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A couple of months ago, a friend sent me a video (below) about how to bake the traditional Egyptian flat bread, Aish<\/em> Baladi<\/em>, in a home oven. Aish<\/em> (or eish) baladi<\/em> is a fluffy pita speckled with bran flakes and eaten daily or even multiple times a day by many people in Egypt. The word for bread in Egypt, aish<\/em>, also means \u201clife,\u201d hinting at the importance of bread in the culture; and baladi <\/em>means traditional or authentic, indicating the foundational role of this particular bread. Although I\u2019m using wheat, water, and leavening microbes from more than 10,000 miles away from Egypt, and I don\u2019t have a clay oven made with sediment from the Nile River, I really wanted to try this bread. I gave the recipe in the video a go with sourdough starter instead of the yeast preferment in the video, and I tried both the suggested refined flour and also emmer wheat<\/a>, which is the traditional wheat of Egypt<\/a>.<\/p>\n [Jump to recipe<\/a><\/span>]<\/p>\n Part of my inspiration to try this bread comes from all the delicious ways in which it\u2019s eaten in Egypt. Here\u2019s an excerpt from an article <\/em><\/a>in the Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram<\/em>\u00a0describing how this bread is traditionally served throughout the day.<\/p>\n \nBaladi bread was served at practically every meal. At breakfast it accompanied fuul (stewed fava beans) drizzled with olive oil, along with fried or boiled eggs and cheese. It was eaten with tehina and molasses, the latter at one time procured in urns from Qena in Upper Egypt\u00a0but now store-bought.<\/p>\n At lunch, baladi bread was a versatile accompaniment for every dish: it was dipped into molokhiya<\/a> (green mallow) or cut up into little triangles to mop up sauce and gravy from plates. Supper included loaves of baladi bread packed with white baramili (barrel-ripened) cheese along with arugula, a taste to die for.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Unlike pita<\/a> or naan<\/a> that I\u2019ve made in the past, the dough for this bread is quite wet and the proofing process involves a bed of flour and bran flakes (also called wheat bran) that acts as a nonstick proofing surface. The hydration makes aish baladi<\/em> a bit more spongy than typical pita, and the bran coating adds a toasted aroma to the bread.<\/p>\n In the video below I learned that the shaping of this wet dough has a steep learning curve where you essentially drip-roll balls of dough between your hands and then onto the bran flakes. The baker in the video notes that you can also use an ice cream scoop, and after a few attempts at using my hands, I happily switched to the ice cream scoop. I suggest you watch the video to see the method for shaping by hand, as well as how to maneuver the dough onto the peel before loading it into the oven.<\/p>\n\n