Thursday, July 17, 2008

Bread Ovens/Baking Egypt

flickr.com/photos/laiv/387168059/
I really like this photo of a woman making flat breads on a steel plate over an open fire. I have baked many, many flat breads this way, but I've also skipped the steel plate and placed the flat bread in a barbecue basket and held it over the flame. That works really well. I have a photo of this, and I'll search for it.

www.whats4eats.com/recipes/r_br_pita.php
Making pitas, also known as Syrian bread or pocket bread is quite easy. Just make sure your oven is hot, and if your flat bread is uniformly shaped and about 1/4" thick, it will miraculously fulfill its destiny in the oven. Looks like there is a firebox below the oven proper.


commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Egypt_making...
Making flat breads is much more leisurely than making raised loaves in an earth oven. More about this later.
www.touregypt.net/featurestories/agmuseumd.htm
Old style Egyptian bread oven. Certainly looks enormous


Note how the oven is being fired from below the floor with brush and dried grasses

www.keras.ca/photo.htm
A family affair, and they seem to be having fun too.



www.yachtaragorn.com/Egypt.htm
Ancient oven design, yet oven is being fired with propane.

3 comments:

evalarevolution said...

This post is great. Yum, I'm going to try pita bread soon! And wow, that Egyptian bread oven is ginormous. I have a blog called "Todo Masa", which to me means it's all dough...or all one as someone once said. I am in the process of building an oven right now...check it out! :)

evalarevolution said...

I still love this post. The images are great. Thank you Breadhunter.

Breadhunter aka Stu Silverstein said...

I too, am very fond of these images. These are not the images we're used to seeing that come out of the Middle East.
Stu