The interior of our local bakery - one of many.
Every quarter of the Fez Medina has its own communal bakery, but they cook more than bread writes guest contributor Anne Marie Witulski.
Children carrying large metal pans with bread dough shaped in perfect circles to the public oven is a popular sight in the Medina. While fresh baked bread from the oven is delicious, you can make many other dishes at this local institution. Some families make pastries, cookies, and even cook fish and potatoes. We chose to make a familiar favourite, pizza, recently.
Our pizza ready to be taken to the bakery.We were invited inside by the baker, Abdessalam, to take a look at the oven.It consists of a wood-burning fire and a large slab of cement enclosed in concrete.
Abdessalam, waiting for customers.
Items are placed through the metal door and onto the cement slab in front of the fire with the use of large wooden dowels. Abdessalam slides breads, pizzas, cookies and even main courses in and out of the heat at precisely the right moment. He keeps track of whose bread is whose and always replaces the bread to the correct metal pan aided only by his memory.
Taking our finished pizza from the oven.
His assistant, Mohammed, knows each families bread-making style and is able to return the bread to the customers without them saying a word. To the outsider, all the breads appear exactly the same, but to the experts, the subtleties of each family's bread making style are obvious.
Good enough to eat - which we did.
Tags: Moroccan Morocco Fes, Maghreb news
3 comments:
There is nothing quite like Medinas and their bakers
I was in Damascus 10 years ago, and each morning joined a queue of locals at a shop around the corner from my flat in Bab Touma. We'd all patiently wait for freshly the baked bread to be removed fromt he oven and stacked on the countertop, chatting about our plans for the day, the weather ... Sure beats Hovis and Tesco!
The pizza looks wonderful.
Try out bread-baking lessons at te Clock which takes you to the community oven. Or even make tanjia which you take to the hammam furnace to allow the spicy meat to stand in hot ashes for 7 hours - amazing! It is said some of the ovens are 600 years old. Totally unique.
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