This bakery in Leh's Old Town has been operating for 600 to 700 years. I assume the bakers aren't the originals, though ;^)
I couldn't walk past this without stopping. Almost everything about it -- the wonderful smell, the simplicity, the thick layer of black tar on the ceiling from hundreds of years of smoke, the dexterity and rhythm of the baker as he formed the dough and slapped it onto the inside of the oven -- fascinated me.
Later in the morning after I photographed this, the entrance was a scrum of people packed several deep, waiting to buy the fresh breads.
All content © 2014 Pete McGregor
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5 comments:
I hope you joined the crowd and bought some of that bread - which looks delightful.
I can smell it from here.
EC, some of the food in Leh was very good indeed, and it's the only place in India where I've ever eaten icecream I trusted. The range is huge, but freshly-baked bread like this takes a lot of beating.
RR, I could smell it as I came down the hill to the Old Town on an early morning walk. Several similar bakeries exist, although I don't know if they're as old as this one. Our response to that smell, though, is probably as old as human history.
Our first domestication, yeasts.
Zhoen, a life without domesticated yeasts would be a very poor life. No beer, no wine, no bread, ... doesn't bear thinking about.
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