Bread of the Pashtuns: naan and the tandoor

At a glance

• Bread is the centre of the Pashtun meal. The Pashto word dodai (ډوډۍ) means bread and also food or a meal, and the older word lists give it as "a cake of bread". [3, 4]

• Villages bake in a clay tandoor, Pashto tanur (تنور), a word that came into Pashto from Middle Persian and Sogdian. [5] Elphinstone, in the account he published in 1815, wrote that every house and every tent had an oven, and that people also baked on an iron plate. [1]

• Towns buy their bread. Kabul and Peshawar are full of bakeries, and a Kabul baker described one on nearly every street. [7] Their prices are watched closely and have caused strikes in Peshawar in 2010, 2020 and 2022. [11–13]

• Poorer households ate maize bread. Elphinstone's Sherani lived on it and kept wheat bread for festivals, and in Swabi in 2016 millers said the poor still depended on maize flour. [1, 10]

• When flour rises, Kabul bakers have kept the price and made the loaf lighter, as residents reported in 2021 and again in 2026. [15, 17]

Dodai, the word for bread and food

Raverty's Pashto dictionary, published in 1860 and again in 1867, gives dodai as "bread, a cake of bread" and lists rotai as bread "leavened or unleavened". [3] Wiktionary's Pashto entry gives dodai two meanings, "food or a meal" and "bread", and its example sentence is "Mother cooks food", with the same word. [4] In Pashto a meal is bread. The Pashtun diet, laid out in the article on Pashtun food and the table of hospitality, is built the same way: bread first, with milk, curds, pulses or a little meat beside it.

Elphinstone's informants among the Yusufzai described two meals a day. Breakfast was bread, milk and curds, dinner was bread, pulses and vegetables, meat very rarely, and in summer a lunch of hot bread at noon. [1] Raverty's word list shows how many kinds of bread the language names: khamira dodai for leavened bread, pateerah for unleavened, brorrah and rarrah for bread of mixed grains or pulses. [3]

The tandoor

The tandoor is a clay oven, narrow at the mouth, in which flat dough is pressed against the hot inner wall. The Pashto word tanur (تنور) is, by Wiktionary's account, from Middle Persian and Sogdian, and the Persian entry traces it further to Akkadian tinurum, "clay oven". [5] Elphinstone, writing of the Durrani country, noted that bread "is generally leavened and baked in ovens, of which there is one in every house and tent". [1] A photograph on Wikimedia Commons from a Pakistani village shows how small a household one can be: a mud dome with a firing hole at the foot and an iron dish, weighted with a brick, set on top. The uploader describes it as the old way of making bread, called tandoor in Pashto. The hujra and qala article describes the walled compound where such an oven stands.

The household oven and the bakery are two different things. A journalist for Scroll who spoke to Afghan bakers in Delhi writes that naan is rarely made at home in Afghanistan because it takes a large tandoor and a lot of fuel, so people buy it from bakeries. [6] Elphinstone describes the opposite for the villages and camps he saw. The Delhi bakers are talking about town habits, Elphinstone about farms and tents.

Bread on a plate, on stones and in the ashes

A shepherd on the move has no mud oven. Elphinstone adds in the same note that Afghans "eat unleavened bread toasted on an iron plate, like what is used for oat cakes in Scotland". [1] Raverty's dictionary names the plate: teghna, "an iron plate for baking cakes of bread on". [3] It also has kak, which he glosses as "a bannock, a kind of bread baked on heated stones", and kakorrai, "a round cake of bread, … bread cooked on the ashes". [3]

Raverty also records a custom. Kaharrai is "a large round cake of bread, baked when a child is first able to place its feet to the ground without assistance". It is "trundled along on its edge after the child, that its daily bread may follow it", and afterwards it is cut up and given to the poor. [3]

Naan in the bakery

In a town, the baker is the nanbai or naanwai. [6, 11] The Delhi report describes an Afghan naanwai's day, which begins about 5 am with the dough. A ball of dough for the ordinary Afghan naan weighs about 250 grams. Each ball is wrapped in folds of soft cloth, stretched by hand, pressed with a wooden stamp or a comb to mark it, and sprinkled with poppy or sesame seeds before it goes into the tandoor. [6] The same report names the breads: the "dense" naan Afghani, eaten with a stew, lavasa, which is lighter and flakier and taken with tea, and roghani, brushed with oil so that it comes out buttery, a teatime bread. [6] In Afghanistan, it adds, the bakeries traditionally burn wood. [6] That report describes Afghans in Delhi. In Kabul itself, The Wire spoke to Mohammad Zayeed, who had made bread in Kabul for about 35 years, sold around 400 round naans a day, each about 20 cm across, for as little as 10 afghanis, and used flour imported from Kazakhstan. [7] He told the writer that big shops in crowded districts sold 800 to 1,000 a day. [7]

Bread is also the spoon. Shiza Malik, writing in Dawn in 2015, describes a chapli kabab scooped up with hot "Kandahri nan" and dipped in a yoghurt-based chutney. [9] The dish is in the article on chapli kabab; the rice and meat dishes are in Kabuli palaw and namkeen and dumpukht, and the tea that ends the meal is in green tea and kahwa.

In Peshawar, Dawn's Sher Alam Shinwari visited a shop behind Qissa Khwani Bazaar in 2016. Wazir Rahman, who worked there, said the shop was about 40 years old and that his father "used to sell only bakarkhanai, Roghni Naan, sugarcoated Naan". [8] He added that Afghan shops had once sold roghani naan in Peshawar, and that after they went back only one or two shops in the city still did. [8] A plain 200-gram loaf cost Rs10 there that year. [8]

Maize bread

Wheat is the bread of festivals and of those who can pay for it. Elphinstone's informants said the Sherani of the Sulaiman range ate bread of maize, with butter and qurut, and that "wheaten bread is only produced on festivals". [1] Two centuries later the poor of Swabi were doing the same. Dawn reported in September 2016 that most families in the district relied on cheap maize flour ground in machines at the harvest. "Maize flour is food for the poor sections of society," Wahid Zaman of Pirtab village told the paper, and Mohabat Khan of Saleem Khan village, who supports nine people, said he could not afford wheat flour. [10] A grain trader added that some people take maize only as a change in winter, and that this was "adopted by the rich". [10] Doctors at the district hospital told the same report that most people in Swabi ate maize bread at breakfast. [10]

The same pattern shows in the Bannu country. Thorburn, a British settlement officer writing in 1876, records a Marwat woman's remark that her people's food was millet with occasional wheat, while the Bannuchis ate maize and wheat and plenty of ghee. [2] The revenue farmer Futteh Khan Tawanah promised the Marwats never to take more than a sixth of the produce "in kind and rotz (bread)", which Thorburn says was understood as a small extra contribution toward the cost of hospitality. [2]

Bread in sayings

Thorburn printed Pashto proverbs in English translation in the same book, and several concern bread. "The guest likes that bread which the host likes." "Who eats the bread of the powerful eats his own lips", which Thorburn explains as "will sooner or later suffer for it". And, said of a man in real need: "A drop will not cool you, and a crumb of bread will not satisfy you." [2] Thorburn gives the English only. For the guest's side of the bread, see melmastia.

When flour costs more

A loaf's price is the first thing a city notices when wheat is short, and the Pashtun cities have recorded it.

In Kabul in May 2008, the bakers of Sang Tarashi Street were at work by 7 am, but customers were buying half their usual bread. A carpenter spent the equivalent of 40 cents on two naans for a family of seven. [14] Flour had reached as much as 50 dollars for a 40-pound sack. Zabiullah, 21, the son of the bakery's owner, said it was three times its earlier price: "In my whole life, even in the civil war, we did not see prices this high." [14] A handcart hauler, Abdul Karim, said: "When the price goes up, your stomach has to shrink." [14] The report, from the Washington Post carried by Dawn, said Pakistan had closed its borders to food exports, that the government had trucked in flour from Kazakhstan and that the World Food Programme had raised money to import 85,000 tonnes. [14]

In Peshawar the bakers' association has struck over the price of flour at least three times. In November 2010 the naanbais demanded a rise of Re1 on a naan that cost Rs5, against Rs6 in Rawalpindi and Islamabad, because of the cost of carrying flour from Punjab, which the district president of their association put at Rs70 a bag. The district's coordination officer said 25 bakers were arrested and four tandoors sealed. [11] In January 2020, with tandoors shut across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the Express Tribune heard that a single naan sold for as much as Rs60 in places, and that an 85-kilogram sack of flour was selling in Peshawar for Rs5,200 against the stipulated Rs40 a kilo. [12] On 15 June 2022 the tandoor owners shut for a day, and residents walked "from pillar to post" for breakfast, in 44 degrees of heat. The association's president, Haji Farooq Ahmed, said a 115-gram roti had sold for Rs10 since 2018, when an 85-kilo bag cost Rs3,600, and that an 80-kilo bag now cost Rs7,300. [13] The district administration notified Rs15 for 135 grams, and the tandoors reopened that evening. [13]

The prices of the loaf and its weight are the two knobs. In Kabul in December 2021, Pajhwok weighed the Rs10 loaf at 20 bakeries and found 125 to 171 grams. In 2017 the bakers' union had agreed on 180 grams, and a 49-kilo bag of flour had gone from 1,650 to 2,300 afghanis in the meantime. [15] On 16 December, after the afghani recovered from 130 to 101 to the dollar within days, the municipality brought the 140-gram loaf back from 15 afghanis to 10. [16] In April 2026 Kabul families told 8am that loaves were 30 to 40 grams under the tariff, which they gave as 190 grams for 10 afghanis and 380 grams for 20. One woman, head of a ten-person household, said she now bought eight, nine or even ten loaves where seven had been enough. [17] The report also notes that flour is imported from Russia, Kazakhstan, Iran and Pakistan, and that imports from Pakistan had stopped. [17] The Wire's Kabul report gives the other side, the ministry's: Afghans eat 165 kilograms of wheat a head a year, the country needs about 6 million tonnes, grows about 4.6 million and imports 1.4 million. [7]