Flour, water, and leavening are the origins of every dough, two-thirds of which originate from the same source: Ancient Egypt. The first wheat grain on record, the first naturally leavened bread, the first “sourdough” — all Egyptian. In Egypt, as in elsewhere, bread is far from being a ‘simple’ product. It is so deeply rooted within Egyptian culinary culture that the Egyptian word for bread ‘eish literally means ‘life’.

Over time, this essential food form traveled and spread across the globe, transforming at each destination to form new roots and traditional techniques guided by the geography, terroir and needs of each adoptive region.

While the resulting creations may seem vastly different in their modern forms, they all stem from the same set of age-old principles. Each rendition is an innovation on the classic form, re-birthed through the renewal of traditions and melding of newly-acquired knowledge. Fermentation & natural leavening start off as Shamsi bread, a sun-proofed loaf baked in a mud oven, and grow to become ‘artisanal sourdough’. Lamination became croissant in France, feteer meshaltet in Egypt and, at the hands of the 4th-generation Italian master pastry chef Torta Bella – an ingenious hybrid of classic panettone. 

That master chef is Andrea Tortora, a passionate advocate of sustainability, conscious consumption and above all respectful innovation within the pastry world. After accumulating an extensive international resume with some of the world’s biggest names, Andrea chose to dedicate his full focus to traditional Italian patisserie, creating modern interpretations of the classics by honoring tradition as the main source of knowledge and inspiration.

With tradition as the starting point and authentic representation as the goal, Tortora and Chef Omar Fathy of Otto — to name just one of his ventures — took a deep dive into technique, traditional knowledge, ancient flours and modern trends in Italy and Egypt.

The scene of their presentation was Fathy and Alia Helmy’s contemporary Italian restaurant Otto, which was transformed by the latter into a gallery of Egyptian ingredients and stories. The outside resplendent with spreads of seasonal local fruits, displays of local products used in the menu and a custom-built mud oven specially constructed to bake the Shamsi bread that formed the base of Fathy’s pieces. 

With the usual setup removed, the interior became a food lab for the chefs to showcase their experiments, a welcome disruption to the pace and architecture of the week thus far, with guests gathering around the stations to watch the food being prepared, asking questions and sparking up one or two heated debates over the provenance of certain elements. It was a riveting tête-à-tête of Mediterranean flavors at once competing and complementary.