A Passion for Bread

By Heidi Noroozy

Photo by ph_en

Half a lifetime ago, I lived on the grounds of a Benedictine monastery in Vermont. Although I’d overcome a brief flirtation with religion by then and was well on my way to becoming a non-believer, I’d often slip into the back of the chapel in the evening when the monks gathered for vespers. Along with the customary Gregorian chants, these Benedictines sang beautiful songs written by one of the brothers. One song had a line that always remained in my mind: “Man does not live by bread alone.”

These words stayed with me because, well, I beg to differ. I could easily live on bread alone. Paired with a good Vermont cheddar cheese is best, but I’ll settle for plain butter, and some varieties are delicious with nothing at all.

I’ve always loved bread—even the rough loaves a neighbor used to make from coarse, hand-milled flour. But when I moved to Europe, where bread is serious business, I was in heaven. Different towns and regions have their own local specialties: Joggingbrot in Stuttgart, a rye bread packed with sunflower and pumpkin seeds, or salty Bretzeln (soft pretzels) in Bavaria.

In Salzburg, Austria, I bought my bread from a tiny bakery on the aptly named Brotgasse (Bread Alley). Identified only by the word Bäckerei (bakery) in faded letters over the door, the shop was easy to miss. It had a practical selection of baked goods and, unlike the elegant, tourist-packed Konditoreien (pastry shops) on Getreidegasse only blocks away, no fancy tortes or cream-filled pastries. It served oval loaves of rye bread, chewy in the outside, soft on the inside. Rectangular, whole-grain breads filled with sprouted rye, oats, and seeds. Large rounds of crusty sourdough. On the sweeter side, the options were a simple Obstkuchen (fruit-topped cake) or sweet roll. I knew I had been elevated to the exalted status of Stammgast (regular patron) when the baker started tucking little extras into my bread bag: a pair of Kipferl (crescent rolls) or even a slice of Zwetschkenkuchen (plum cake).

Photo by Kochtopf

From time to time, I’d head for the Franciscan monastery on the far side of Domplatz and descend a narrow set of stairs into the basement, where the monks baked huge loaves of sourdough rye bread. On baking days, a wonderful yeasty fragrance wafted through square.

You might think it disloyal of me to abandon my favorite bakery for the Franciscans, even temporarily, but it was such a treat to stand in the bakery and watch the brown-robed monks pull fresh bread from enormous ovens that stretched nearly all the way to the ceiling. The loaves weighed two kilos each, so I always bought a Halber (half a loaf). Bread addict that I am, even I couldn’t eat four pounds of bread before it got stale.

Years later, when I visited Iran for the first time, an entirely new world of bread opened up to me. Like other Middle Easterners, Iranians prefer flat bread with lots of crust. And they like it fresh, still warm from the oven. When my husband was a boy, it was his job to fetch sheets of warm flat bread from the neighborhood bakery—not just once a day but before every single meal.

Like in Germany and Austria, Iranian bread has regional variations. The ultra-thin lavash is made with white flour in Tehran but comes in tastier whole-wheat varieties in the villages along the Caspian Sea. The bakery in the Isfahan neighborhood where my sister-in-law once lived sold a fragrant barbari, a thicker, oblong loaf with ridges down its length. And Isfahan’s signature street food is beryan—ground mutton with savory spices, mint, and slivered pistachios wrapped in a round sheet of taftoon, which is much like an enormous tortilla.

In Paveh, a Kurdish village in the Zagros Mountains of western Iran, I started each day with sheep’s milk cheese, homemade butter, and sour cherry jam spread on the thinnest, laciest bread I’d every seen. It was perfectly translucent when you held it up to the light. One morning, my hostess added koloocheh, slightly sweet rounds of fried dough, a kind of donut without the hole. Breakfast became my favorite meal of the day.

But my all-time favorite Iranian bread is sangak, a whole-wheat flat bread studded with sesame and black nigella seeds. In Iran, it is often still made the traditional way, long sheets of dough draped over heated pebbles in a clay oven and hung on hooks from the wall to cool. The only drawback to this age-old baking tradition is that sometimes small pebbles cling to pockets in the knobby surface of the loaf, which can be hazardous to the teeth.

This hearty flat bread is so versatile, I could eat it with every meal—spread with hummus or smoky baba ganoush, wrapped around kebabs fresh from the grill, or torn up and stirred into the soupy portion of a one-pot, two-course meal called dizi.

Half the fun of travel is the opportunity to expand my culinary horizons and explore new tastes and textures. And visiting local bakeries to sample new kinds of breads usually tops my agenda. It’s an easy expedition—I just follow my nose.

The Sinful Sushki

They're irresistible. They're addictive.
They're the guilty pleasures of the Russian reality.

By Lina Zeldovich

Oh, sushki!

They're irresistible. They're addictive. They're the guilty pleasures of the Russian reality, its rainy autumns and icy winters, when homes, restaurants, and your friends’ kitchens welcome you in with a cup of hot tea and a bundle of sushki next to it. The Western world binges on chips and popcorn, but Russians are hooked on sushki. Walk into a Russian store anywhere in the world, and you find them. Actually, you’ll find a variety.

Sushki are dry bread crackers – in fact the name comes from the word “sushit” which means "drying out." Circle-shaped with a hole in the middle, they are too low in sugar to earn the sinful title of dessert, but satiating enough to grow into a delightful addiction. Think of them as a cross between bagels and tea biscuits. Or a hybrid of cookies and pretzels. Worse, they aren’t just tasty – they are also fun to play with. You can twirl them on your fingers. And if you’re still in that blissful age of under ten, you can hang them on your ears.

The cousins of American bagels, sushki are smaller, crunchier, and more resilient – keep them in a dry place and they will stay crispy for weeks without ever growing the blue dots of mold. Bite into them too hard and you’re risking breaking your tooth – but that’s part of the fun. The little crunchy fragments with a mild delicate sweetness melt in your mouth oh so satisfyingly. They sneak up on you too: suddenly you realize you’ve eaten half the pack. Some people dip them in milk and others in butter – depending how much they are prepared to sin!

Suddenly you realize
you’ve eaten half the pack!

Besides bagels, in Russia sushki have even more dough cousins of various sizes and “toughness” – bubliki and baranki. They are all members of the same family of bread products made from dough that has been boiled before baking. The dough is made from flour, eggs, water and salt, and then cut and rolled into thin strips; for sushki thinner than a quarter of an inch. The strips become little circles which are dropped into boiling sugary water and then baked in an oven. Traditionally, sushki were sold stringed on a twine, from which you’d bite them off if you were a kid or just crush them with your palm and munch on its crunchy wreckage fragrant with vanilla and sometimes honey.

They are also almost an ideal junk food. They work perfectly with tea. They work with milk. They work as a nighttime snack, a midday mood booster, and even as a quick morning bite when it’s too early to even think of breakfast. It’s five o’clock and you're craving carbs? Sushki are literally the golden cure for you only need a few yellow-brown rings to chase away your afternoon blues. And they are a calorie-friendly comfort food – low in food and high in comfort.

But most amazingly, this lovely combo of snack and dessert also used to serve as travel provisions. Sushki don’t spoil. I don’t think I've ever seen them go bad. Such impressive toughness made them easy to store and transport. Traveling across Russia years ago, merchants brought bundles of sushki on their journeys. Even if everything else turned sour and moldy, sushki wouldn’t!

Keep them in a dry place and they will stay crispy for weeks
without ever growing the blue dots of mold!

Lost In Leipzig

By Heidi Noroozy

City Tower, Leipzig
Photo by Dundak

Everyone should get lost in a foreign country at least once in life. It’s the best way to discover the heart of a place, the cultural gems that don’t make it into the guide books: a tiny restaurant without a menu in English translation, a roadside shrine to a local saint, a pretty park where you can watch the life of the city ebb and flow around you. I’ve gotten lost like this more times than I can count, but one experience stands out from all the rest – the cold day in February when I discovered a rare private bakery in the heart of Communist Leipzig.

I wasn’t a tourist but a student living in a city steeped in history. Leipzig once was home to the likes of Bach and Mendelsohn, and it inspired Goethe to write his masterpiece, Faust. By the time I lived there, though, Leipzig had lost its mojo. The Auerbachskeller, which Goethe used as a setting in Faust, still existed and so did the St. Thomas Church where Bach worked as musical director. But for the most part, Leipzig had become a city of soot-stained buildings and filthy air, polluted by the coal refineries just outside town.

Every chance I got, I’d go exploring and try to find a hint of the grand old days. Usually, I managed to find my way around with a good map and directions from the locals. But one day, I got completely lost. It was the dead of winter, the sideways slick with gray slush, the chill air freezing my breath into clouds of steam. I wandered through streets that all seemed to have the same small grocery stores with half empty shelves, the same stout matrons sweeping debris off their stoops, the same ethnic restaurants where all you could get was German food, due to the scarcity of imported ingredients.

Factory Bakery in Leipzig, GDR
Photo by Deutsche Fotothek

Then I rounded a corner and smelled a rare scent: freshly baked bread. In a country whose bakers are famous for their bread, the smell of baking shouldn’t be unusual in the least. But in East Germany, bread, like most products, was usually manufactured in state-run factories. The shop on the street where I lived carried two kinds – oval rye loaves the locals called Graubrot (gray bread, on account of the color) and occasional rectangular bricks of a heavy, multigrain variety. In both cases, the loaves arrived from the state-run bakery wrapped in brown paper and were usually well past their peak freshness. A private bakeshop, with its wares baked right on the premises, was a discovery worth getting excited about.

On that wintry day, I followed my nose until I saw a line of people snaking down the sidewalk. It was eleven in the morning, only an hour until every shop closed their doors for the obligatory midday break. But nothing ventured, nothing gained, so I took my place at the end of the line.

Forty minutes later, I made it through the door into the warm, delicious-smelling bakery. The shelves were alarmingly bare. But my hopes sprung eternal as I inched ever closer to the counter. Only to be dashed when the baker sold her last loaf to a customer just ahead of me in line. The rest of us were told to come back the next day.

The bakery opened at six in the morning. I arrived shortly after five (yes, I was desperate). A line had already started to form, but this time I was in luck and left the shop with a rye loaf under my arm, still warm from the oven.

Photo by Rainer Zenz

Later, I learned an interesting fact about the GDR’s private economy. Although the state owned most businesses, anyone could open a private company as long as it employed fewer than fifteen people. With fresh bread such an important element of German culture, it still amazes me that there weren’t private bakeries on every street corner. Leipzig, a city of around 50,000 inhabitants, had only three.

It’s been thirty years since I found my private bakery, but I still remember the taste of that fresh, loaf with its firm texture and chewy crust, just like a good German rye bread should be. So I’m not at all sorry I got lost on that cold day in Leipzig.