Taboon

A clay oven in the ground or on a stand: bread that takes the heat of a wall and the perfume of a pit.

Also called tabun, tannur · From The Levant

The mouth of a clay taboon with flatbread baking on hot pebbles and a wooden peel.

The journey

Taboon is the Levantine village oven — clay, sometimes set in earth, fired with wood or dried dung, with bread baked on pebbles or slapped on the wall. It is a cousin of the tandoor with a local name and a local loaf.

A home oven can bake the dough. It cannot copy the pebbles or the smoke.

Bread wheat — the grain a Levantine taboon was built to bake. — Franz Eugen Köhler, Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen (1887) · Public domain. Source

In the kitchen

If you lack the oven, use a screaming stone and a lid. The bread should blister and stay pliable.

Lebanese and Middle Eastern pages in the series treat this oven as the other half of a grill.

Used in these ComidaTime kitchens

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