In the Land of the World's Oldest Bread, a Return to an Ancient Baking Culture

By Yulia Denisyuk

This is part of Breaking Bread, a collection of stories that highlights how bread is made, eaten, and shared around the world. Read more here. All products featured on Condé Nast Traveler are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Stretching the freshly-kneaded dough with his hands, Suleiman Daiffallah throws it on top of red-hot coals. Behind him, Wadi Feynan’s jagged mountaintops disappear into the darkness.

Daiffallah is a local Bedouin working with Feynan eco-lodge, a community-run project on the southern edge of Dana Biosphere Reserve, Jordan’s largest nature reserve. Today, he is making a shepherd’s bread called arboud as a pre-dinner snack for guests staying at the lodge. Made with just three ingredients—water, flour, salt—arboud is common in this mountainous part of Jordan where herds of goats and sheep scale ravines and peaks. It doesn’t need much fuss: ten minutes spent baked in the ash on each side, and it’s ready to be consumed, just like it was done 14,500 years ago.

Herds of goats and sheep scale the ravines and peaks of the Dana Biosphere Preserve.

At Feynan eco-lodge, guests can experience aspects of traditional culture like making Bedouin bread and coffee with locals.

Situated in the Fertile Crescent—the soil-rich swath of land alongside the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile rivers where the onset of agriculture helped the world’s first civilizations flourish—Jordan has a long tradition of living off the land. It is here, in the remote northeastern region of Harrat al-Sham, known as the Black Desert for its striking basalt boulders, that archeologists made an astonishing discovery a few years ago. In a stone-lined fireplace, much like the open fire pit used by Daiffallah, they unearthed evidence of the world’s oldest known bread, later found to be made from a type of wild wheat called einkorn.

Before this find, most scientists believed that our hunter-gatherer ancestors settled around 10,000 years ago, at the dawn of the Neolithic age, to start cultivating crops and using wheat to make bread. But the discovery of the Black Desert breadcrumbs predates this moment by at least 4,000 years, signaling that perhaps humans were bakers first, and settled farmers and cultivators second.

Just like the einkorn found in the Black Desert, Jordan’s native baladi (meaning local) wheat varieties tend to be harder than the common wheat used to make commercial breads. As a result, bread made with this wheat gets stale faster than the soft wheat varieties. Across the Fertile Crescent, this has shaped the tradition of turning days-old breads into a base for multiple dishes. Fatteh, for example, is a regional breakfast staple, for which torn bread is served over a generous helping of yogurt, tahini, and chickpeas to soften it up. Then there is fattoush, a medley of finely chopped fresh tomatoes, radishes, and cucumbers with toasted or fried bread chunks.

In the small city of Madaba, south of the sprawling capital Amman, Feryal Kardasheh runs a family restaurant, Hikayet Sitti, from her grandparents’ home. On the restaurant’s shaded terrace, she serves—alongside other dishes like stuffed grape leaves and mezze—a traditional Palestinian dish called musakhan. Tinged with the bright red hue of the sumac spice, this fragrant meal of rice, chicken, pickled onions, and nuts would not be possible without taboun, a flatbread that forms its base. “Taboun is thicker than other breads, so it can hold the weight and the juice of musakhan well,” explains Kardasheh. For Hikayet Sitti, she sources her taboun, a flour-water-and-yeast staple for Jordan’s Palestinian communities, from countryside bakeries, where it is baked to perfection in tandoor-like ovens.

Traditional breads are on the menu at Petra Kitchen, an organization that runs cooking classes near the ancient Nabatean city of Petra.

Even mansaf, the king of Jordan’s dishes that’s recently been inscribed into UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list, would not be the same without bread. Served at communal gatherings like weddings and birthdays, this famed Bedouin dish of rice, lamb, and fermented dried yogurt called jameed is usually prepared in large quantities. Eating it is a social, festive event. “While guests gather around the table, mansaf can get cold,” says chef Raed Hasanat from Petra Kitchen, an organization that runs cooking classes near the ancient Nabatean city of Petra, a UNESCO World Heritage site. “So we cover it with shrak.” Shrak is a Bedouin bread that works well with mansaf because its wafer-thin texture does not overwhelm the dish. It also doubles up as a platter. While the bottom layers of shrak soak up mansaf’s juices, the pieces on the top can be used as a plate: It’s customary to eat mansaf with your hands, scooping up the meat, rice, and jameed into a ball in a skillful practice called dahbara, but it takes practice.

Although the tradition of baking bread with baladi hard wheat flour stretches back millennia, most of the breads found in Jordanian cities today are made with refined flour imported from the US. “In the 1970s, Jordanian baladi wheat farmers were essentially pushed out by cheaper US flour that flooded our market,” says Lama Khatieb, co-founder of Al Barakeh Wheat, an urban farming collective based in Amman that’s working on restoring Jordanians’ connection to their land—and to native wheat. “Before that time, we didn’t know what white flour was,” she adds.

When Khatieb and her co-founder Rabee Zureikat first started interviewing farmers who still had local wheat knowledge, she kept hearing the phrase, “Al Barakeh is lost.” While no one could give her a clear answer on what Al Barakeh was, the essence of it was explained by one of the farmers, Abu Tarik Nuaimat. During their first planting season, he instructed Khatieb to use “15 kilograms of wheat for planting and leave two kilograms for birds and ants.” “He said if you share what you have with every living thing around you, you’ll get Al Barakeh, the prosperity of the harvest,” she recalls.

Caitlin Morton

Melinda Joe

Steph Koyfman

Lilit Marcus

The Al Barakeh project started just before the pandemic as a micro experiment planting various types of baladi wheat like Hourani and Nab Al Jamal on a small plot of land in the village of As-Salt. Today, it has expanded to include over sixty Ammani families who rent plots in the city and work together to sow and reap the wheat. The harvesting is done by hand, using a sickle, because “this is how relationships take place,” adds Khatieb. Al Barakeh is also building a new mill and starting to supply their hard wheat flour to bakeries, restaurants, and hotels around town. “This is our history,” muses Khatieb. “All Jordanians have ancestors who were great farmers but we went through some kind of collective amnesia where we forgot this part of our story.”

Bedouin souvenirs sold on the side of the King's Highway that connects Jordan's north to its south

A meal at Petra Kitchen includes mansaf, the 'king of Jordan’s dishes,’ that's covered with shrak, a Bedouin bread, to keep it warm.

Other organizations are following suit. Inside Amman’s leafy Al Weibdeh neighborhood, a stone's throw away from its boisterous downtown, the non-profit Jordan Heritage offers an opportunity to engage with this process of reviving ancient wheat and other forgotten ingredients and foods. Its spacious outdoor restaurant serves recipes you’d be hard-pressed to find elsewhere on Jordan’s touristic trails, like taboun that’s made from the earthy local Gatmah wheat or bazina, a Nabatean version of fettuccine made with yeast-free sun-dried dough that’s cooked in fermented yogurt. On its menu, you’ll read stories about the women of the city As-Salt who’d gather around a mountain of freshly ground wheat, singing and rolling the flour into basbasoan, a pearl-sized handmade pasta. In addition to the restaurant, Jordan Heritage hosts AirBnb experiences and workshops, has produced documentaries on the country’s heritage, and even operates a historical guesthouse, Madhafa, in As-Salt.

According to Al Barakeh’s Khatieb, the ingredients for bread, particularly wheat, are considered sacred in Jordan. For centuries, wheat was not only the main source of food and calories, but also the social fabric that held communities together. Harvesting wheat was communal work, and that communal spirit, Al Barakeh, started with the planting and extended to every step of the chain: from leaving the extra grains to birds and ants to baking breads crucial for the meals that nourished entire communities.

“The culture of Al Barakeh sees the individual as part of the whole, rather than as separated from others. We learned that when you take away the main crop, the main source of food from people, you disintegrate the entire community,” says Khatieb.

“It’s easy for us to say that we are preserving the wheat,” she adds. “It’s actually the other way around. The wheat is preserving us.”

Amman looms beyond a wheat field planted by the Al Barakeh project, which seeks to revitalize the market for an ancient local wheat and build food security in Jordan.