Matnakash: Armenian Leavened Bread with Finger Grooves
I stood at the bread shelf in a Yerevan supermarket longer than bread usually calls for. The loaves lay there unbagged, almost as long as your forearm, and each one had a few lengthwise grooves in its crust, as if someone had stroked it with splayed fingers before baking. Which, as I found out later, is exactly what happened.
Matnakash (Armenian: մատնաքաշ) is a leavened wheat bread of Armenian cuisine: an oval or round loaf with an airy crumb, a golden crust and five or six grooves that the baker draws into the raw dough with his fingers. It shares a table with thin lavash, not a family - it's thick, soft and good for only a few days.
What Matnakash Means and Why Russians Call It Lavash
The name is the method. Mat is finger, kash is pulling, so matnakash is bread "pulled with the fingers" - named after the hand that shapes it. Outside Armenia almost nobody knows it by that name. In Russia it sells as "Caucasian lavash", an official label left over from Soviet days, and the Armenian Wikipedia patiently corrects it to this day: lavash is thin, dry and keeps for months, while this is a loaf that goes hard within a week. Matnakash is Armenian bread, not a shared Caucasian one - the neighbors bake their own finger-marked breads; they just call them something else. In Iran they have barbari, grooved down its full length, in Turkey they bake round ramazan pidesi for Ramadan, dimpled with fingertips, and in Georgia they slap tonis puri straight onto the wall of the oven. The whole region around the tandoor presses fingers into dough. The bread itself is Armenian, and the Iranians, who would have the easiest claim on it, list it among Armenian baked goods themselves.
The Youngest Bread in the Country
Lavash goes back to the Bronze Age and has been on the UNESCO list since 2014. Matnakash has neither. It has only been baked on any scale since the 1930s, when the city bakeries of Soviet Armenia started turning it out; it's the bread of apartment blocks and the morning line at the bakery, even if these days they bake it in a tonir, the Armenian clay oven, up in the southern mountains too. Travel sites throw in a legend that in the Soviet era the grooves stood for the furrows of a freshly plowed field. I found not a single piece of evidence for those furrows in Armenian sources; the grooves are a technique, not a manifesto. Anyone who wants to see a collectivized field in the loaf is welcome to; the baker mostly sees somewhere to put his fingers.
Sourdough, Fingers and a Few Days of Shelf Life
There is nothing inside it that a grandmother's kitchen couldn't handle: wheat flour, water, salt and sourdough starter or yeast. The star is the starter, tthkhmor, which ripens in Armenian homes for several days until it starts to smell right; it's what gives the crumb its big holes and a flavor that is full but not sour. The risen dough is divided into pieces that rest for a while, then get flattened; fingers press in the grooves and the tops are brushed so the crust turns golden. The starter and that damp crumb are exactly why matnakash doesn't keep: it lasts about as long as a fresh roll from the morning bakery back home in Czechia - crisp before noon, breadcrumb material the next day. In Armenia, lavash is dried and stored for months. Matnakash you buy for today.
It's an everyday bread, not a festive one: it sits in every shop, and in a restaurant it arrives in the basket next to the lavash whether you ordered it or not. You don't tear it the way you tear lavash, you cut it into wedges and use them to mop up the juices from khorovats or finish off a bowl of spas. Buy it loose, in the morning, and only for one day - matnakash from the day before yesterday is building material.
A Loaf from a Supermarket in Yerevan
I bought my matnakash in Yerevan, in an ordinary supermarket, at the same shelf I started with, and I carried it out of the store in my hand, as you can see in the photo above. The crust was thin and brittle and cracked under my thumb, the crumb underneath soft and damp, full of big holes, and it tasted faintly sweet from the starter and barely salty at all; I didn't need anything to go with it, it was fine on its own. In restaurants it came in the basket next to the lavash with everything I ordered. Lavash has millennia behind it and a UNESCO listing. Matnakash has a few days and ten fingers. At the table that was enough.
