Avigail of Avigail Bakery, wild wheat bread and sourdough bread baked in Jaffa
In the the beautiful city of Jaffa resides a fabulous bakery home to a variety of incredible bread. Avigail’s Breads is a sustainable bakery that produces fresh loaves everyday and challah on Fridays. I checked out Avigails Bread and asked Avigail some questions about her business.
Avigail Dahan is an incredible and knowledgeable baker who decided to switch from being in the film and television industry to baking bread. Avigail use to be a very athletic person. She would run and swim until she felt like she didn’t have the energy to sustain her lifestyle: “I had no power,” Avigail claimed, and she knew she wanted to find a way to eat bread that would work for her.
After years of being vegan and not being able to eat bread, Avigail wanted to change her diet so that bread can be incorporated into her diet in a healthy manner. Once she learned over the course of the pandemic the health benefits that bread can provide, Avigail opened Avigail’s Bread in Jaffa and her business has been blooming.
Avigail began her journey at home, using Russian pans to craft a recipe that would work for her. The pans are important to her because it helps keep the process natural and efficient. Her recipes are traditional and stem from a variety of wild wheat.
Her wheat comes from 4 different wheat companies. She picks from the mill the best type of bread, such as white, rye and wheat. The mills she gets her ingredients from are all local from Israel. One of which she gets from a mill in Haifa. Read this story on emmer.
Some bread alternatives that Avigail’s Bread has in store are gluten free, wheat, rye, and others that can be form fitted into ones diet in order to compensate for any dietary restrictions. In addition, Avigail allows her customers to come into the bakery and try different breads she has in stock. With that, she also has an assortment of spreads that customers can put on the bread and try it for themselves to ensure they take home what they like.
Wheat contains 25 kinds of proteins
Another important thing Avigail likes to tell her customers is that wheat (unlike what’s talked about in popular culture) is very nutritious. According to Avigail, white wheat has almost 25 kinds of protein and should be utlized in the everyday diet.
Coming from America, my whole life has been infiltrated with crazy diet culture and obsessions over what you should and shouldn’t eat. Once I arrived in Israel, I started taking notice of how normal it is to eat carbs here. For breakfast, it is normal for Israelis to eat bread with chocolate, which is something that would be almost criminal in American diet culture.
It was so intriguing to see how normal it is to eat bread in Israel and to hear Avigail’s side of the story. Once you know the source of your bread, the ingredients and how to eat it in moderation, bread can be a safe and enjoyable food.
Avigail Bread staff
Now that Avigail can safely eat bread, she enjoys Borodinsky bread, a dark brown sourdough bread made from rye, and Avigail inspires others to introduce bread back into their diet.
Not wasting any part of the loaf
She sells to her customers full loaves and half loaves so that they don’t need to worry about wasting bread they do not finish. She urges her customers not to freeze unused bread and instead to come back whenever and purchase a fresh loaf. One way Avigail guarantees a delicious slice of slightly stale bread is to quickly run it under water, throw it in a hot oven for a minute and you will have a like new slice.
What I was most surprised to learn from Avigail is her way of creating a sustainable system of baking. Avigail uses the leftovers from bread not sold in the store and is able to compress it down. She explained the fisherman’s bread, using the dry and unusable bread, grounds it, shreds, and is able to remake a fresh new loaf. It originated in Normandy, Avigail said. The wheat is fermented, meaning you put it in water and dry it at low temperatures. This creates a nutritious new loaf that is sustainable and still delicious. It can also be grounded into flour and used for other recipes such as schnitzel.
Shelves with fermentation crock pots, jams, sauces and more.
When I asked Avigail what she feels is the biggest environmental issue in Israel, she feels that more important than anything else is being nice to each other, being able to listen to each and come to agreements.
No matter what your dietary restrictions are, Avigail has a bread for you so that you can incorporate the health benefits of 2 slices a day into your diet. Avigail urges for people to come into her bakery and ask her about what bread will work for them based on their own dietary restrictions and allergies. Her ambition is that her customers find the bread that they can enjoy without the unpleasant side effects most bread can cause in their bodies. She joins a group of new Israeli bakers making a living on bread.
Eager to make your own sourdough? We have a sourdough guide that Miriam developed over time.
Author: Danielle Meyers
Danielle Meyers is an Environmental Science major at the University of Massachusetts Amherst interested in environmental law and policy. She took an interest in studying the environment once she learned about the worsening effects of climate change. Danielle enjoys going on adventures, the beach, shopping, and seeing friends and family. She is reporting from Tel Aviv in the Summer of 2023 to to learn, discover, and inspire change in the community and throughout the Middle East.
