Why Fattal's bread doesn't travel well

Image by graciepoo via Flickr

I have been eating bread from Fattal's Syrian Bakery in Paterson for decades, but have always wondered why I don't see it in served in restaurants or sold in grocery stores.


Down to my last two loaves and not wanting to drive the 20-mile round trip to South Paterson, I stopped for bread Tuesday at Sahara Stores on South Summit Avenue in Hackensack and discovered canned goods for the same prices as at Fattal's.

After I paid, I asked Mohsen Mekawi, the friendly proprietor, why he doesn't carry bread from Fattal's, which I consider the best in North Jersey. It's simple, he said. Fattal's is the only Middle Eastern bakery that doesn't credit him for unsold bread.

The others take back the day-old bread and deduct it from the bill for the loaves that are delivered fresh daily, he said. With Fattal's, he is stuck with old bread.

I bought two packages of Kings Pita (no hyphen), a thinner, larger, Lebanese-style pocket bread, for $1.50 each. The bread is baked in Paterson, unlike Fattal's bread, which is now baked in Fair Lawn.

But Kings Pita is only a stopgap, because it isn't as tasty or as good a value as Fattal's loaves. I'll have to try some of the other brands sold at Sahara Stores (despite the name, it's only one store) when I'm out of Fattal's and don't want to drive to South Paterson.

A new restaurant in South Paterson

Restaurants come and go in South Paterson, the Middle Eastern section of Paterson, and I had a terrific meal at one of them, Aleppo, named for the city in the north of Syria dominated by an old fortress. Two friends joined me for a filling lunch Tuesday before we shopped for pita bread, sardines and za'atar, the spice mixture of thyme and wild sumac. (This restaurant replaces Kafe Teria, one of my favorite Turkish places.)

We started with three appetizers: hummus, muhammara and fried kibbe (filled with ground meat and pine nuts), plus a small salad of diced cucumbers and tomatoes. We also shared an entree, the Aleppo mixed grill: chicken and lamb kabobs and ground-lamb skewers, plus rice, tomato, onion and a hot pepper. The appetizers were great, especially the kibbe, also known as torpedoes, and the poultry and meat in the entree were moist. Muhammara is a hot pepper-and-nut dip that originated in Aleppo, and this version was excellent.

After lunch, we stopped at Fattal's Bakery for pita bread, canned hummus and Moroccan sardines, and at Corrado's Family Affair supermarket for fettuccine with squid ink, ground cheeses and wine. Does any other supermarket have a bread aisle like the one at Corrado's, which carries Italian, Syrian, Turkish and other ethnic breads from two dozen or more bakeries? Our last stop was Taskin, the Turkish bakery, where I picked up two kinds of borek filled with cheese or spinach and cheese.

We couldn't find any place that served small cups of strong Turkish coffee, but noticed a new pastry shop called Sham (Damascus) that looked promising for our next visit.

North Jersey's pita bread wars

I have been eating pita bread all my life and can recall the enterprising salesman who hawked bread baked in Brooklyn from a baby carriage he pushed through the sun-splashed streets when we summered in Bradley Beach, part of the annual migration of Sephardic Jews. We called it Syrian bread back then and the loaves were a foot across.

When I moved to North Jersey three decades ago, I naturally gravitated to the Middle Eastern food bazaar in the South Paterson section of Paterson that straddles the Clifton border. As the years passed, great pita bread bakeries came and went, including Amir's, which formed the bread by hand and turned out a deliciously chewy loaf that stood up to stuffing with meat, salad, hummus and whatever else you could cram into it. In those days, no preservatives were used -- just flour, yeast, water and salt.

Today, only a few bakeries in Paterson sell the bread, including Fattal's and Nouri's. But for a decade or more, I have noticed a preference at some restaurants for the thinner, Lebanese-style pita over the slightly thicker Syrian-style loaf. No big deal you would think, but some Lebanese restaurants refused to buy freshly baked local pita and served thinner bread imported from Canada that often was cardboardy and didn't stand up to stuffing with food.

Fattal's loaf, although it is no longer baked in Paterson, has been my preferred bread since Amir's handmade, preservative-free, Lebanese-stlye pita disappeared. Despite the addition of calcium propionate to retard spoilage, Fattal's pita is pliable and stands up well to heating in the toaster. (Calcium propionate is an organic salt that inhibits the growth of mold and is considered one of the safest food additives, according to science.jrank.org.)

This week, I purchased a bag of Nouri's pita and found it is thinner and doesn't heat as well or stand up as well to stuffing. And since any meal can be eaten stuffed into pita, a pita you can't stuff is a pita you don't want.