Zawita, Duhok, Iraq. September 2018
When I was a kid, Mom would take me over to Kauffman's bakery in East Prospect as a treat. I loved all their sugar, ginger, and molasses cookies. I even went to school with Jeff, whose Dad owned the place. I didn't realize at that tender age that the place represented the end of an era - family run bakeries were nearly extinct. Interestingly, we never bought bread there. By the time I was in high school, we all ate what my neighbor, Barbara Lukas, used to call "squishy bread". Mrs Lukas was German from Europe and I can only imagine what she thought of typical American bread when she first arrived in the USA. My best bread memory from growing up was of my cousin KGM's ex-husband's pizza joint where he made very tasty Italian-ish bread for sandwiches or to accompany non-pizza meals. Bread had kind of fallen off my radar by the time I was in university.
Then I lived in Asia for years - I was in the rice zone. Japanese bread seemed even worse than American bread in the mid 1980s. After Japan in New York, H&H Bagels did fill the bread gap in my life for awhile, but bagels are not bread per se and suddenly everyone was doing Atkins anyway. Later, Indonesia was certainly not a bread paradise. With the exception of roti prata [see: my love affair with roti prata], because for some reason I just don't classify that as "bread", Singapore was not a place I associated with bread either in spite of its multitude of bakeries. Of course, trips to Europe reminded me that bread COULD be amazing - like baguettes in Paris or fresh bretzel in Germany. Nonetheless, bread still remained a kind of special treat, mostly to be avoided due to all those empty carbs.
Things really changed in Saudi Arabia. They had lovely Afghan flatbread served with a lentil dipping sauce (addis) that was available everywhere. That bread was simply amazing. It had to be eaten hot, though. I had never come across another bread that went stale so quickly - literally in less than an hour from being baked, it was sub-optimal. I often was invited by ex-colleague EB in Abha to his place for Friday morning bread and addis. It was a treat indeed. The Saudis loved their Afghan bread, too. The place always had an enormous queue and EB and I got there early to avoid the rush.
Lest I forget, Aroos Damascus [see: Aroos Damascus] in Dubai featured fresh-baked pita bread which also went stale shortly after it cooled down. MWK insisted our bread always be hot! I also have fond memories of AQ rushing over to my apartment in Abha with fresh baked bread that his Mom just made. The Middle East really became a huge "bread memory" for me more than many other places I visited and/or lived.
Fast forward to Iraq and the bread opportunities expanded as the Kurdish region was at a cultural crossroads. There were several kinds of fresh breads available depending on the cuisine - Arab, Turkish, Kurdish. My old apartment there was on a street with three bakeries selling three different types of bread. How lucky was I?? The bread pictured above is from a fish restaurant in Zawita [see: fresh carp in Zawita]. The type of oven was the same as those used in Saudi to make the Afghan bread - natural gas fired in the shape of a dome. The walls were piping hot and the bread was thrown against the interior where it stuck. In a short time, it was ready to be picked out steaming hot with a pair of tongs to an eagerly waiting customer. I watched some Kurds on my street walk away with dozens of pieces of bread at one go and wondered what small army they were feeding because this kind of bread simply DID NOT KEEP.
So bread in my life has gone from bad American bread, to life in Asia without much bread, to returning to a country that demonized white flour, and finally to a region that absolutely loved the stuff fresh out of the oven. I do love European bread, but I have to say that there is something to that Middle Eastern variety that goes stale soon after cooling. Piping hot bread with a meal is one of my best food memories of living in those countries.