nuts – ready in no time and perfect for a fancy dinner. Let’s do it!
Meghli, also known as maybe or meghleh, is a simple Levantine dessert made with rice flour, cinnamon, cumin, and anise. The ingredients are boiled with water until thick and pudding-like. After cooling, the puddings are topped with coconut flakes, pistachios, and other local nuts.
Unlike other puddings, meghli does not contain milk or eggs, which means it is dairy free and vegan By default. However, the classic recipe uses refined white sugar to sweeten the pudding. To make our version healthier, we swapped out sugar for maple syrup, which includes weight for weight 40% less sugar. If you’d like, you can even make the recipe sugar-free with sugar-free erythritol, a diabetic-friendly sweetener.
Meghli is too gluten free how to prepare it with rice flour. Make sure you use baking circle flour, which you should be able to find in the Free of department in the supermarket. If you use milled rice for this recipe, the pudding will be quite gritty and won’t bind as well.
As for the spices, we couldn’t find any ground cumin or ground anise, so we used the whole seeds and pods instead. We put them in a cheese bag and let them soak in the boiling water. This is a great trick we learned for our chai flavored chocolate! But if you can find the ground spices, just add them to the pot along with cinnamon.
You can prepare the puddings in it less than 10 minutes and then let it cool in the fridge. This is great if you need to prepare them ahead of time before your guests arrive. We are sure that this Lebanese pudding will make everyone happy with its delicious combination of fresh coconut, crunchy nuts, warm cinnamon and aromatic anise!