I wanted to serve only one type of bread at our restaurant and I had visions of the flat, round, golden loaves that were stacked at the Bukhari bakery at the entrance to the market in Jerusalem—decorated with crisscross cuts and nigella seeds, always oven-fresh, easy to tear and dunk into dips, soups or sauces. Like sponge, it soaks up any tasty liquid on the plate, leaving it squeaky clean and making for a very happy mouthful. We have played with various recipes, looking mostly online for Bukhari ones. We did stumble across a good website dedicated to the food of Uzbekistan that mentions the bread of the Bukhari Jews, but when the recipe called for a custom-built clay oven and a fair bit of goat fat, we decided to improvise. We ended up with quite a good recipe, and I was pleased with the thought that this would be our signature bread.
Our first day of trade was coming close. We stayed up the night before, prepping everything—me in the kitchen, Sarit at the pastry and upstairs our devoted coffee guy, Robert Henry (or Henry Robert, we still don’t know which is his first and which his last), refusing to give up on reconditioning our coffee machine. The day itself was a bit of a blur. Our idea of creating a little service kitchen upstairs went up in smoke—quite literally—when the portable electric burner I was cooking eggs on exploded, leaving our first customers teary-eyed and gasping for air. We had to move the breakfast pass to Sarit downstairs, while I stayed with our waitress Rachael upstairs, on my first day ever as a waiter.
Clumsy, disorganized and always saying the wrong thing, I was not a natural at waiting tables. Luckily the magical Rachael was completely unfazed, pouring drinks and sorting bills, taking it all in her stride and still finding time to charm whoever walked in, as she still does. I, on the other hand, was bumping into things, knocking drinks onto people and floor, and running up and down inefficiently (a move that is now my trademark). Downstairs Sarit was handling the kitchen with typical calm and control, gliding elegantly between the kitchen and the pastry.
When the smoke subsided and the situation calmed down a bit, Rachael realized things would be easier without me and sent me downstairs to the kitchen, where I took a proud glimpse at our first loaf of bread. I noticed Sarit had a row of little dough balls on her pastry bench, proofing.
I asked, “What are these?”
“Yeah… I’m making pita. Why aren’t you upstairs helping Rachael? All I see you do is run up and down inefficiently.”
“Pita? I thought we were only making one type of bread. You know we really don’t have time to make pita.”
“Yeah, well, you can’t have a Middle Eastern restaurant without pita,” she said in a tone that ended the conversation.
And of course she is right. You can’t have a Middle Eastern restaurant without pita.
We now make three or four types of bread on a daily basis. We are proud of them all, but it’s pita that everyone asks for.
• We always use strong white flour. In the UK, strong white flour has a protein level of 12.7%; the closest white flour equivalent in America is King Arthur unbleached bread flour.
• We use fine table salt.
• All your ingredients should be at room temperature.
• The water can be lukewarm.
• I prefer to use fresh yeast. My friend and colleague Bridget says it’s easy to obtain in the real world by walking up to the bakery counter in any large supermarket or bakery and asking to buy some. However I have given dried yeast measurements and methods as well, just in case.
• I always preheat the oven to a high setting when I am preparing the dough. It brings the kitchen temperature up closer to Middle Eastern levels and helps the dough to rise nicely. Considering the price of gas and electricity, though, you may just want to proof the dough in a nice warm place until it’s ready to bake.
• It’s hard to give exact timings for proofing dough as there are so many variables, from the temperature of the ingredients and the room, to the moisture in the air to the freshness of the yeast. As a general rule, however, the dough in each of the following recipes should take between one and a half to three hours at each proofing stage.
• There are a few ways to judge if your dough is proofed:
—It will have more or less doubled in size.
—It should be soft but firm and bounce back when you touch it.
—It should retain its shape, but just be bigger and more taut.
• Make sure the oven is heated to the correct temperature before you put your bread in to bake.
• Once baked, bread is best cooled on a rack, to allow steam to escape from underneath.