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Concept
Flatbread
Summary
A flatbread is a bread made with flour; water, milk, yogurt, or other liquid; and salt, and then thoroughly rolled into flattened dough. Many flatbreads are unleavened, although some are leavened, such as pita bread.
Flatbreads range from below one millimeter to a few centimeters thick so that they can be easily eaten without being sliced. They can be baked in an oven, fried in hot oil, grilled over hot coals, cooked on a hot pan, tava, comal, or metal griddle, and eaten fresh or packaged and frozen for later use.
Flatbreads were amongst the earliest processed foods, and evidence of their production has been found at ancient sites in Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, and the Indus civilization.
In 2018, charred bread crumbs were found at a Natufian site called Shubayqa 1 in Jordan (in Harrat ash Shaam, the Black Desert) dating to 12,400 BC, some 4,000 years before the start of agriculture in the region. Analysis showed that they were probably from flatbread containing wild barley, einkorn wheat, oats, and Bolboschoenus glaucus tubers (a kind of rush).
Primitive clay ovens (tandir) used to bake unleavened flatbread were common in Anatolia during the Seljuk and Ottoman eras, and have been found at archaeological sites distributed across the Middle East. The word tandır comes from the Akkadian tinuru, which becomes tannur in Hebrew and Arabic, tandır in Turkish, and tandur in Urdu/Hindi. Of the hundreds of bread varieties known from cuneiform sources, unleavened tinuru bread was made by adhering bread to the side walls of a heated cylindrical oven. This type of bread is still central to rural food culture in this part of the world, reflected by the local folklore, where a young man and woman sharing fresh tandır bread is a symbol of young love, however, the culture of traditional bread baking is changing with younger generations, especially with those who reside in towns showing preference for modern conveniences.
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