Bakers in Kabul toil to satisfy Afghans for whom ‘a meal is incomplete’ without bread

Round or curved, plain or sprinkled with sesame seeds or sugar, flatbreads are turned out in their thousands every day at a bakery in Kabul

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Afghan baker Jamil Ghafori (left) and his staff preparing traditional flatbreads, called naan, at a bakery in Kabul. For many in Afghanistan , bread makes up the largest part of their meals. Photo: AFP

Published: 11:15am, 30 Dec 2024

Every day before dawn, Jamil Ghafori gets to work on the floor of a cramped Kabul bakery with five other men churning out thousands of traditional flatbreads – the staple of every Afghan meal.

The common bread Ghafori has made for 27 years is fluffy with a satisfying crunchy edge, where each piece has been slapped onto the wall of an earthen oven sunk into the floor.

Afghans rely on bread, he says. So he and his colleagues, each in charge of one part of the five-step process, take pride in their work.

“We always try to provide good bread for people, our customers must be satisfied,” he said in the north of the Afghan capital.

Afghan baker Jamil Ghafori (second from right) and his staff prepare traditional flatbreads, known as naan, at a bakery in Kabul. Photo: AFP

An Afghan baker prepares the dough for making flatbreads. At Jamil Ghafori’s bakery in Kabul, each step in the five-step process of making bread is assigned to a different baker. Photo: AFP

Piles of bread – some round, some stretched into canoe-like shapes, some sprinkled with sesame seeds or sugar – overlap like roof tiles lining the slanting display windows of bakeries in the Afghan capital, whose bright lights pour out over streets on seemingly every corner.