Cooking on pebbles

Cooking over stone is a technique as old as time. Hot stones are traditionally used to grill meaty cuts of Yemeni “madhbi” or to create the sticky rice, vegetable and runny yolk crust around the edges of a Korean “bibimbap” stone pot. Stone retains heat exceptionally well even after the source of heat is removed and its porous structure absorbs moisture from the surface of the food, helping it crisp up." Arva Ahmed - Friday

Then of course there are heated stones in the ground of Hawaii and the Pacific Islands in general, cooking pizza on a pizza stone, and a whole heap of variations of cooking steak on stones. But what inspired this post is last night's Nigel Slater episode in which he visited a bakery in Tehran to watch them making sangak.

Sangak means little pebbles and that is what the bread is baked upon. Thousands of small pebbles heated to very high temperatures in a brick oven. Apparently you need to be sure there are not any pebbles left in the bread, but the buyers just seemed to casually flick them on to the floor. So I guess this is a little difficult to do at home unless you have one of those pizza ovens. Just be sure to wash the pebbles well before you use them, and according to some of the gurus I have visited in print and online - for the first use you need to oil them. Actually Greg Malouf suggests that you could cover a baking tray with pebbles, heat them in a very hot oven for half an hour or so and then cook the bread on that. Sounds feasible. Don't forget to wash and oil them though.

Really it's just a leavened flatbread cooked in a particular way, but what struck me was the endless possibilities that flour and water (and sometimes yeast) present. The picture in my now rather old The Complete Middle East Cookbook by Tess Mallos (1979), shown here, has at least three different varieties. The technique of cooking on pebbles, or stones may be ancient, but who on earth thought of the somewhat elaborate way the bread is shaped?

The dough which is made with wholemeal flour or a mix of wholemeal and white flour, is rather moist and stretchy. It is not rolled out but shaped by hand on one of those huge paddles and then patterns are made by fingers dragging across and punching the dough. It is then put in the oven, and somehow stretched to the enormous size of the final product.

Below is a bit of an arty video which tries to show the process and mostly does, although, to me anyway, the most important bit of stretching the dough out in the oven is really not clearly shown. The baker gets in the way. I guess the whole process is one of those things that looks amazingly easy until you try to do it yourself. Anyway watch the video it's really quite good.

The other surprising thing I learnt last night as I watched Nigel Slater drool over his bread was that Iran has the highest consumption of bread in the world. Well certainly the people walking away from the bakery that Nigel Slater visited were walking away with several huge breads. Some just draped them over their arms, some folded them into three and carried away a pack of them.

I would guess that you can buy it somewhere in Melbourne, but there is definitely a bakery (and restaurant) in Sydney called, appropriately, if a little unimaginatively, the Sangak Bakery and restaurant. I assume that it was set up by some immigrant Iranians but their website does not really tell us much of their story, which is a shame. They do however describe their product:

"Baking on the uneven surface of the stones gives the sheets of bread a variable thickness and colour. Some pieces commonly have small charred areas or holes. Traditional sangak has a slightly sour flavour and a distinctive spongy texture"

So having got your bread from somewhere or made it yourself (there are lots of recipes on the net) what do you do with it? Well according to Greg Malouf it's best eaten warm because it doesn't keep very well, and it is usually eaten for breakfast. One writer said that it really is not meant to be something you eat for its own sake but something you use to scoop up other things. Mostly it is a breakfast food - ideal for dipping in fried eggs, or yoghurt dips.

Arva Ahmed, who wrote the most interesting article that I found used to eat it in Dubai, where there were many Iranians. He says:

"Warm slices of sesame-sprinkled sangak would descend on the table with a plate of mint, rayhaan, rocket leaves, radish, cool soaked walnuts and salty feta. Arva Ahmed - Friday

Rayhaan is apparently a kind of basil, but he really didn't think it was quite either Italian basil or Thai basil. And you know, now that I think about it that delicious Persian meal we had several years ago now, in the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Dubai probably had some of this bread. Delicious bread anyway - and we certainly had a very similar platter to the one described above.

All of my Middle-Eastern gurus - Greg Malouf, Yasmin Khan and, the oldest one, Tess Mallos, had recipes but surprisingly, Claudia Roden who is the most scholarly of the group did not.