The Staff of Life

Danger Zone for Carboholics

Bulghur--the starch of choice

Between the bulghur and the breads, Yerevan is one big Red Light Food experience. Those of you who have brushed shoulders with Weight Watchers know what I mean. This is a total danger zone for me. But, oh what joy!

Flat stuffable Georgian bread

Breads are so important to daily sustenance here that even the little coca-cola stand on our street gets a delivery each morning (we are talking 9:30 here for early morning). A man in an unmarked white van pulls up and hauls in a pile of big Georgian flat loaves on his shoulder. Then he speeds off, presumably to the next popstand. Sort of a Lone Ranger of Bread.

Most bakeries are very small and the products are baked on site. Customers buy from the same women who bake. When I walk to the grocery store I pass a small bakery where the line is always out the door. Keep in mind there is only about 10 square feet in the store for customers. I keep thinking I am going to catch the place with a short or no line one of these days. But not so far. I suspect locals have knowledge I do not yet possess about what time of day to show up for the fresh pigs-in-a-blanket or the square pastries that look like turnovers but whose fillings (cheese, apples) are usually a little too skimpy.


Every small grocery store has a serious bakery section too. These display a variety of breads and pastries and in the bigger stores elaborately decorated cakes. A loaf of very good "sandwich" bread (the kind we used for BLTs) costs 100 AMD--yes, 25 cents American. At that rate if it goes stale on us it is much less of a disaster than I feel when I let my Mad River Grain go stale in Vermont.

Astounding Variety Offers an Opportunity for Research

Here is a personal challenge I feel up for: seeking out and trying every different kind of bread and learning what it is used for.  This could take the whole time I am here. Sort of a hobby with training requirements, which are that I walk my shoes off to make up for the consequences of doing serious culinary research. And that is much more walking than just going to and from the bakeries.

And, depending on how the basic study goes, there is the potential for a related study of the ready-to-bake pastry in the freezer sections of the bigger grocery stores. This is especially tempting because of the aforementioned problem of inadequate filling material. From there I could move on to the crepes....but I digress.

Lavash--the backbone of the bread menu

Making lavash

Lavash was my first bread. This is not the yummy crispy cracker we know and love to eat with hummus. This is thin, almost wafery soft sheets of bread used principally to sop up sauces or to wrap around spring salad of cucumbers and tomatoes with herbs. Some people have been known to smear butter on it in the absence of anything else. The closest thing to it at home is a tortilla used as a wrap. But not even close. Not surprisingly, everyone has a firm opinion about where to get the best lavash. I certainly intend to have an opinion of my own before I leave.

We discovered something that gets translated as "grey" bread (obviously without a sense of how the English doesn't work with this item). On the lookout for something like whole wheat, we were told this was dark bread. Well, sort of. Maybe by comparison.   Our favorite place to get this bread is a small grocery next to Denise's office building. The loaf we bought last night smelled yeasty and has the the open texture of the wonderful sandwich bread our Dad made for a good 50+ years to wide acclaim both within and outside the family. Not as good as Dad's but has some of the same features.

Georgian bread in the shape of small, fat baguettes can be a little doughy, but tasted good enough with spinach and nut spread. The Georgian bread I am salivating for is the big flat loaves baked in clay ovens, much like Tandoori ovens. I am going to hypothesize it tastes like naan, the Indian bread often stuffed with onions. Georgian bread is often stuffed or filled with tangy cheeses and smells super-yummy ("super-yummy" might be incorporated into the research scale as a data category). But could it be better than matnakash, the Armenian equivalent?

Matnakash is known for its cross-hatching decoration.

 

Preliminary Research Design

If I am going to be serious about my research, I am going to have to start keeping records and notes about the size, shape, price, and taste/use for each kind. Happily, I have my computer and can create a little spreadsheet for this data.

The samples for the study are going to be a challenge. I am not sure if I can keep the Armenian breads separate from the Georgian breads, but I will try. This could then set me up for testing hypotheses about the comparative value for different uses, e.g., H1: There is no difference between Armenian lavash and Georgian flatbread for sopping up sauces.

Now that I think about it with my researcher hat on, perhaps I should do a couple of case studies before I develop the hypotheses (the qualitative researcher on my dissertation committee would be so proud of me).

Oops--it is lunchtime already! Maybe I can catch that bakery without a line.