The line on the right is for people who want just a
single sheet of bread. Those on the left wait longer,
chatting to pass the time it takes to assemble a
whole sheaf of
sangak , the flat bread named
for the pebbles it bakes upon.
Taken
from the beds of rivers south of Tehran, the stones
now lie glowing in the great oven that takes up the
whole back of Sayyed Hasan Mohseni's bakery, two
steps down from the customers who watch the sangak
being made.
The work area takes up almost half
the shop, a large, clear space being necessary to
accommodate the sweeping arcs of the long-handled
tools the three bakers wield as they move the dough
into the oven and, five minutes later, take it out
as bread.
"They're small," says a woman at the
head of the left-hand line who has just been handed
her sheets of bread. "Why aren't they as big as they
were?"
She curls her lip as she shuffles
through the four long, brown, irregularly shaped
sheets, just cool enough to hold in a bare hand. She
stands not at a counter but at a steel-frame table
with a top made of steel mesh, because when the
bread comes out of the oven, a few pebbles come out
with it, stuck to the crispier bits.
At times, the only sounds in the
shop are the dull roar of the propane fire and the
clatter of stones falling to the concrete floor
through the mesh as a customer brushes the gravel
from his bread.
"Don't get too close to that," a
mother tells a boy of 4. "Hot stones will fall on
your hand."
Mohseni, a stocky man with a
cheerful bearing and graying beard, hands a sheet of
bread to a man in the line for singles. "It's thick,"
the man says. "I want it thinner."
Mohseni goes back to the oven. It'll
take a minute to get him another one.
At a counter hugging the left wall,
a slender young man named Roohollah Sharifi reaches
into a vat and, with both hands, pulls out an oval
of dough. He pivots, then lays it in the center of a
long-handled spatula, the dough landing an instant
after the assistant standing at his right has
flicked a handful of sesame seeds onto the walnut
surface.
Sharifi spreads the dough evenly
across the wood, then assumes the posture of a
concert pianist, the fingers of both his hands
dangling over it. In the beat he hesitates, the
assistant flicks another handful of sesame onto the
dough. Then Sharifi begins to play, poking the dough
with his fingertips from top to bottom, creating the
ridges and wee holes that will crisp first in the
800-degree oven.
The next motion is a flourish.
Sharifi lifts the spatula by its 10-foot pole, steps
to the arched mouth of the oven and peers in. He
sees a kind of hillside, the pebbles piled higher
toward the back, where several loaves are already
baking. Sharifi spies a vacant patch and in a single
fluid motion pours the dough onto the searing stones,
stretching it to its signature length as it falls.
Then he steps back, sets the spatula
back in its cradle and starts again. It's 1:15 p.m.
His workday, which started at 5, has another eight
hours to go.
At 1:30, while the bakers sip tea,
Mohseni checks a covered pot tucked beside the
propane gas jet where it will cook all day. Man does
not live by bread alone. "Bakers' stew is famous,"
he says.
Half an hour later, the customers
have thinned to a handful, but the bakers keep at
it. The bread that doesn't sell immediately is stuck
on a row of nails beside the oven, to hang like
shingles.
"It looks like a map of the United
States," says Hossein Jafari, sizing up a sheet of
sangak on the wall. Jafari, a salesman who deals in
cars next door, says he majored in geography in
college.
Someone takes the bread down, eats
for a while, puts it back on the wall. Jafari looks
again. "It looks like the Strait of Hormuz," he says.
