Moroccan bread

Moroccan bread is kind of amazing. In a country with wide regional diversity in many things, the bread remains consistent throughout the country. It’s a basically flat, white, small loaf coated with bran. Crucially, it goes perfectly with Moroccan foods, including and especially tagines.

I’ve asked several Moroccans what the bread is called — what style of bread is it? — and after a moment of confusion, they reply that it’s just “bread.”

You can buy this stuff everywhere in the country. And it’s cheap. Amira and I just bought two breads and a big slab of butter and it all cost about a dollar.

The quality ranges from “not that great” to “pretty damned good” and never higher or lower. But this bread is perfect for scooping up tagines without need for utensils. Amira and I had a fantastic chicken tagine today with really great bread at some dive that probably sells them for $3 each, but we were charged $10 because we were foreigners.

Fridays here are a kind of anti-bread day. The devout spend more time at the mosque, and Fridays are an especially religious day. There’s too much religion for bread baking, so bread is harder to find on Fridays. As a result, many people have couscous every Friday, a starchy dish that you don’t eat with bread.

I love making Adjarian khachapuri!

Amira and I lived in Tbilisi, Georgia, about a year and a half ago, where we discovered a world of delicious foods we had never even heard of.

One of my favorite Georgian standards is something called Adjarian khachapuri. Basically, it's a boat made out of bread filled with melted cheese and an egg, with butter on top.

Khachapuri comes in many types, shapes and sizes. What they all have in common is the combination of cheese and bread, or beef and bread.

Some kinds of khachapuri are round, and look just like pizza. In fact, it's probably very close to the pizza Italians used to eat before tomatoes were brought from the New World in the 16th Century. It may have been introduced to Georgians by Roman soldiers.

The Adjarian variety appears to be the most popular kind in Tbilisi, and for good reason: Everybody loves an egg on their baked whatever. And Adjarian khachapuri has an egg.

Khachapuri is a finger food -- you eat it with your hands. Basically, each end of the boat has stub of bread. You tear one of these off and mix the cheese, egg and butter mixture, and take a bite. You keep tearing off bread and dipping it and eating it. It’s really fun to eat.

The khachapuri in Tbilisi is made with yeast-leavened modern white-flour wheat. I make mine with naturally leavened bread with a little whole grain flour.

The traditional Georgian cheese, called khacho (after which khachapuri gets its name), is often simulated outside of Georgia with a mixture of feta and mozzarella, which is what I'm using here.

Even more home-made is the fact that we're using eggs produced by one of Kevin's chickens, who just started laying last week.