Pet’s plates

Mekren’s Bakery
50, Triq Tal-Ħanaq,
Nadur, Gozo.
Tel: 2155 2342

Food: 8/10  
Location: 6/10
Service: 8/10
Value: 10/10
Overall: 8/10

Spikes in the price of bread have sparked historic revolutions as far apart in time as the French Revolution and the Arab Spring uprisings. Basic and beautiful, bread and whether we are getting enough of it is truly an existential issue. All over the world, with many or most meals, bread is served and eaten. It is hugely important, fundamental to life. It is a sacred food.

Bread is also a simple food, mixed from the most humble of ingredients – flour, water, yeast and some salt. In this way, flour and water are able to produce something that can sustain and nourish, that can keep us alive. In just one single grain kernel there lies contained all the nutrients necessary to support life: carbohydrates, proteins and minerals.

The word for bread is pregnant with meaning. It is no coincidence that in Egyptian Arabic the word for bread, aish, means life. After the yeast has been left to work its rising magic, in the heat of an oven, the alchemy occurs. This is the miracle of bread – the fact that a small amount of food is transformed into a much greater quantity.

The ancient Egyptians enjoyed the first loaf of bread around 6,000 years ago. Our inimitable Maltese bread wasn’t around yet, but the recipes in use today are centuries old. Bread can be worked into the simplest or the fanciest of creations and every country has its own distinctive form of bread, making it unique in shape, taste and texture.

Malta boasts some of the most exceptional bread in the world; you can’t help waxing lyrical about it. Apart from the iconic dark crusted ħobża, there is the beloved ftira – a round, semi-flat bread with a hole torn out of its centre. The crust provides a hard, crunchy covering for bread that has a glorious texture, spongy and softly chewy.

I was at Mekren’s Bakery to sample a ftira with a difference, an embellished ftira. This family-run bakery is one of Nadur’s most popular attractions. The traditional, Gozitan pizza made here is not pizza as we know it. It makes use of the disc-shaped ftira, sliced open and topped with mandolin-thin potatoes.

This potato base sounds like it would be rather heavy, but the resulting taste and texture is quite the opposite. The potato layer also soaks up excess grease and oil and makes the most appetising layer, on top of which any pizza can be prepared.

In Rome you’ll find a pizza that calls for a topping of nothing more than translucently thin potatoes, sliced onions and sprigs of rosemary. It is divine!

At Mekren, on this potato bed, any manner of fillings are lain. I loved the anchovy one with sliced tomatoes, ribbons of sweet onion, juicy capers, olives and fresh basil; a combination heavily redolent of the typical sfincione toppings of certain regions in Sicily.

Hot from the oven, the ftira base was simultaneously crusty and spongy with a satisfyingly chewy bite. The bread was good enough to be eaten by itself. The pizza cost just €5. The mixed tuna and anchovy ftira-pizza was equally as delicious. The generous mixture of fresh ingredients was heavenly and reminiscent of summers spent by the sea.

The crust provides a hard, crunchy covering for bread that has a glorious texture, spongy and softly chewy

Mekren’s Special consisted of fresh Gozitan cheeselets, Maltese sausage and black olives, all on a bed of crisp, wafer-thin potato. It was absolutely delicious. Each ftira base was completely covered with potatoes layered all the way to the edges. These were the best ones, the ones that brown, crisp and curl. The potato slices hidden by the pizza topping had a lush, unctuousness to them.

Mekren do regular pizza too and you’ll find favourites like capricciosa and pepperoni pizza on the menu. I had a taste of the enormous qassatat, but the ftajjar stuffed with cheese would have to wait for another visit.

I love being inside a bakery. There are few things nicer than the heavenly, tummy-tingling aroma of freshly-baked bread. In 2012, the Journal of Social Psychology went so far as to say that this particular smell makes people act nicer toward strangers. I’m not certain of the truth behind this hypothesis, but I will say this, soaking up the heady, yeasty aroma while queuing up at Mekren, I felt elated and, yes, I did manage to smile at a stranger or two. The heart of every traditional Maltese bakery is the forn – the huge, wood burning stone oven that is heated to monstrously high temperatures.

As you enter Mekren, you walk headlong into a tower of filled trays, lined with all the doughy goods that this bakery sells. The massive oven is built into the left wall and you can peer in to see its cavernous stone mouth. To your right, the bakers are hard at work.

The baker has always played a crucial role in the community with baking long considered an honourable job, a job that requires sweat and toil, but which is extremely fulfill-ing. Mekren still offers the traditional, age-old service of a community bakery, with people occasionally bringing in their own food to be cooked.

Of course, gone are the days when people are without ovens at home, but meat or potatoes flung into the fire and cooked in a burning hot oven still taste so much better with fantastic flavours and juices coaxed out by the flames.

At Mekren’s Bakery they have been known to roast a whole pig for a good, old traditional majjalata, along with much smaller dishes like rabbit and roast lamb.

You can settle down on a bench just outside, having grabbed a cold drink from the vending machine. A slice of something delicious in hand, you can sit and enjoy the slow pace of life that a Gozitan village has to offer.

And, on a balmy summer’s evening, with the ringing of crickets filling the air, that is exactly what I did. I didn’t desire a table or require a waiter. Mekren’s Bakery is to be found at the edge of Nadur, practically overlooking one of the most picturesque bays in the Mediterranean, Ramla l-Ħamra, the beach of the red sand.

Legend has it that the hillside caves above this stunning beach where home to Homer’s nymph, Calypso, who detained the wandering Odysseus for a number of years, beguiling him with her many charms.

I daydreamed on the bench outside Mekren, happily listening to all the bustle inside. But we are all called back. Odysseus by the pining Penelope and myself by the ferry that I was about to miss.

You can send e-mails about this column to petsplates@gmail.com.

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