Rolling in Dough

Bread, as the saying goes, is the staff of life, a food so fundamental that its history can be traced back thousands of years to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. For a substance made from such simple ingredients—flour, leavening, water, maybe a little salt or sugar—bread comes in remarkable variety, with shapes and tastes as abundant and diverse as humanity itself. Anywhere that people have access to grain and yeast, you’ll find bread. So why, oh why, is it so hard to find an affordable loaf of bread in this town—at least one that hasn’t been pumped with preservatives and shoved into a plastic bag? Visit one of the city’s purveyors of artisan bread, and you can count on spending 5 or 6 bucks for a single loaf of fresh bread—if not more. At Bread & Company, a Harvest Loaf costs a jaw-dropping $9.95. For that price, a person could buy a sack of Roman Meal bread, a block of cheese, mustard, mayonnaise, tomato and pickles, and still have enough left over for a bag of chips. As with everything else edible in our modern economy, the best way to find quality bread at reasonable prices is to delve into the city’s many ethnic subcultures, populated by Nashvillians who want to maintain their food traditions but lack a surfeit of disposable income. And in a town that welcomes immigrants from the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America, a curious eater doesn’t have to look far. The most atypical—and possibly the oldest—of breads to be found in Nashville is that of the many Ethiopians who’ve fled the poverty and political instability of their homeland. Nothing better embodies the culture of this East African country, with its distinct linguistic, religious and ethnic traditions, than injera. Flat and spongy where most breads are doughy, injera is made from teff, a tiny, iron-rich grain native to Ethiopia, where it has been cultivated for millennia. Injera also has a unique tanginess, the result of a difficult-to-master fermentation process that can last for days. “It’s really, really very hard to make,” explains Sebla Sebsebie, manager of Horn of Africa restaurant on Murfreesboro Road. “It takes a long time even for Ethiopians to learn. You have to keep trying until you get it right.” At her own eatery, Sebsebie makes a large batch of dough and sets it outside to ferment for several days, then lets it sit refrigerated for a day. Any variation in temperature or water salinity can throw the recipe off—“summertime is hardest,” she says. Then the bread is cooked on a skillet, rendering what looks like an enormous grayish pancake. Though injera is best sampled at restaurants like Horn of Africa, where it comes accompanied by spicy-red meat and lentil dishes and vegetables glowing bright yellow with turmeric, International Food Mart on Thompson Lane does a brisk business selling prepackaged bags of injera, which come five for $3. The bread is a cottage industry for Gizachew Tesfaye, the owner of Horn of Africa, who delivers crates of the stuff to the store several times weekly. As unusual as its flavor and texture may be, injera adapts remarkably well to any kind of home cooking. Use it as Ethiopians do, by tearing off a piece and scooping up a bite of stew, sauteed vegetables or any kind of dish with a rich, hearty sauce. It’s easy to imagine it going well, for instance, with beef stew, where its slight maltiness would complement the hearty flavor. On the west side of town, Iraqi immigrant Abdul al-Motury spends six days a week in his Charlotte Pike store baking khobz, the round flatbread eaten across his native country. For four years, he’s been supplying International Food Mart and several other local ethnic groceries with this specialty, which may be the best bread deal in town: an enormous bag of six khobz made with white flour goes for $2, while a bag of five khobz as mal, made with whole wheat flour, costs the same price. Al-Motury, who began baking a quarter-century ago in his hometown of Basra, makes the dough with self-rising flour, baking powder and yeast before shaping it into round balls and giving it time to rise. From there, he takes a blob of dough, flattens it with his palm and stretches it out much as a pizza maker would, tossing it between his hands and letting the force of gravity pull it outward, until the dough reaches a foot in diameter. Then he throws it against the wall of his tandoor, a gas-fired cylindrical oven that quickly turns it a golden-brown. Puffy in some places, crispy in others, the bread is ideal for any kind of salad or sandwich wrap—especially anything involving tomatoes and feta cheese. Asked how Iraqis eat their khobz, al-Motury smiles and says in his heavily accented voice, “With everything!” Aided by Bayan Taro, an Iraqi Kurd from Sulimaniya, al-Motury turns out hundreds of loaves of khobz daily, sometimes arriving at work as early as 1 or 2 in the morning. As he spends the day filling up his tandoor, Taro loads a conventional baker’s oven with samoun, pointy white sandwich rolls that resemble the bolillos available at most Mexican markets and bakeries around town. Tasted fresh from the oven, they’re wonderfully soft and fluffy. Along with an assortment of canned and dry Middle Eastern goods, al-Motury also sells baklava and basbusa, a dense, sweet cake made from cream of wheat; both are made on premises. Charlotte Bakery sits on the north side of Charlotte Pike, a block or two past the intersection with White Bridge Road. Pull into the tiny parking area out front, and on your way out you’ll realize that limited room and visibility give you no choice but to take a right on Charlotte, heading away from town. Take your first left, on Lellyett Avenue, and you’ll wind up right next to the parking lot for the newly opened K&S World Market. This second branch of K&S World Market is shockingly pristine—something that can’t be said for the store’s original location on Nolensville Road. At one end of the store, past rows and rows of products from every corner of Asia, sits a full-scale bakery operation. Tucked away as the store is, in the same ghostly shopping plaza that’s home to the competing Vietnamese restaurants Kien Giang and Miss Saigon, the bakery feels like some kind of secret production facility, and the products on offer are at once alluring and strange: bear claw pastries filled with a light-green paste, chewy rolls made from tapioca flour and black sesame seeds, rows of perfectly round bean cakes. Along with Alpha Bakery in Bellevue, it’s the closest Nashville has to the Asian bakeries that dot every other block in San Francisco or New York’s Chinatown. And with places like these, a person never again needs to spend $5 for a fresh-fruit tart from Provence.