9 January 2024 / leggypeggy

Bread galore and even a conveyor belt

Amman, Arabia, Arabian Peninsula, bread, Doha, Jeddah, Kuwait, Madventure, Medina, Riyadh, Yemen

A loaf of warm bread falls from a conveyor belt

Loaves get put in plastic bags, while new loaves shoot down

It’s a good thing we love bread and aren’t on a low-carb diet. Ever since our trip through Arabia began in November there has been bread on the table for virtually every meal.

I’m not talking about a little bit of bread, but loads and loads of bread. You don’t even have to order it in a restaurant. Whatever you choose automatically comes with bread. If there are four people at the table, you’ll get four loaves of flat, round pocket bread. After you’ve eaten two, four more loaves usually arrive.

Bakery loaves in Jordan

Bakery loaves in Jordan

Luckily, leftover bread isn’t wasted. At one truck stop we saw a huge tarpaulin covered in leftover loaves being dried for animal feed.

We’ve lived or travelled in about 15 Middle Eastern countries, and bread has been revered in all of those places. But my first introduction to this obsession was in Cairo where bread is called ‘aish’ in colloquial Egyptian Arabic, which literally means ‘life’. In the rest of the Arab world, bread is known as ‘khubz’.

Shaping a loaf in Kuwait

Then into the tandoor oven

I thought you might like to see some of the different breads we have enjoyed. My favourite pics are a series from a supermarket bakery in Medina, Saudi Arabia. I’ve shared three pics here (and took many more).

Taking bread from the oven in Riyadh

Griddling a bread and egg dish in Jeddah

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed bread falling from the ceiling. Hang on, then I realised the warm, just-baked loaves were dropping from an overhead conveyor belt. A fellow was catching them and packing them into bags of 6 loaves. Many customers waited to be handed a bag of fresh, warm bread. I could have stood there all day watching the process, and was glad the fellow said it was okay to take pictures. I even went back a second time and caught a pic of two loaves falling together.