Greek Bread Baking Methods

A tandoor oven terra cotta figurine. Roughly 500BCE.

While this is obvioulsy a tandoor style oven from ancient Greece, I have not been able to find confirming archeological evidence for tandoor oven from Greek archeological sites. If you know of evidence for a tandoor oven from a Greek site, please leave a comment.

The video I have included here shows breads placed up near the mouth of the oven where the clay is convext . Note how much bigger the bubbles are on two of the loaves in the video, below, where they catch the heat up by the oven neck. The Greek baker placed her bread in this exact location, presumably to also catch that heat.

The bubbles on the Naan are large because the baker is using a refined wheat flour — white flour. If we can trust the scale of the figurine, the woman is baking large breads. The most pratical flour for a large diameter flat bread is common bread wheat. Based on the image, i’d speculate the breads are made with common bread wheat and that there is a fair level of refinement.

Same oven in terms of function. From an Indian restaurant.

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