Tannour bread

In Syria this bread is named after the oven it is baked in, and the oven is the older word. The tannour is an oven built of clay; the dough is pressed onto its inner wall with a wet hand and bakes over a wood fire. Gas-fired tannour ovens exist now too. The arrangement is the same: the loaf is flat, thick, and cooked on one face, blistered where it touched the clay.

What it is made of

Wholewheat flour. That is why the colour is brown and the taste pronounced. The flour does not have to be one kind either: depending on whether the season was generous or thin, maize, barley and oat flour can go into the mix. The dough is worked in the evening, rises overnight and goes into the oven in the morning.

A detail from the coastal mountains

On special days some loaves are brushed with olive oil or sprinkled with wild thyme. There is one practice particular to Syria: a few terebinth berries are set on the dough. The terebinth grows abundantly in the coastal mountains, so this is seen mostly there.

Where to find it

In villages and the countryside this is still the daily bread. Bakeries in the cities fire a tannour as well. The morning queue forms in front of them. It is bought hot and eaten the same day. Left a day it hardens, and in that state it goes into soup and into fatteh.