More than 1,000 years before pizza’s inception, people in the Levant region were eating manoushe, a flatbread topped with with za’atar and zayt (olive oil). Chefs from Z&Z Manoushe Bakery in Rockville, Maryland, demonstrate their family’s manoushe in this outdoor cooking demonstration.
This event will happen in-person, live on the National Mall, during the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on July 2-7, 2025. It will be livestreamed for online audiences and remain archived on our YouTube channel and website.
Accessibility: Live real-time captioning and American Sign Language Interpretation are available for these programs.
BN. B. Baby. Iin’t knew Kelly. Okay. So again, right Tell me why you beautiful. I need of the city. Hey Heat. Heat. N. Center for Folk Life and Cultural Heritage in partnership with the National Park Service. For over 50 years, the festival has convened people on the National Mall to explore, exchange, and engage the power of culture and creativity in our lives today. Please add your festival stories to ours on social media using the hashtagash2025 folklife. Please be respectful when taking photos of the artist and visitors. And we ask that your photography is for personal non-commercial use. The festival is made possible by people like you. Join our circle of support and donate today. Look for festival volunteers with tiptop buttons or visit festival.si.edu edu. If you need accessible seating options or assisted listening during this presentation, please see our venue manager volunteer Tanya, who is wearing an ask me button for assistance. For more information about all of our accessibility services, including ASL interpretation, live captioning, audio description, and other resources and materials, please visit uh please visit the accessibility tent located across from the main festival concessions area near the 12th Street and Madison Avenue. Tonight, uh this afternoon, um our 12:00 cooking demonstration is Manous Okay. Being cooked by um Danny Duban and dad whose last whose name I don’t know first name
Issa
Issa Dubane. They are um from Z&Z Manush Bakery in Rockville, Maryland. Johnny and his brother opened it in 2021 and they grew up eating sorry Johnny and his siblings grew up working for their grandfathers and uncles restaurant. This included working front and back of the house task like washing dishes, whiting tables, and prepping food items. Johnny graduated in 2014 with a degree in finance and information systems from the University of Maryland. And Danny, what when did you graduate from UMD? I gradu 2010 and I become my master.
Okay. And so Danny graduated in 2010 from UND with the undergraduate. In 2016, Johnny and Danny opened the farmers market standing mane, a classic Middle Eastern street food starring Zatar and Zate. This dish is often confused with pizza, but it’s not. Although his grandfather’s and uncle’s restaurant closed in 2006, that location entered the family once again in 2021 when Danny and Johnny bought it and opened Z&Z Bakery at the same spot. Everybody uh give help me give a big hand to welcome Danny and Isa. Thank you.
Good afternoon. Thank you very much for coming. Yeah, like she said, we’re here from Z&Z Manushi Bakery in Rockville, Maryland. We have been there uh just over three years now. Prior to that, we did farmers markets for 5 years in the DC, Maryland, Virginia area. Uh we got our first stand at the Foggy Bottom Market, so just outside of G GW. We were there for about three years and we slowly grew to more markets. Uh when we first started, we did this special Middle Eastern flatbread called We grew up eating this all the time. We mostly uh grew up with my grandma baking hundreds of them on the weekends. Uh we would wake up to her filling up our ping pong table in the basement with these fresh zer flatbreads. And so that memory and that smell always had a special place in our heart. So when we wanted to start a food business, even though our parents told us not to, this was this was the item we decided on. And so it was really cool to see the transformation where the first year no one really knew what it was to after three, four, five years people getting excited. Oh my god, you have z oh my god you have minutiae. Uh so seeing how people have really come to know and love it has been really cool part of our uh our journey. And then um this food is traditionally very culturally iconic in the Middle East. It’s on every corner bakery. People cook it at home. It’s kind of culturally the equivalent of pizza. But the reason we always say is it’s not pizza. is because when we were at farmers markets, people would walk by and say, “Oh, is that pizza?” And for us, it was important that they came to know it for what it is. And Manusha, in fact, was a was around a long time before pizza.
So, we always like to make sure people know that. And people, you know, now that food media has grown so so large and widespread, it’s important to recognize foods, to talk about their origin and where they’re from, and not everything needs to be in kind of this frame of pizza or more familiar foods. Um, my dad had a fried chicken sub shop restaurant for almost 30 years. When they first came to the US, we saw that he was there day and night. And so, our parents obviously didn’t want us to end up with the same uh same dayto-day working restaurant is very grueling. It takes a toll on your body. It kind of consumes your life. So, they encouraged us to go to school, get good, comfortable jobs. And we all did that for a while, but we kept finding that we had a little bit of an itch to do something. Uh, and that ended up being something we wanted to do with both our culture and our love for food and hospitality. And so that’s how Z&Z was born. When you restaurant lives are really tough. It’s not easy. You spend most of your life in the restaurants. My kids grew up like with I I haven’t seen my kids grow growing up. I go in the morning to work and they’re sleeping. I come back home at night, they’re sleeping. But since they started the farmers market in 2016, I enjoy working with them. So now I’m spending more time with them than when they were growing up.
Yeah.
So I enjoy I enjoy being with them and being at the at the restaurant. Yeah. It was a a funny twist of fate that restaurants were the reason we never saw our dad growing up, but now restaurants are the reason we see my dad all the time. So, it’s it’s kind of nice to make up that time and to be building this together. Uh, and especially to doing doing it centered around a food that is so nostalgic and important for our family. And I think she mentioned we opened this in the same restaurant my grandfather had his first restaurant for almost 30 years. So when my grandfather came to the US, he worked a lot of odd jobs overnight, sweeping bakeries just to save up whatever he could. He was basically starting his life over for his family at the age of I don’t know how old is he, 50 when he came. Yeah. So my grandfather was starting over, doing whatever he could, working hard to take care of his family. Eventually he saved up enough money to buy this deli called Nelson Street Deli. Uh he turned it into a chicken sub shop restaurant which he operated for over 30 years and it was a really important part of the neighborhood. But him and my grandma always said, “Oh, it would be cool if we could sell Arabic food or sell bread.” Because my grandma was a community baker. But at the time, there was just no appetite for that kind of food. So, they sold American food because that’s what what it was. So, we find it both cool and also fortunate that all these years later to have an atmosphere where people not only know the food, but want the food, and we’re able to have a business selling this humble food that we thought no one would ever buy. So it’s very cool for my grandmother to see that this food that she used to bake at home all the time is now being sold in the thousands at the same restaurant my grandfather had. So it’s really been a full full circle moment for our family. Back then the Middle Eastern food wasn’t famous. But after after I don’t know maybe 210 or before people start traveling to the Middle East people start coming from the Middle East here and introducing the the Middle Eastern food. So people start familiar with the Arabic food and or basically the Middle Eastern food. We tried we tried to sell the Arabic food in our restaurants when we started. Nobody bought it. But now it’s really it’s really selling very good. So we consider ourselves also lucky to be in the area that we’re in in DC. There’s a very kind of well educated, wellraveled, very diverse population. So people have tried a lot of these foods. People are always looking to try new foods and they were very receptive uh to try and we’ve had such a great community that’s kind of grown with us. And so while people at the time started they knew falafel, they knew humls, they knew a lot of the swarma for example, we really made it our mission to make people know and love manushia as much as we did. And so manushia is a word for this kind of category of flatbread. And it comes from an Arabic word called neg which means to carve or to sculpt. So basically when people would make the bread and stretch the bread, which you’ll see us do in just a little bit uh in the demo, you’re using your fingers to create these little pockets, these pockets of flavor. The most common topping is like the classic combination of zur, which is a both a plant and an herb mix. I know people get this confused. So it’s kind of in the oregano thyme family. We call it a wild thyme. So it’s a zur plant that grows native in the region, usually in the mountains. It’s picked, dried, mixed with toasted sesame seeds and a citrus berry called sumac. And then you take that and you blend it with a really nice rich olive oil. And then you put this kind of slick spread on top of the bread. Cook it. And that is probably one of the most famous breakfast in the Middle East. You can eat it any time of day. And then of course after that there’s a lot of variations that arose. So there’s of course one that’s half a half cheese. A lot of people call that the cocktail or the Middle Eastern black and white cookie. Uh there’s also you know all cheese. There’s a very common one in the region we call lahim biain which is a beef onion parsley tomato meat pie that goes all the way Turkey Armenia everyone’s got kind of their version of it and then there’s all sorts of different classic toppings ingredients we do one with lebnne which is a yogurt that we make uh fresh veggies the salad on top so there’s a whole category of this and then we’ve really found ways where we try to balance not only respecting the roots and honoring the culinary traditions it comes from but also pushing it forward with new techniques new ingredients, new combinations and I think that’s what people have really enjoyed to see kind of this humble food presented in a new way. So I don’t know you grew up eating zatar at home.
We grew up eating zatar for breakfast not as a man. We used to eat zatar like in two separate bowls the zatar and the olive oil separately. So it’s you dip the bread in the olive oil and then in the zatar and eat it as as a meal as a breakfast. And I I still eat that for breakfast like almost every day when I don’t have any, you know, main breakfast items. And then they they expand that into a manushia. So instead of eating it as dipping the zatar in the oil and eat it, they spread they spread it on the flatbread and bake it.
Yeah. And so a lot of people do that. Do do what we call as the dip into the olive oil and dunk into the zata and then enjoy and then repeat as many times as you want. And another interesting thing about Zath, it was always kind of known to make you smarter. So a lot of people would have their kids eat it before you take exams. We would before every exam, every hard test, every essay, we would have zata for breakfast. And I did a little bit of research on this topic. And so some people say that this started during one of the Lebanese civil wars where rations were low and people wanted to encourage their kids to be grateful to be eating this herb and olive oil mix instead of maybe more rich foods. But there actually is quite a bit of science to back it up. So some of the essential oils, one of them being thymol and another one called carbocrol, those are found to kind of increase cognitive behavior in mice, but usually you can borrow that. And so we all aided author growing up. Uh and we have a
smart guy. Yeah, we have a whole filing cabinet of honor roll report straight A report card. So I guess that works.
It’s it’s true. It works. We used to eat zatar before we go to the exam and we pass the exams without even studying. No, but it’s really funny because It’s a generational It’s a generational thing that our parents and our grandparents always told our parents that eating zatar before the test day does something to your brain. I don’t know. It makes you I don’t know what it does but I’m not uh into science about zatar but we it grew up we grew up eating it during exam days. I told my kids to eat it for exam days. They’re they’re here. They’re smart I think. So you can you can always do the research about does it really make you smarter.
Yeah. And so there’s a lot of different ways to cook the manushia. Uh some people do it in a brick oven. Some people cook it in your home oven. What we’re going to be showing you today is a very traditional piece of equipment called a s. And so this is a dome-shaped oven that goes all the way back to the time of the phoenetians. So, it’s basically like a flat top but with an arc almost like an upside down walk, which you’ll see in a second maybe make more sense. When people started using this piece of oven, they would make one big piece of bread that covers the whole oven and then basically fold it up, you put it in a bag, and you take it home to enjoy with the Middle Eastern breakfast, which I think is the best breakfast in the world. There’s, you know, yogurts, eggs, veggies, olives, and you’re just dipping and tearing into bread. Uh, eventually some people started making men with it, which is what we do. So we make, you know, circular bread that we cook on top of it. It gives it a very nice crisp, but allows the bread to stay soft and fluffy as well. And then you put the zata on it, so you can smell this. It kind of sizzling and it really enhances the aroma and taste. And to get what used to be this large piece of bread on the oven, people use something called a bread pillow, which again you’ll see in a second. Uh they put the dough on the pillow and then use the whole pillow onto the transfer onto the oven. Of course, we we we had my grandma make us a smaller version of these pillows. So, now we still use them today to put it onto the oven. But it’s just a really cool way to cook it outdoors and then just with a different texture than you’ll get in the oven. If you wanted to replicate it at home, you can do it with a cast iron skillet. So, just on top of your oven, you put your favorite dough, flip it over, add the zer, and cook it. But regular oven works great, too. I just prefer it this way because of the texture. So the concept about the pillow I would like to add to what Danny was saying like he said in the past they would make one big loaf and you probably see some of these in the Middle Eastern stores with one big loaf fold it up in a bag of bad
the women could not transfer they could not transfer the big piece of soft dough into the oven without the pillow. So they would put it on that big pillow. We use a small one because we have smaller version. But then we put it on that big pillow and take that pillow and turn it over on the oven that we will show you in a minute. That’s where the pillow concept came from because there was no way of transferring a big piece of dough into this oven. So they had to use it on a pillow. That’s I just wanted to make sure you know why the pillow is for
that big loaf of bread used to be called shurk or u what they call it uh they have another name for it but we we call it shrek uh I don’t know where the name came from but that’s what we call it we use it to put it under the rice when we make mensaf or we make uh you know make sandwiches out of it similar to bur burritos because they don’t put yeast in it so it comes very very thick thin and you can cut it up and use it to wrap up sandwiches or whatever whatever you want to use it for, but it doesn’t have yeast in it. So, it doesn’t rise up. It stays thin. And so, the the dough has always played a special part in our family starting back with my grandma who learned from her mother. She for her grandmother, she has memories of at a young age kind of crawling on the table and mixing the flour and the water and stuff with her hands. And so, she became kind of the community baker when when they moved to the US. And she baked so much bread that my grandfather actually bought her a commercial dough mixer, a really nice uh Hobart mixer that she would mix and make dough. She didn’t have a restaurant. I think she would just make bread for people. When we started this business in 2016, my grandma actually passed this Hobart mixer on to us and we used it for about five or six years. Basically, again, another kind of returning to the c the same place my grandfather bought it. It returned to after like 40 years to we were using it to make the bread for our business until after a couple years we just outgrew it. But so now it still sits there as like an artifact. But it was just really cool that she handed down kind of this passion for making dough and then also just the physical machine that we still now kind of pick up to this day. And I always find it funny is my grandma’s favorite food is our bread now, which I think is not something a lot of people can say. And so it’s very cool. Whenever my grandma’s craving something to eat, she’ll call me and ask me to bring her a couple pieces of bread or men of each or she’ll come over for breakfast. So I think it’s uh it’s really exciting that she gets to see this food that she inspired us to make to now enjoy getting to eat from us. So that’s been a really special part for us. Um,
and I always talk about this for us, particularly the kids. Uh, in our journey, we were all born here. And I think, uh, a lot of a lot of people who are kind of born between two cultures have this experience where when you’re going through school, all you care about is fitting in. You just want to be like everyone else. I remember my mom would give us actually these author sandwiches. Hello. I can just talk loud. Uh my mom would always give us these zathther and olive oil sandwiches and we would be almost embarrassed to take them to school because one the brown paper bag would get all the olive oils. It be so oily. And then kids would tease us. They’d be like, “Oh, what are you eating?” Like, you know, is that a is that a ant sandwich? And uh so when we were kids, all we cared about was like I would beg my mom, “Please give me Lunchables. Please give me a turkey sandwich.” I didn’t want to bring it. But now we’re like so proud of it when we got older. you start looking for ways to connect back to your roots, to your culture. Uh, and for us that was food and, you know, the traditions around that food more than anything. So, as we started getting into our 20s, we started, you know, going back to visit our family in Jordan and Palestine, we started learning more about the food. We started really having a passion for it. And so, we started looking for ways to connect because it’s so hard to preserve a lot of those things when you grow up in another country. And so that’s been a way that the business has been really great for us to connect with people to learn more about our recipes, our heritage, and our tradition. And we get to do that every day, which is really cool.
One little story I want to add about my mom. Um, she she uh was raised by her grandmother, even though her mom was alive, but she had a lot of girls at home. So she gave up one of her daughters, which was my mom, to help her.
Let him finish
grandmother. So her grandmother would always teach her at a very young age how to do the dough and the bread and that’s how she became the baker in our family. When she got married and up until today at age 18 she got married had uh six of us and now she’s 88. She still bakes her own bread and it’s always the best. It’s always adored by many people. But she did learn at a very young age. She remembers it vividly and
being on the floor with a big bowl of flour and her grandmother teaching her how to do it.
So start young. Brett.
All right. I think we’re gonna go move around the side to the live demo and you press I need a spoon.
Yeah. See, can I get from this side as well?
There’s small ones.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Mine. Let me see if it’s still here.
Oh, yeah. Sorry. I’m going to slide right. Okay. Thank you. Yeah.
When they come out.
Oh Okay.
Sure. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Let me just get the dough up. We got our gloves today. All right, everyone. This is what we call a s. It’s been used for ages at the Thank you. Middle East. But in the Middle East, they use wood. They fire it with wood because the bread needs a higher temperature. Temperature of this surface now it’s about 600°. So the it takes like 2 minutes, 3 minutes to cook the bread. So the this kind of bread needs a higher temperature. I’ll do the Saj. Not on. Working with family is always a boss. Okay.
I don’t think we know best.
So, this dough we stretch a little different than we do. Some of the dough we’ll stretch it more like a pizza crust for different toppings. But this particular one, like I said earlier, the root of the word is to carve or to sculpt. You can kind of see my my I’m going to use kind of the pads of my fingers. And we’re just kind of spreading the air out. And so what this is going to do is you’ll see these little pockets of air that are going to kind of bubble up. And that’ll just make really nice pockets for like kind of the valleys of olive oil and out there in there. So ready,
ready. There’s one. You can see this little heart. And then so we’re just going to keep making them. And basically, you’ll see what he’s going to do is he waits for the bottom to crisp up. He’s going to flip it over so the other side cooks. And then we’re going to
spread the za in the oil and then let it basically finish cooking because it just enhances the flavor when it has time to cook. I’m sorry, the plastic is burning my hands on the sage. All right, Danny, next. So, when we first started at farmers markets, we used to do this with a small convection oven where we found out that one, it wasn’t enough, and two, it was just a little boring. So, we went out to try to find this specific piece of equipment, which is very hard to find in the US. Luckily, there’s two brothers just outside of New York who have a kitchen equipment company. And they actually started it because when they were students in college, they missed making shawarma. So, as engineering students, they made a little small shawarma spit they could use in their dorm room. And then that led to them selling that and then selling more and more equipment until they make this. Yeah. and you’ll see. So, we use a mix of white and wheat flour. Uh, and we also ferment our dough for about 72 hours. So, this is part of the kind of the new techniques that we’re using that most people don’t traditionally use on this type of bread. It’s our way to kind of continue to push the quality forward. And then we like the wheat just for the flavor it adds to it. Uh it just adds a little bit of notes of sweetness that really complement everything too. This is a yeasted dough. Uh but we use several methods to kind of enhance the quality. But then we have a we have a big walk-in fridge. We’ll make big big batches of dough and all the dough is usually kind of on a cycle starting days in advance and it just really helps with the flavor, the digestibility and the texture. And again, like I said, if you want to do this at home, you can see with a cast iron skillet where you can just put it on top, flip it, and do the exact same thing. And he’ll show you now when he’s ready to flip. Or you can put this off of there. Okay.
Watch out.
So, we’re going to hand it off to
Oh, yeah. But this is the There you go. Yeah. On bottom down. All right. So, we’re going to make a bunch of these with the zer on them. Uh you can see some of the other ingredients like with the beef for the cheese and stuff aren’t quite possible on this piece of equipment, which is why at a restaurant we have the full menu. But when we do events and when we do farmers markets, all of our menu is just limited to zer and the lena cold yogurt spread. Well, so we’ve been partnering a long time with a Tunisian olive company. Actually, I think I saw that Tunisian tuna. It’s a It’s a It’s a very smooth olive oil that that goes really nice with the zer. So, you you always want to get a good olive oil that’s that tastes just as good fresh. This is more of like a fresh olive oil than it is a cooking olive oil. Uh I think you can
individual
the olive oil. You could find it anywhere right now. Costco, any stores, they have olive oil, but not the same kind. You need the extra virgin, extra virgin olive oil. Yeah, this specific one, we do sell their bottles at our shop in Rockco, Maryland. We have a small market there. And then you can also uh check their website to find it as well. We can share that information later.
Yeah, because I know they they carry it in uh in the Maryland and the other areas.
If you’re ever in the area, pay them a business in Rockville. It’s off the highway. Yeah, if you’re ever in the area, please do come by our bakery. We’re open from Wednesday through Sunday. We do we we’re we’re not generalist specialists. We only do this one flatbread and we like to focus on just doing that really well. And then also just excelling with uh hospitality, which is very important for us. I think a lot of people find that the food is just as important as how you’re treated when you’re there. So, we like to keep that alive. Oh, we are off 270 exit 6. If you’re familiar with Montgomery College, we’re just behind Montgomery College. In Montgomery College, Woodley Garden Shopping Center. Woodley Garden Shopping Center. And you could Google Znz Manushe.
Yeah. You could also find us at if it’s easy to remember, we own the do it’s not pizza.com. So that’ll take you to Yeah. So, we’re going to keep baking them. You see, you can eat these plain. You can uh you can put herbs.
A lot of people take them home. This can be the base for a lot of other dishes. There’s a famous Palestinian dish called, which is a sumac roasted chicken. So, you’re caramelizing onions.
We have a lot of meals that you put basically on a bed of bread. Uh, so we put the onions, the chicken, and a healthy amount of sumac on top. And you’re kind of tearing tearing into the bread, grabbing a chunk of chicken, and enjoying it. Any questions? We call it a bakery because we specialize in bread, but it’s a restaurant. Yeah. Yeah. And we have specialty drinks and things like that, too. Yeah.
Yeah.
All right. We are going to sample some of this. And we’ve got a few right here. All the rest of the beautiful behind our stage. And please and enjoy it. It’s so so good. So, if you’d like to try, get closer and be sure you do not have a sesame allergy. Okay, and if you ever make these at home,
this topic goes really nice with fresh veggies and any kind of like yogurt. So, or even cheese. It’s a common add tomatoes, cucumber, mint, and then a little bit of fresh yogurt on top. Cut it in six or eight. I think we’ll have enough for everybody. And so in addition to these breads that we make every day from time to time, we do have special events at the shops. And that’s a way for us to kind of take advantage of some of the foods we’re interested in or some of the meals we want to share. For example, recently we did a pop-up making a Jerusalem bagel, which is kind of an oblong sesame version of a bagel that we always ate a lot. You can eat with fresh cheese, fresh herbs. Uh we, you know, and then we’ve done stuff with like fool, which is a fava bean dip. We do a canapid dessert, which is very famous. So, we’re always trying to just explore and play around with different foods that we can make for everyone. Yes. The flour, we do not. We we work with a local distributor to get the flour from here. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. It could a lot of giants carry like King Arthur organic flour. So if you use that it would be perfectly fine. Yeah. Canafa. So have you heard of it?
Okay. Do you want to explain what kappa is, mama? You’re welcome. A shredded filo dough. You want to spread more zat or
you want me to do another zone? I’ll do one more and then we got
Okay. To cook at the quality we like at a lower temperature. It just cooks kind of dry and it doesn’t get the nice kind of browning that we like. So yeah.
So if you’re going to bake it in a inside the home oven, you can bake at 400 500. That’s how they always used to bake it drying up. It’ll be a little different but still delicious. What? So the dough first when we mix we mix it we use a a method called auto lease which is just a flour and water mix. And then you can let it rest from anywhere between 30 minutes to two hours. After that we’ll add the rest of the ingredients in the mix. We let it rest through a series of stretch and folds to strengthen the gluten and then it goes into the fridge for three days. So after we take it out of the fridge, we roll it into dough balls. And after you roll it, depending on the amount of yeast and depending on the ambient temperature and things like that, sometimes it can be ready as soon as four hours, sometimes it’ll be eight hours in the winter. But so there’s a lot of those variables with dough where no matter if you use the exact same recipe from day to day, it’s going to be different. But that’s part of the the challenge that we love is continue to to learn and to practice and you you knowing that you’re never going to quite get perfection, but that you’re always pursuing it has really been the most enjoyable part of the food journey for us.
When I taught them how to make the dough and made that day daytoday and use it that same day, but now they’re coming up. Yeah, that was a little bit of the challenge when we first started is asking my grandma for a recipe, asking my mom for a recipe, come to find out no one has a recipe. Uh my grandma still does everything by eye, by feel. Uh and it works for them, but we like to be exact and we like to, you know, monitor and measure and see how everything’s progressing to make sure we can always get a little bit better. Man, that’s that’s the plural of the singular is manush.
Yeah. And that’s just and they have these types of flatbreads. Yeah. So they’re all the way from around Levant. So Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan. Eat them most commonly. Yep.
Yeah. Thank you. I think they’re passing out samples. Yeah. Yeah. So at the moment we use a dry instant dry yeast. And ush is the way you
you can do fresh yeast to it. You just need to change.
You open you spread the bread.
It’s been the most consistent for us large amounts and stuff. You know,
I would like to try some other methods. Um fresh yeast, sourdough stuff we’re always experimenting with at home. But then implementing it at a large level takes more time to figure out. Yeah. And some people use things, we don’t use, but my grandma grew up putting a a milk powder in her dough as kind of a softener. So, a lot of people do put a little yogurt or milk powder to kind of soften soften the dough if that’s the type of dough you’re going for. Not sweet, but uh it makes it softer because of the protein content.
Yeah. This is called a saj s a j and so it’s a dome-shaped dub and it goes all the way back to the time of the phoenetians and I think I sharing earlier that they used to cook just one big piece of thin bread covers the whole thing and basically when it finishes you just like fold it up on itself you usually would have the parents would be at home cooking breakfast they’d send the kid down to the market to go pick up some bread
to buy bread yeah
you’d come in a little plastic bag run back home with the bread and then you’re sitting at the communal table where usually you have like some eggs, some yogurt called Lebna, maybe some hummus, some falafel, some veggies, all these delicious things. For me, it’s like the best just the variety and sitting down together and you’re just grabbing chunk of bread, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. It’s really nice. Uh, that’s a good question. We are in Rockville.
Thank you. Yeah. So, I don’t know. I’m sure you can find it. I don’t know anywhere off the top of my head. There you go. Oh yeah,
they sell they small they sell small ones. Uh Detroit, I think
in Detroit.
The oven. Yeah. Or I don’t know if they have a website for their stores. Yes.
They have a tabletop ones but smaller. Yeah, we have we have seating as well. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Not too many friends because we only can fit about 12 people. All right.
But there is a nice there’s a nice patio outside, you know, you could enjoy the heat. Yes. And we’re next door to a a gelato place that’s been there for 21 years. So we always try to say, you know, you make a trip out of it, you come get lunch, and you get a little dessert after. Uh it’s on Nelson Street. Yeah. Yeah. 270 exit 6
if you’re going south. Thank you.
What’s the name of the
Carmen’s? Yeah. And so we make a thicker version of this bread. A lot of people, especially in Lebanon, eat a much thinner version. They fold it over and they eat it kind of like on a wrap on the go. That way is delicious, too. But this is just the way we always grew up eating it. This is kind of the way we prefer. So again, just like any food, there’s a million variations, a million preferences. Even down to the blend of herbs, zar, we use a more traditional simple blend, but some people add different ratios, different uh ingredients. Uh and so it’s just at the end of the day just what you like and this is what we like. That’s the main one here. Yeah.
It’s a thyme. It’s wild thyme.
Yeah. And they add it’s like oregano but it’s has different taste to it. Yeah. They add suma and suma is the the berries and sesame seeds and other spices. Thank you. Yeah, that’s Thank you.
There you go.
Back in the past, they we only used to eat zatar like this.
But now, new chefs and modern chefs, they use the zatar as a spice. Yeah.
They use it as a spice on everything. Baked chicken. Yeah. So, you’ll find it interesting. I actually saw somebody made a kacio and pepe recipe with zera and albna yogurt that we make. So, it’s funny. They’re kind of playing with us some of the classics. I don’t know. Uh we do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We we make a lot of dips. My dad makes a le baba gous which is a roasted eggplant dip. Fresh from my mom makes the special len balls too. Yeah. Yeah. This my parents my parents here with us too. Thank you all for joining us. I I think our time’s up.
Okay. Thank you all for Thank you all for joining us. We’re from Z&Z Manushi Bakery in Rockville, Maryland. We specialize in Men East, which is this Middle Eastern flatbread. Please come and visit us. Thank you very much. Thank you. The cast.