A recipe worth sharing.
Folklore LB is a small, family-owned artisan food house in the West Bekaa. Everything we make — from the labneh cured in our cellar to the fig jam simmered on the wood stove — is rooted in one place, and one way of cooking.
Where the recipe comes from.
A stone village at 1,200 metres, terraced with vineyards and olive groves, an hour's drive south-east of Beirut.
Our village has been famous for its arched windows and its independent spirit since Ottoman times — but its real inheritance is the pantry. Every family here still puts down the summer harvest: fig jam in July, kishk in the autumn, labneh balls sealed under olive oil to see them through winter.
When we started Folklore LB, the ambition was simple: to make our grandmother's recipes on a scale that could reach beyond her table, without ever changing what's in the jar.
Three things we don't compromise on.
The land, first
We buy from farms within a thirty-minute drive of our workshop. Contemporary practices where they help — hygienic milking, cold-chain transport, sealed glass jars — and old ways where they matter more: sun-drying, olive-oil curing, wood-stove reduction.
Only what belongs
Read the label on any jar we sell. There will be four or five ingredients on it, all things you'd recognise in your own kitchen: goat's milk, sea salt, olive oil, herbs. Nothing else. No preservatives, no thickeners, no colours.
Animals treated well
Our goats live outdoors, graze on the ridge above the village, and follow their own seasonal rhythms. Milking is by hand, in the morning. If that sounds unremarkable, that's rather the point.
The long way round.
Take our signature Goat Labneh Balls. The milk arrives at dawn, is heated slowly on the stove, then cultured overnight. The next day it's hung in cheesecloth for twenty-four hours, until it's dense enough to shape by hand.
Each ball is rolled — a hundred grams give or take — and set aside to dry. Only then does it go into the jar, packed tight, sealed under extra-virgin olive oil pressed from trees a five-minute walk from where we work.
The whole thing takes four days. A factory could do it in one. That's the difference you taste.