Labne with Smoked Shimeji: Housemade Strained Yoghurt, Explained

Labne is the only dairy dip on our mezze board, and the only one whose main ingredient is time rather than fire. Nothing on this plate is grilled. It gets made by leaving something alone and letting gravity do the work, which is not the sort of technique that photographs well but is the reason the dish exists.

The menu line: housemade strained yoghurt, smoked shimeji, taklia, garlic crisps, peppermint. One of those words is doing far more than it looks like, and it is not the mushrooms.

What labne is

Labne is yoghurt with the water taken out of it. The name comes from laban, the Levantine word for yoghurt and cultured milk generally, and the product sits somewhere between yoghurt and a young soft cheese depending on how far you take it. Across Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Jordan it is breakfast food, mezze, and a way of keeping milk edible for longer, all at once.

The method has not changed in a very long time: salt the yoghurt, put it in a cloth, hang it, and wait. Hours give you something thick and spoonable. A day or more gives you something firm enough to roll into balls and store submerged in olive oil, which is how households kept it through seasons when there was more milk than anyone could drink.

What straining actually removes

What drips out of the cloth is whey — water, lactose, and the whey proteins, which are the ones that stay dissolved. What stays behind is casein, milk fat, and every bit of the lactic acid the cultures produced.

That is why strained yoghurt is not simply thicker yoghurt. It is more sour, because the acid is now in a smaller volume; it is richer, because the fat is too; and it carries salt and toppings differently, because it has enough body to hold a garnish on its surface instead of swallowing it. A wetter yoghurt would let the mushrooms sink and the crisps go soft. The dish only works at a texture you have to earn by waiting.

Housemade is a control, not a boast

Every kitchen menu prints the word housemade and most of the time it is a small brag. Here it is a practical decision, because the strain is the recipe. How long you hang it decides the thickness, the sourness and how the whole plate eats, and that is not a setting you get to choose when the yoghurt arrives already thick in a tub.

It also means the labne is consistent with everything around it. A dip that has to sit next to a sesame sauce and a charred vegetable needs enough acidity to cut them, and a supermarket thick yoghurt is usually tuned to be mild.

Taklia is the word to remember

Taklia is garlic and ground coriander fried together in fat until both go fragrant. It is a foundational seasoning across Egyptian and Levantine cooking — the thing that gets stirred into a soup or a stew or a dip near the end, and the reason a kitchen can be identified by smell from the corridor.

The coriander here is the seed, not the leaf, and the distinction matters more than any other fact in this paragraph. Coriander seed is warm and citrusy with a faint sweetness. The leaf is the herb that a portion of the population sincerely believes tastes of soap. Fried in fat with garlic, the seed goes nutty and rounded, and it turns plain yoghurt into something that reads as cooked even though nothing in the bowl has been.

Smoked shimeji

Shimeji are the small clustered brown-capped mushrooms sold in a block with the base still attached. They are firm, faintly nutty, and they hold their shape when cooked, which is why they end up in so much Japanese cooking as a texture rather than a flavour. They also have to be cooked — raw shimeji is unpleasantly bitter, and the bitterness cooks out entirely.

Ours go through smoke before they go on the dip. That is the house signature arriving on a plate that otherwise has no fire in it at all. Smoke and lactic acid is a very old pairing in the abstract — think of the way soured cream sits next to anything barbecued — and this is that relationship shrunk to the size of a mezze bowl. The mushrooms bring the smoke; the yoghurt cuts it; neither has to shout.

Two garlics and a cold note

There is garlic in the taklia, fried soft. There is also garlic on top, fried crisp. They are not a redundancy: one is a background seasoning stirred through and the other is a texture you hear. Fried garlic crisps give a dip made of yoghurt something to bite, which it badly needs.

The peppermint is the last thing that hits and the only cold, high note in the build. Mint with yoghurt is close to a reflex across the region for a reason — it makes dairy taste fresher than it is, and it stops a rich, sour, smoky, garlicky bowl from closing in on itself.

Labne turns up twice more on our menus

Once you know what it is you start seeing it. At Hamilton Road, the cassava and taramasalata is built on housemade labne underneath the roe. At Li’l Habibi in Haji Lane, the mentaiko taramasalata does the same thing — we wrote that one up in mentaiko meets taramasalata.

So the labne dish is not an outlier on the board. It is the pure version of an ingredient that is quietly holding up two other things you have probably already ordered.

How to order it

Order it against something hot. Labne is at its best as relief, and it is slightly wasted on a table where everything else is also cool — put it next to the charred sprouts or the fire-tossed edamame and it starts doing a job rather than sitting there being pleasant.

Get pita, obviously. And if you are building a board, do not stack it with the other dairy-adjacent things — one creamy dip, one acidic one like the matbucha, one sesame one, and you have a table with actual range on it. The whole ordering method, if you want it, is in what to order at a Japanese-Middle Eastern table.

On dietary questions: there is no meat and no fish in the ingredients listed above, but it is dairy from the first word and we would rather you asked the floor than assumed your way through a mezze board. There is more of that in our FAQ.

Where to eat it

We are at 29 Hamilton Road, Singapore 209198, in Jalan Besar — Tuesday to Sunday, 5pm to 11pm, with brunch on Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 2.30pm. The mezze list in full is on the menu, the room and the grill are in the gallery, and the longer story of the place is in five years of Habibi-san.

Book a table and start with the board.

Also on the board, and not a dip: Habibi’s spanakopita — Greek in name, Tunisian in pastry, Japanese in the filling.