The Chronicle Herald (Provincial)
Chef Assil celebrates connection and community in Arabiyya
Transforming flour, water, salt and yeast into sustenance may be an everyday occurrence in bakeries the world over. But the feat is no less impressive in its ubiquity.
Palestinian-syrian chef Reem Assil sees bread as “living, breathing” alchemy and believes that everyone should experience working with dough.
“I’m really fascinated with alchemists and alchemy. I don’t know if it’s because my mom was a biochemist — I just have it in me,” says the owner of Reem’s California, a bakery with locations in Oakland and San Francisco.
There is a science to breadbaking, she adds, but once you figure out the basics, “it’s an ever-evolving thing and you get to evolve with it.”
As Assil chronicles in her first book, Arabiyya (Ten Speed Press, 2022), this is how her bread education unfolded. She spent years getting acquainted with dough while she mastered Arab bread-baking techniques and experimented with natural fermentation (i.e., using a sourdough starter: a mix of flour and water fermented by lactic acid bacteria and wild yeast).
Bread is a common connector between rich and poor, says Assil. It’s also a cultural through-line, which is apparent whenever she teaches Arab bread-baking workshops: No matter their heritage, people tend to value the memories evoked by the fresh-baked aroma most of all.
Being able to provide that connection for people drew Assil to bread; a food that she finds endlessly interesting.
“Every time that I make dough, it’s going to come out a little bit different. It’s going to taste a little bit different. I think it’s kind of analogous to my life,” says Assil, laughing. “The different ingredients you put into it and the different elements. So, I think that attracts me.”
In Arabiyya, Assil recounts her family’s journey from Palestine (on her maternal side) and Syria (on her paternal) to the United States and charts her path from community organizer to entrepreneur.
It stands apart from many other cookbooks, not only in the openness of Assil’s storytelling but the balance she strikes between baking and cooking. Cookbooks typically emphasize one or the other: Arabiyya gives equal weight to both.
“I tried to make it as accessible as possible,” says Assil. “In the Middle Eastern genre, they skip over bread a lot. Like, it’s really fast with not a lot of instruction.”
Bread is at the heart of many of the book’s 100-plus recipes, which range from spice mixes and pantry snacks to small and main plates, pickles and preserves. Assil offers a primer on bread-baking basics, features two master recipes (one sourdough, the other yeasted), as well as chapters dedicated to savoury and sweet breads and pastries.
She pokes fun at the breadbaking world’s use of Eurocentric terminology, which initially alienated her when she started baking professionally. Through her clearly written direction and process photos, Assil makes breadmaking welcoming instead of exclusive.
“A lot of baking books can be really intimidating. The components of bread are very simple; the ingredients are very simple. But if you don’t have the intuitive knowledge of how to work with dough, how to troubleshoot things, it can be very frustrating for the home cook,” says Assil.
With hand-rolled phyllo dough, laminated quince-andcheese pastry rolls, and Aleppan braided brioche, “there are some recipes in the baking section that definitely show off my nerdy baking side,” she adds. “But I tried to vary the recipes so that there’s a little something for everyone.”
A 2010 trip to Lebanon and Syria with her father and sister spurred Assil to quit her job as an organizer and enrol in culinary school. Inspired by the corner bakeries she visited during her travels, she saw an opportunity to build community around an Arab bakery at home in California.
“I really wanted to work with my hands and come out of my brain a little bit after 10 years of trying to understand why the world was so unjust,” says Assil. “So, when I went to the Arab world and I discovered these places, I think that gave me a container to be able to describe to my family, ‘This is the mission. This is the end goal.’ It gave me that drive.”
When Assil opened Reem’s in 2017, she didn’t anticipate the attention and accolades that followed (which included James Beard Award nominations). She began fielding offers to write a cookbook but, as a trained baker, was occupied with learning how to run a restaurant.
“(I thought), ‘This is a chance for Arabs to really tell our story through our foodways.’ But I certainly did not have the capacity. I had, in that time, opened three restaurants and had a child,” Assil said.
When she left her fine dining partnership with Daniel Patterson, Dyafa, in 2019, Assil was in the spotlight once again. With the heightened media coverage came a renewed desire to tell her own story.
“I felt like my narrative was sort of getting away from me and so I really wanted to reclaim that narrative of my experience being an Arab woman in diaspora,” says Assil. “How I found my purpose through food, and to debunk whatever tropes or romantic stereotypes people had of what it meant to be an Arab woman.”
The title of the book, Arabiyya, translates to Arab woman. Assil wrote it as an homage to the women who came before her, those who are in her life now and the women who will come after her.
“I know that I don’t come in a vacuum. I know that a lot of people struggled before me to have a platform,” she says.
Assil asked her aunt, Emily Katz, to help her write the book. Food writing was new to them; as they unearthed family stories, the project ended up being a “very cathartic” bonding experience. “And there’s something very funny about this white Jewish girl from Humboldt (County in California) writing this Palestinian girl from diaspora,” Assil laughs. “It made for a very unique story that really debunks a lot of the assumptions that people might have had about me and my upbringing.”