Category: Sangak Blog and News

[vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1588583692936{margin-bottom: 40px !important;}”][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Where to find Sangak” font_container=”tag:h1|text_align:center” use_theme_fonts=”yes”][vc_separator color=”orange” border_width=”2″ el_width=”20″][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1582696457767{padding-bottom: 100px !important;}”][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”15976″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” img_link_target=”_blank” link=”https://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-sangak-persian-flatbread-20151030-story.html” css=”.vc_custom_1588829216368{padding-bottom: 20px !important;}”][vc_column_text]Even before you taste the tangy, leavened Persian flatbread known as sangak or nan-e sangak, there is so much to marvel over. Made of whole wheat flour, it’s sold in sheets so long they could be used as a sesame-seed encrusted table runner at your next biblically-themed dinner party.

It can be found at most Persian markets packaged in plastic and drooping lazily over the sides of shelves like an endless swath of delicious carbohydrates. But a strong case can be made for buying it at one of L.A.’s Persian bakeries, where it’s prepared fresh right in front of you or plucked from a drying rack where the sangak hangs like so much tanning leather or maybe slices of sea sponge.

Buying sangak at a place such as Naan Hut on Santa Monica Boulevard, in the Sawtelle neighborhood on the Westside, where it’s baked in-house, also gives you a chance to see how much sangak individual patrons purchase — though it goes stale after a couple of days, it freezes well, so customers will often take home five pieces, or sometimes 10.

You can also see how each portion of sangak is spread out onto a length of brown paper (in Iran, it’s wrapped in fabric) and folded into an “S” shape so the moist, still-warm bread doesn’t stick together.

According to Ramiro Garcia, one of Naan Hut’s heat-flushed counter men, sangak in Iran is traditionally baked over beds of small, blisteringly hot rocks. (The name means “pebbles.”) But here in the U.S., health authorities insist that concessions are made to things such as dental safety.

“Sometimes the rocks stick to the bread,” said Garcia, who then pantomimes biting down on something hard. “You could break a tooth.”

Instead, Naan Hut achieves sangak’s pockmarked, intermittently charred surface by way of a rotating, bumpily textured metal bed that sits tilted at an angle inside the bakery’s enormous stainless steel oven, which was shipped from Iran via Canada and is heated to between 150 and 200 degrees Celsius. Using a wooden baker’s peel, the wet dough is slid on top of the hot metal disc, which twirls until the bread is done, a process that takes just a few minutes.

On the Internet, debates about sangak in Los Angeles tend to be about which bakery makes it best — Naan Hut or Woodland Hills’ Asal Bakery and Kabob.

Though there is consensus that it is best eaten warm from the oven or a toaster, so that the outside is crispy while the inside is soft and chewy, there is a lot of back and forth about what to eat with sangak — topped with tomato and feta cheese, served with the yogurt shallot dip known as mast-o-musir, or slathered with beurre blanc, etc.

There is regrettably, however, no thread explaining how to stop eating sangak once you get started, perhaps because it’s sort of impossible.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

[vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1588583692936{margin-bottom: 40px !important;}”][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”What Do You Eat Three-Foot Long Sangak Flatbread With?” font_container=”tag:h1|text_align:center” use_theme_fonts=”yes”][vc_separator color=”orange” border_width=”2″ el_width=”20″][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1582696457767{padding-bottom: 100px !important;}”][vc_column][vc_column_text]When a wedding buffet pushes you into this spacey state of existence, making everyone in the buffet line vanish away and leaving one twisted thought lingering in your head…ah, if only I could share that goat head crowned with tempered rice with my readers. When you’re having nightmares about whether your facebook page followers have stealthily unliked your page and left you high and dry, with one pathetic like…from yourself. When you have this overwhelming feeling of needing to jump out of the car and review the first place that crosses your path…even when you really don’t have much of an appetite cause that dang flu virus in India has done this wicked black magic on your precious tummy. When you nearly kiss the camera with joy at the first moment you can pull it out and photograph the salt and pepper shaker over lunch. When you do a bunch of other nasty and embarrassing things that had best be left off of my public domain…

…then you know you’re having deep-rooted blog withdrawal symptoms.

I did, I had those symptoms…and boy, did I miss this blog. The big fat Indian wedding was a dream over the last few weeks – one that involved so much food and dancing and after-party karaoking that it totally wiped me off the blogging planet for nearly a month. But I’ve missed you guys. And I’ve missed all those little corners of Dubai that serve me my curries and kababs and my hot fresh breads straight out the tandoor. All those little places that keep Dubai real warm and tasty for me.

The last couple of times I was in the area, I’d watched in fascination as three-foot long pimpled breads were being hauled out of a dome-like oven in a room beside the main restaurant. The image has been rolling restlessly in that part of my brain that tortures me with images of doughnuts or haleem or thick juicy kababs every time I’m sick and hungry and miles away from the source of the image. It’s a sort of strange mental masochistic tendency – when my brain knows that my tummy has gone for a toss, it’ll twist the knife in my tortured wounds by flashing past images of seen-but-not-tried foods in front of my face. The last time that happened, I started googling for food photos on my tiny blackberry screen, desperate for a glimpse of something that was miles away in Dubai, all the while squirming with tummy cramps in some little town during my travels to India. Desperate, desperate foodie that I am.

Thank God for global data plans.

Khoory brings to Dubai one of the most traditional types of Irani bread – sangak bread, which basically translates to ‘stone bread.’ I’d never seen an oven filled with red hot burning pebbles like the one they had at Khoory. Bread fanatic that I am, I just stood and stared as the sangak-guys tore off a clump of elasticky leavened dough, slapped it on a peel, stretched it out and sort of played ‘piano’ all along the length of it, perforating it with little craters that were sprinkled all over with white sesame seeds.

Now there’s some step in between where that one-foot bread baby gets pulled out into a three-foot mammoth, a step that I’ve stupidly missed in all my gawking at those long cratered landscapes of bread that were being hung up on the wall.

Now in addition to the live open-to-public bread-making, Khoory has their grill laid out in an adjoining little section of the restaurant. We’re talking kababs and tomatoes and hot flaming charcoal…all those elements that make you feel closer to your kababs cause you can watch it being made, feel the heat on your sweaty palms as you bend down close to get a whiff of grilled meat. THIS is what I wanted on my plate, with that hot ogre of a sangak by my side.

With a name like Khoory Special Kababs, you’re setting the bar of tender grilled meat super high. I didn’t know which of the list of kababs on the menu was special per se…was it the exotic-sounding lamb shishlik? Or maybe it was the chicken tekkah? Or maybe I was overthinking it and the Khoory peeps just threw in the word ‘special’ without realizing that I’d be paralysed by the potential implication of such a word? Yeah, probably.

When faced with gross indecision about which kabab to order, a mixed platter of meat will be your lone lantern in the dark.

I started spearing my fork through the plate, starting with the cubes of mutton kabab and the long meat tikkas. Heavy meaty flavor, check. Juiciness, check. Tenderness…chewchewchew…chewsomemore…chewohno….bitsoffat…whyfatwhyyyyy….chewy. Overall decent kababs, but not the best I’ve had in town. The chicken kababs fared better on the tenderness scale – light, moist, tender…but again, nothing that would have me googling for kabab photos on my crackberry in those restlessly hungry moments that ascend on me when I’m miles away from edible salvation.

Just then, just as I’d nearly written off the s-word, I found it. I found the special kabab. The kabab koobideh. This log of minced meat was glistening with a thin sheen of oil and was laying quietly right at the extreme edge of my plate. The koobideh was so outrageously moist and well-seasoned [was it parsley? or cumin in the seasoning? or both? whatever it was, it was pretty magical…] that it obliterated every other previous bite of less-awesome kabab from that plate.

Let me also draw your attention to the sangak bread under the bed of kababs. On its own, the bread has this rustic sesame-tinged feel to it – I could imagine pulling bits of it, slathered with some butter, slightly stretchy bits, slightly crispy bits, eating through it on some mountain village somewhere, with a steaming hot cup of chai. And maybe surrounded by Yaks.

Definitely surrounded by Yaks.

But under the kababs, the bread had sucked up all the kabab juices and forgotten that it had been born a bread to begin with. It had morphed into this rich chewy blanket of meaty drippings. An identity crisis at its delicious best.

[On a separate note, I actually took the rest of the dry, unkabab-ed bread home and the parents toasted it up for dinner. So damn good, both that night, and the next night. The next time we have a soup and bread day, sangak is going to be the bread star of the table.]

What was also very special was the bowl of lentil soup that the kababs came with…

…into which I also dipped pieces of my sangak [I was mixing and matching the bread with everything on the table by this point…in my soup, in my yogurt, with my kababs…I almost thought of sprinkling some salt on a morsel and layering it up with some of the green leaves from the salad…but that idea died somewhere in between the utterly addictive kabab koobideh and the lentil soup.] I’m sure that making the soup in a kitchen close to the kabab grill had something to do with the taste – I’m convinced that the meat juices vaporize into the air and then condense back down over the lentils and baby noodles swirling around in the soup cauldron. Sort of like a cross-pollination of awesome flavours in the kitchen…

I’m glad that I started my blogging year with discovering what’s so special about Khoory. No…I’m not just glad, in fact, I’m relieved that I have my blogger-foodie-explorer cape back after it’d been sitting at the laundry for nearly a month. I finally have my first blog post of 2012 [hallelujah.] And a Kabab-happy tummy. And a new sesame-studded bread discovery. I can feel it in my bones…t’is gonna be a good, good year.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

[vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1588583692936{margin-bottom: 40px !important;}”][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Sangak: Long, Iranian Flatbread” font_container=”tag:h1|text_align:center” use_theme_fonts=”yes”][vc_separator color=”orange” border_width=”2″ el_width=”20″][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1582696457767{padding-bottom: 100px !important;}”][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”15961″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” img_link_target=”_blank” link=”https://www.goodfoodstl.com/2018/09/sangak-iranian-bread/” css=”.vc_custom_1588759161319{padding-bottom: 20px !important;}”][vc_column_text]

Sangak looks more like a table runner than a piece of bread. The sheet of flatbread was longer before we nibbled away about six inches. Good stuff!

Recently I came upon an Iranian bread at Jay’s International Market. The sheets of Sangak, made with whole wheat flour and sourdough, were almost 3 feet long! Robin was pleased to see the bread, that she had once eaten warm from an Iranian bakery in California. It’s awkward to handle, but we managed to make room in my grocery cart for the funky flatbread.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

An Army Travels on Its Stomach

I love food that comes with a story and Sangak comes with a delightful historic tale. This mainstay of the Persian army was first mentioned in the 11th century. It was baked atop small, blistering hot river stones, which caused the pebbly markings on its surface. (Sangak in Persian means pebble).

To facilitate the baking, each soldier carried a number of small stones, which at camp were placed together to create the sangak oven, that would bake bread for the entire army. Afterwards, each soldier scooped up some of the cooled pebbles and packed them away for the next meal. How clever is that! The world’s first portable oven![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

[vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1588583692936{margin-bottom: 40px !important;}”][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Sangak, 50 of the World’s Best Breads” font_container=”tag:h1|text_align:center” use_theme_fonts=”yes”][vc_separator color=”orange” border_width=”2″ el_width=”20″][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text](CNN) — What is bread? You likely don’t have to think for long, and whether you’re hungry for a slice of sourdough or craving some tortillas, what you imagine says a lot about where you’re from.

But if bread is easy to picture, it’s hard to define.

Bread historian William Rubel argues that creating a strict definition of bread is unnecessary, even counterproductive. “Bread is basically what your culture says it is,” says Rubel, the author of “Bread: A Global History.” “It doesn’t need to be made with any particular kind of flour.”

Instead, he likes to focus on what bread does: It turns staple grains such as wheat, rye or corn into durable foods that can be carried into the fields, used to feed an army or stored for winter.

Even before the first agricultural societies formed around 10,000 B.C., hunter-gatherers in Jordan’s Black Desert made bread with tubers and domesticated grain.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator color=”custom” border_width=”2″ accent_color=”#e0a81a” css=”.vc_custom_1582683921936{padding-top: 20px !important;padding-bottom: 10px !important;}”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row css=”.vc_custom_1582696067841{padding-top: 20px !important;padding-bottom: 100px !important;}”][vc_column][vc_column_text]

Sangak, Iran

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]It takes a pair of deft bakers to craft this addictive Iranian flatbread, which is cooked directly on a bed of hot pebbles.
That blazing-hot surface pocks the wheat dough with golden blisters, and it gives sangak — also known as nan-e sangak — a characteristic chewiness.
If you’re lucky enough to taste sangak hot from the oven, enjoy a heavenly contrast of crisp crust and tender crumb. Eat the flatbread on its own, or turn it into an Iranian-style breakfast: Use a piece of sangak to wrap salty cheese and a bundle of aromatic green herbs. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]