Random Memories, Baking Bread

When I was a child and lived in a small town in Iran, a few times a year my mom would hire two Iranian women who were bread bakers.  In our courtyard we had a special room just for that purpose. In one corner of the room there was an earth oven for baking the bread. Above the oven on the ceiling there was an opening for the smoke to escape. 
The earth oven was very common all over Iran and possibly other Middle Eastern countries for baking the flat bread called Lavash both in Armenian and in Farsi (the  language that Iranians speak). 

The women would arrive late afternoon wearing their long black chadores or hijab the garment that Muslim woman were required to wear.  As children we didn't talk to them and I probably didn't speak Farsi well enough yet. But we were in awe because making bread was an arduous and time consuming job. They would make a massive amount of dough in a large ceramic tub and cover it with layers of tablecloth. The bread had to "sleep" overnight and rise to be ready to be backed the next morning.  

By the time we woke up they were already hard at work.  They would take a mound of dough and put it on a round low table and flatten it with their wooden rolling pins and make the circle larger and larger. Then they would switch their rolling pins and pick up the long and slender rolling pin to make their large circle much thiner.  They did this by trowing the large dough through the air several times much like what is done to a pizza dough.  When they had reached the desired thickness or in this instance thinness they would drape the thin dough on a round fat pillow and would bend down into the hot oven and slap the dough on the oven wall.  

The wood burning earth oven had to be started very early in the morning and the flames had to have died down leaving only the red and orange embers.  After they slapped the dough inside the oven they had to watch it closely because it didn't take long for the dough to bubble up and bake to a golden colored bread. If they didn't remove it on time it would drop to the bottom of the oven and be ruined which happened sometimes.  

My sisters, cousins and I would be sitting on the age of all the table clothes that were covering the floor and we would watch them do all those things in wonderment. The women would throw the hot flat breads on the table clothes surrounding them when they pulled the bread out of the oven with a metal hook.  We were not allowed to touch or eat the bread until they were totally finished but that was very hard to do because the freshly baked bread smelled amazing.  They would only allow us to eat the ones that had fallen to the bottom of the oven and were partially burnt. We didn't't mind at all because the bread still smelled and tasted wonderful. 

Backing the bread would take all day so my mother would serve the ladies lunch and tea. At the end of the day beside paying them she would also give them some of the bread that they had baked so diligently. By then all the flat bread were cooled down and dry so my mother would pile them on top of each other wrap them in tablecloths and store them in earthen vats She would share the bread with my uncle's family and a cousins's family who lived near us. 

This is one sweet memory from my childhood.