Anjarian olive bread

bob married into Armenian-Lebanese ethnic cooking but not just any Armenians, these are hard headed Armenians descending from the Musa Dagh resistors to the 1915 genocide who later transferred en masse to Lebanon as refugees in 1936 to create the Bekaa Valley community of Anjar on the Syrian border just off the road from Beirut to Damascus (where Ani was born). Isgouhi's mom Nartouhi had been a newborn baby when her parents fled up to the eastern Mediterranean mountainous coast ridge of Musa Dagh awaiting rescue by the French navy. Many years later Isgouhi grew up in Aleppo, a Middle Eastern food mecca at least until the 2012 start of the Syrian civil war when much of the city was bombed by the Russian/Syrian forces. It was not until the mid 1960s that Ani's family resettled in Anjar but then had to immigrate to the US in 1976 for Ani's oldest brother to be able to give college a try when the Lebanese civil war shut down higher education.

In 2001 the ladies in the Apolstolic Church in Anjar self-published tranditional recipes from Musa Dagh and Anjar in Armenian and a frequently consulted copy is in the dr bob cooking team library. The other cooking team members read Armenian. Not bob. During our 2026 Snowmaggedon January Sunday with church cancelled and snowed in for the day, our cooking team decided to whip up some olive bread from this cherished cookbook. Meanwhile bob was curious if there were online tools to OCR (optical character recognition) the page images of this cookbook already scanned for sharing a few years earlier. While the cooking team went to work, bob experimented with the recipe translation, making the amazing discovery that Google Translate itself could handle the entire job. It turned out that Google Translate can work directly with images and translate into English! Wow! A bit tedious page by page but the door has opened.

 For dinner we had Isgouhi's lentil soup leftovers from the night before, and this soft olive bread was ideal for dipping in the soup, unlike the crusty whole wheat focaccia of the night before that was fatally crippled by not having any gluten on hand. A delicious outcome for both our stomachs and our minds.

The team did a half recipe based on the cookbook quantities.

ingredients

bread dough

7 c flour

1 c oil

2 eggs

3 T powdered milk

1 t salt

1 t sugar

1 t European yeast

filling

4 c pitted and chopped black olives

2 c chopped onion

1 t oil

1 t black pepper

instructions (Google image translate!)

1. Place the flour, oil, powdered milk, egg, salt and sugar in a bowl, then sprinkle with the yeast and sprinkle with lukewarm water.
2. Cover with a cloth and let the dough rise and rise.
3. Divide the risen dough into 4 balls and let it rest for about 10 minutes.
4. Roll each ball out to 1 cm thick and the diameter of a medium round plate.
5.  Prick the rolled out dough with a fork, spread the filling on it and roll it into a log.
6. Place in a previously greased plate and let it rest for a while until the dough rises.
7. Then brush with egg and cook.
8. After removing from the oven, let it cool a little, then slice and serve in a bowl.

notes

1. It is amazing how far software has come since the internet age began.
2. Poerek with Olives: (Olive bread): Page 124 of The Traditional Recipes of Musa Dagh and Anjar by the St. Paul Armenian Apostolic Church Ladies Union, Anjar, Lebanon (2001).
3. bob's Anjar page.
4. Isgouhi's lentil soup recipe.
5. Illustrations available.