Baking Bread in Foreign Countries

In every flatbread country, leavened bread is simply an afterthought. So is key ingredient associated with leavened bread: yeast. This isn’t surprising. Leavened bread takes a long time to make and, unlike chapatti, naan, and the like, doesn’t have much of a functional purpose in countries that eat gravies, beans, and lentils.

In all fairness, these flatbread countries have made an effort to reproduce bread in loaf form. Well, bread that masquerades as leavened, anyways. It’s usually the equivalent of North American Wonderbread. If you don’t know what that is, think “bread that has more air in it than flour.”

The problem comes because I grew up with homemade bread. My dad is what you would call the human version of a bread machine. Ask him, “Why don’t you have a bread machine?” He promptly replies, “I am the bread machine.” I’m pretty sure his output equals that of some small Pacific island nation. Kiribati, perhaps. As such, store-brought bread, aka. Wonderbread, didn’t enter the equation.

Mongolia had fabulous bread. India and Egypt, on the other hand, are sorely lacking. Not that this is a problem, but it did motivate me to bake a loaf or two. The attempt in India was egregious—no proper oven, decades-old yeast, and heavy flour. My attempt stopped before it even started.

Last night, I attempted my first loaf in Egypt. Things definitely looked on my side: I had a proper oven, half-decent yeast, and what I assumed to be good flour. Strangely, I followed the directions on the yeast package, instead of just winging it like I always do. Actually, I did wing it because I had nothing even close to resembling a measuring instrument. I put some flour in, salt, sugar, oil, my yeast/water mixture, more water, and then added the flour until the concoction resembled a dough that I could knead.

Four hours of proofing later, I was ready to bake my creation on a makeshift baking sheet (the same one we used for cookies). Judging by how the cookies turned out, the problem was going to be keeping the bottom from burning, while making sure the rest of it was cooked. Solution: crank the oven a bit hotter, throw in the bread, leave for 15 minutes, then turn the oven off.

The result was a decent loaf of bread. Good and dense on the inside, with an adequate crust. If there was a problem, it’s that I used too much yeast for the amount of flour. That gave the bread a little bit of a beer’ish flavor, which, to some, isn’t a bad flavour to experience in the morning.

One thing’s for sure, though. I will definitely be trying this again. Now all I need is a baking stone. Perhaps a ceramic tile from the dump will do.