Bread

From the archive.

Bread is the staple food in Azerbaijan – probably together with rice, the ingredient for the famous plov, but also side dish for kebab.

Bread comes mainly in three forms: the flat bread, fresh out the tendir oven, the zavod (factory) bread, a round loaf and the lengthy loafs, probably wit Russian influence.

Though bread is subsidized, it is considered precious and rarely thrown away. Od bread can see it spread on the ground to dry or in plastic bags hanging wherever it is considered suitable.

Bakeries

where you can buy fresh tendir bread are still quite common, but you cannot find them at every corner. The round factory bread is found in any small grocery as well as supermarkets and may replace the fragrance and spongy taste of the tendir bread.
Sometimes you can only look through a hole in the wall and see the freshly baked as well as a sleepy staff.
Sometimes, the staff invites me in and observe the process of making bread.

Nowadays there are machines, which do all the hard work of kneading the dough. The forming of the the round loaves, their stretching into long tongue of a tendir bread is still done manually. In this bakery you see black baking trays, which tell you, that the traditional tendir oven was replaced by a more modern one, either electric or gas. These ovens are also suitable for pastries, cooling on the trays.

Close your eyes and smell the irresistible smell of freshly baked bread…

market in Sabunçu

Sabunçu is just outside of Baku, a small town surrounded by oil fields. According to Wikipedia begin of the 20th century it produced 35% of Azerbaijan’s oil and Azerbaijan produced about 50% of the world’s production at time – make your math.

Within the mall town you do not see much from the oil richness around and its market is just a normal market with all kind of things to buy.

It always amazes me that most people buy the factory bread rather than the more tasty tendir bread – it is probably matter of price: a loaf of factory bread is 40 qepik in Baku rather than 50 for the tendir bread and provides more slices.
The market has all the conserved fruits and vegetables you can find in Baku, but also fresh produce and kitchen ware like these huge pots. It was already late afternoon and stalls were about to be closed and the chickens, not doomed for the pot this day, were put back into their boxes.

Not many foreigners come to this place. I walked away with an apple as a gift from one of the fruit vendors.