Lucky dip - khobz

"If you really want to experience the paradigm-shifting miracle that was discovered through the domestication of wheat, then I urge you to throw yourself into this bread, and touch the past."

The Foods of the World Forums

I didn't really need to do a lucky dip, I have a few topics sort of ready to go, but I just felt like a bit of serendipity. Plucking something out of the air and seeing where it takes you is a refreshing kind of adventure. And it's a dull day that needs a bit of sunshine from somewhere. So here we go - Greg and Lucy Malouf's beautiful book about the food of Lebanon and Syria, Saha. Sunshine, delicious food tempered by the tragedy that is Syria today.

There are a few things I would like to say here, not all of them about food. And that's the great thing about doing a blog, sometimes thinking about food makes you think about other things.

The book is about two separate countries and the page I turned to is about Syria and Aleppo in particular. Now the book was first published in 2005 and my edition was published in 2013, and even that is well before the disaster that is Syria today. Well I guess it was brewing but not quite at its peak. Greg and Lucy Malouf travelled through a virtually untroubled country, albeit under the rule of a dictator, where life went on in very traditional ways. The page I picked out was about a visit to a bread shop in Aleppo.

This book could not be written today, although it seems that people are returning to their shattered city and beginning to rebuild. One wonders whether the bread shop is still operating. Or whether it will again. The owner at the time of this book was the latest in a long line of bakers in his family and they turned out some 10,000 loaves a day! And when I looked into it further I fear that indeed it may not be there as according to Wikipedia the square was on the frontline of the fighting, and was largely destroyed in 2015 by a series of huge underground explosions. Hence Saha becomes a historical document. It's not as described in the book now, although let's hope that eventually the people will be able to rebuild life to what it was.

I'm going to quote a bit from Lucy Malouf's description because it was quite evocative.

"We turned into Al-Hattah Square and immediately spotted a long queue of people lined up along a wall. A bearded face appeared at a small window, followed by a hand thrusting a stack of Arab bread at the closest customer. An old man wearing long robes and a 'keffiyeh' carefully slid his bundle into a shopping bag, strapped it onto the back of his bicycle and pedalled away. Another threw his pile deftly, across a park bench like a casino croupier dealing a hand of poker. And all the while, the queue got longer. ...

Inside it was hotter than hell and the constant roar and clatter of machinery was almost unbearable. A conveyor belt ran around the edge of the small room, delivering flat rounds of dough into the mouth of a roaring inferno, which was fed by a massively muscled man shovelling coal into its depths. Another conveyor belt carried the cooked breads, puffed up like golden balloons, to their final destination, where they dropped over the edge and down onto the filthy floor...

'Why does the bread drop on the floor?' we asked.

'To flatten it'. He smacked his hands together. 'It has to cool down for a few moments, too. If you put it in a plastic bag when it is hot, it becomes sticky.'"

However, in spite of the dropping on the filthy floor - they bought some bread and ate it "in the middle of Al-Hattab Square in the sunshine, chewing on the warm, yeasty bread." Thus improving their gut flora or giving themselves a version of Delhi belly. I prefer to think it would be the former rather than the latter. Or maybe they caught one before it fell to the floor.

I wonder if you can do that now.

The second non-food related thought I had was that whilst you read this description you pictured Greg and Lucy Malouf just wandering around like ordinary tourists. But, like all of those television adventure, history and nature programs where some engaging presenter wonders through deserted or even crowded scenery, they must have actually been accompanied virtually all of the time by at least two people - the photographer who took the above pictures, and a translator/guide, although Greg Malouf at least can probably speak the language. There was probably a driver too somewhere and maybe even some kind of personal assistant. Not sure about the last. Anyway - a small team. But didn't they do a good job?

Anyway back to Khobz - often, like all words from languages with a non-roman script - transliterated in slightly different ways. Apparently it's actually just the overarching term for bread in general. Specific types of bread have bits added on or have completely different names - like pita for example. And they are all slightly different and yet similar.

"Middle Eastern bread is round, flat and only slightly leavened, with a hollow like an empty pocket running right through it. It is made with various qualities of wheat flour: a coarse flour makes an earthy, dark bread, a refined white one results in a delicate white bread. It is soft. Even the outer crust is not crisp, but soft, while the inside is chewy, and good for absorbing sauces." Claudia Roden

"Essentially, it is a sort of pizza, although a little bit softer and more chewy than the Italian version." Greg Malouf

So say the experts. But I think I would be hard pressed to see the difference between the packets labelled khobz and the packets labelled pita or pide in the supermarket. And yes there are dozens of choices in Middle-Eastern bread - almost as many as our own traditional kinds of bread. The young love them. My grandson told me off for not serving his Egyptian Lemon Chicken in a wrap! I suspect the differences might just eventually come down to the thickness, although some of them are unleavened. The Moroccan version, for example, looks to be much thicker.

I confess I generally don't make my own, though my daughter-in-law does - very successfully. You can find the Greg Malouf recipe for Manoushi bread dough on the Cooked website. I think this is the basic dough for the kind of bread described on the page before. How you cook it is contained in the recipe for Syrian mountain bread with crushed mild chillies, spring onions and black cumin. Also from Cooked. There are a few more suggestions too. Yum. I might try that for my next dinner party.

And here's another thought. We westerners love the food from the Middle East and North Africa. Their restaurants range from cheap and cheerful to top end and we love them all. We eat Middle Eastern food at home. Hummus anyone? And yet we do not love the people. Let's hope that their food will eventually win us over to the people themselves, and that that bread shop in Al-Hattah Square will rise again from the debris.

"Khoubz is a universal symbol of home, hospitality, comfort, nourishment - and even life itself." The Foods of the World Forum