Two daughters were born to Bella Bracha in old Ramat Aviv, Yona and Shelly, who learned from their mother the joy of Bulgarian baking. The smell of meselenki, those butter crescents for the glory of the community, the perfume of cinnamon and the crunch of nuts hiding in the yeast dough of the kuzonk. The two sisters studied at Alliance, both met their spouses there, and both, after the wedding, traveled to Moshav Sadot in the Yamit region, towards the land in the heart of Sinai. There, 51 years ago, Keren Agam, the youngest of Jonah's two children, was born.
"Women with a good hand," Keren tells me, whose dough album contains the work of Bulgarian girls in her family – Grandma Bella's Balkan baking, Shelly's challah and my mother's stirred cakes. Fragments of sweet life are folded between the pages of "What Do We Bake Today?", her second book currently being published by Modan Press.
"This book," she writes at the outset, "which is all I know about home, I dedicate to my mother, who worked so hard to build us one, and kept holding on tight even on days when everything seemed to fall apart. Mom, I love you."
Dedicated to Mother Jonah. Book cover,
We're sitting in the living room of our home in Jaffa, the city where she arrived more than 21 years ago with Amit (25), her eldest, who was a little girl at the time. A daughter from her first marriage to Avi Nissim, a member of the trance ensemble Astral Project, who to this day, years after the divorce, "is my family, good friends."
Everything in this house feels a little familiar. The kitchen, the living room, the windows, the balcony, everything she does within the setting where her blog, "Married to a Bakery," was born 11 years ago. This is where her baking workshops are held and here the cakes are photographed for Instagram, which during the first lockdown of the coronavirus changed her life.
At a time when an entire world translated the fear of the unknown into bread and cakes and people converted working hours to weights of flour and sugar, tens of thousands of followers were added to her Instagram account, which has since continued to grow. Friends sat down on the phone line to offer her cooperation and "after years of daily calls from the bank and constant pressure, I suddenly started making money from a world that until then I wasn't really sure I had anything to give. I know there's a lot of cancellation in talking about bloggers and influencers, about the fact that all they care about are more coupons, but for me this world changed my life."
"Home packed with pastries"
It was Hagit Billia, "Liza Panels", who pushed Keren to start advertising online. They met when she worked as a producer on the children's channel, and there she also met Nathan, her partner of 21 years with whom she had two children, Or (19) and Gur Adam (17) who walk in space, here and there intervene in the conversation, laughing at the reality in which cameras and strangers are part of this house. "To my private family," Keren concludes the book's opening dedication, "to Nathan and the children, who give me the privilege of maintaining a home full of pastries."
With a big hug, she accepted the camera's entrance into the house, loved the exposure, the short stories peeking into her daily routine. In changing swimsuits, she photographs the daily descent into the sea, which will show the whole world this body that knows muscle work all its life, and documents the team that works with her. Ever since Amit Shela became the producer of "Lake Enterprises", she has been exposed to a new world of collaborations, those that come from the worlds of fashion and beauty. The wild girl born in Sinai fell in love with makeup, jewelry and hair care.
Or and Gur Adam were born in Jaffa. "They both studied at Naamat's peace kindergarten, which is divided half-and-half between Jews and Arabs. From there, automatically, they continued to the Weizmann School, which has since closed. All the regional schools in Jaffa that do not have an 'anthroposophical' or 'democratic' title are very heterogeneous, by virtue of being located in such neighborhoods. Muslim, Jewish and Christian children sign up for them, because that's what there is. Once they started making a fuss about it, talking about it high-and-high, that's where it loses it."
No, the children or parents don't really speak Arabic even though they understand, especially a human puppy whose friends are mostly Arab. "They don't speak Arabic because the Arabs in Jaffa speak Hebrew," she says. "What do you want? Shall I tell them to speak Arabic for me? Living in Jaffa is very complex. It's a different culture, and if you love it, you have to love everything. You must not be afraid, because you will see and hear gunshots. You can try to change things, but from love for this place that will introduce you to lots of sectors and lots of cultures. And yes, not everyone will like you, but it will probably happen everywhere.
"I think what drew me to Jaffa was the story of the mixed population. When we lived in Sinai, the Bedouin were a very, very strong part of our economy and our family," she continues, and out of the golden mane of curls she never collects, a certain seriousness emerges in her laughing eyes. "If you can't go back to where you grew up, the visual memories sharpen in your head."
That's why she remembers so much of life in Moshav Sadot. "My family came there from Ramat Aviv, graduates of the Alliance School, you won't say which sons of farmers now, but my father, Yoel Agam, Chick Check got involved and did it well. He had a big farm."
"You can say a lot about their food, but the cakes of the bakers from the kibbutz are a solid, wonderful tradition." Lake, photo: Etiel Zion
The windows facing the Mediterranean Sea in gorgeous turquoise show a present in all its glory, as the imagination is filled with red patches of peppers and tomatoes in the fields that her father, Yoel, grew in the sands of Sinai in the 70s. In the green surrounding the moshav paths. In the gold of the dunes on which she would roll with the children of the moshav.
She remembers the wooden skateboard that Dad bought her, which was the first to reach the moshav and she, an extreme girl, would sail on it between the paths. I remember vacations in Sharm and the mattress her parents would put in the garage so that she and Yotam, her older brother, could sleep, because at the Agam family home, every trip to the center would start in the early morning.
"The work has become crazy"
Dad gave and Dad took. In the winter of 2020, on the last day of his shiva and after years of not really riding a skateboard, she tried to demonstrate to a human cub what a posture it was, stood on the plank, made the wrong movement, the leg twisted - and on the spot she felt like she had broken something.
"It was just when everything I was doing became crazy, I was on the verge of losing control," she recalls. "Just before it happened, I went out to get some air with Nathan. I told him that tomorrow I was going back to the inferno of life, and that I had no idea how I was doing it." Eight comb bones crashed into Karen's foot, and when doctors told her she had to change pace, she felt like this accident was coming from heaven, forcing her to shift gears.
Keren, who since her father threw her into the pool has been on the move all her life, in water and on land, had to say goodbye to the surfing to which she had been connected since the day she arrived in Jaffa. Only sometimes, when the sea is calm, does she go down with the paddle board and stand on it calmly, in the shallow water.
"I was 3 years old when my dad informed me and my brother that we would be athletes. My brother is an anchor in my life, pushing me to do, to success. Today he's a musician and yoga teacher and used to be a basketball player, but we both started out as swimmers. It was our father's dream, he was ready to turn worlds around for it. He would drive us to the pool at the President's Eshel for us to train.
"After the evacuation of Sinai, at the age of 13, they wanted to put me on the Israeli national team. They sent me to Wingate to see the team's training and that day I didn't swim, I just looked at them and announced that I wasn't ready. Today I was ready to switch to such a body, but then I was frightened by the triangles. I shattered my father's dream."
She was 10 years old when Sinai was evacuated. "I remember the last day. We drive in the car and I look back, seeing the seat for the last time. I don't remember the packaging or the farewells. I have some black on this matter. It was a place with great intimacy, and everything fell apart."
Wild children in the gold of the dunes. Keren and her older brother Yotam in Moshav Sadot in Sinai, photo: from the family album
Like all field evacuees, her parents were offered a choice between Ein HaBesor and Netiv HaTeen, but they decided they didn't want to settle any more. They wanted to go for something based and came to the Aharon Pavilion in Emek Hefer, but there, like Keren's dream of a swimming career, the yearning for stability was shattered.
Strawberries, gibson flowers and orchards couldn't help with the agricultural crisis brought on by the '80s. By 1984, the family was in debt of millions, and Yoel Agam, who had cooked his love for the family all his life, who maintained a library full of cookbooks, turned his passion into a profession and became a chef and restaurateur – a choice that only deepened the debt.
After that came the divorce, and a few years later Yoel left the country in search of a livelihood. At first as a chef in Azerbaijan, then to Moscow, where he remarried and had a son who is now 19 and whom Karen has never met. After that came an episode in Baku, and from there to the last stop in Sochi. There, at the height of COVID-76, at the age of <>, he died of cardiac arrest.
"Until his last day, he worked in the kitchen," she says, "and that day he got up in the morning to go to work, asked his wife to make him a cup of tea, and when she returned he was no longer alive. We did a WhatsApp video minyan after years of barely seeing each other because none of us had money to fly."
Yoel Agam was kidnapped into his world at the beginning of his daughter's success. In the first breaths that financial peace knows how to bring. His girl, who by the age of 11 was handing out newspapers, collecting eggs in a chicken coop and accompanying older women on walks along the moshav paths, left school in tenth grade, determined to prove that she could even without formal schooling.
Seven months after he died, she published her first book, Married to a Bakery. In one of the interviews that accompanied the publication of the book, which she dedicated to her father, she told how he tried to convince her to study cooking and baking professionally, to deepen the basics, but she decided not to.
Why? Didn't feel like understanding the science of baking, the processes? Isn't that a toolbox that increases outcome control?
"Either I'm superficial and I really don't feel like going into depth, or I don't really care. I'm burnt out on home baking. Even when I go to restaurants, even when I'm in Paris, layers and creams don't do that to me. If already cream then in profiteers. I've been crazy about them ever since I used to go with my dad to a restaurant that was in the Dolphinarium. On the dessert table stood a puff tower with vanilla cream."
"Longing for intimacy"
Keren says she understands the price of her choice, such as the audition to which she was invited, to explore the possibility of joining the judging panel in a prime-time reality show. How she passed the first stage, but in the second she no longer found herself in all the professional terminology.
"I'm not trying to play it, I'm not interested in knowing how to temper chocolate. I don't care as much as it should interest whoever does it. If I learn and succeed it will turn me on that I have succeeded in tempering, but in the end my love is for the very simple things - and I am loyal to them. That's what does it to me. I see a cake stirring out of the oven with the crack on top, and I'm fainting. I sprinkle powdered sugar on top and think I've just seen the most beautiful thing in the world," she says, as I give my teeth in a wonderful honey cake seasoned with a restrained balance, careful about the dignity of sugar. Her followers, by the way, all speak in favor of her ability not to overdo it with the sweet.
I am trying to bring the Japanese to the negotiating table. Those who, after years of research of Western confectionery, have become the greatest performers of stir-fried cakes, but even they will not sit Keren on the bench. "The Japanese are scientists, that's not my business. I have a very simple thing – to get a cake out of the oven and have a good smell and a feeling of home," she says. As soon as she realizes that I taste good, she adds that from the first time she brought a cake to some birthday, she relished the attention she received. She realized that delicious food is a way to win people's love.
"I have a good hand, that's all," she smiles when I try to find out what makes her such a precise baker, and I think that in the end she chose to follow the path of Mother Yona's food, whose entire work is courting those first smells that came out of the Bulgarian girls' ovens, and not after the fancy pastries hidden in the cookbooks from Abba Yoel's collection. The recipes that flock to European connoisseurs still await her in notebooks, which his second wife sent him after he died. Notebooks in dense handwriting that one day, when less painful, you will dive into.
"I think that beyond my fondness for pastries, cakes, cookies, and sweets," Keren writes in the book's introduction, "there has always been my longing to be part of the homeliness and intimacy created around food in every home. I was curious about other people's homes, and the fact that some of them baked the same pastries regularly appealed to me. It was the pastries that told me the story of these families."
In kibbutzim and moshavim, baking was a matter that encompassed a fixed schedule. Each and every day of her baking, every day and his cake. Karen controlled everyone's schedule, knew exactly what day Bavaria was being prepared, and at which house she would receive a bag with a sweet bun that had just come out of the oven.
"There used to be no restaurants," she says, a date roll melting in my mouth. "No cafes and no pastry shops. When you're in a moshav, you're even more detached, relying only on the inner cuisine, whether it's good or not. You can say a lot about their food, but the cakes of the kibbutz bakers are a solid, wonderful tradition."
יד טובה ותלתלים
לא רק יד טובה ירשה קרן מאמא יונה. גם תלתלים. אור יורד על חלון הבית כשאנחנו מגיעות לעניין השיער הפזור, שעליו היא מתעקשת גם כשהיא במטבח. עם או בלי מצלמה.
"בתור ילדה היתה לי צמה עד הטוסיק 24/7, אסור היה לדעת שיש לי תלתלים. בגיל 10 אבא שלי לקח אותי לספר כל הדרך מסיני לרמת אביב כדי שיעשו לי גלח. הוא היה אדם הורס, אבל לא סבל את זה שיש לי תלתלים".
באותו יום חזרה הביתה "עם תספורת של בן", אבל התלתלים התעקשו, ולה המשיכו לאסוף את השיער. "בגיל 13 נכנסתי למיטה עם שיער עד המותן והייתי חולה. שפעת של שבוע. כשקמתי הסתכלתי במראה של פיירו שאבא קנה לי, הייתי אחרי שבוע שלא הסתרקתי והיו לי תלתלים שעפתי עליהם. מאותו יום לא אספתי את השיער עוד".
לכבוד סיפורים המקופלים בבצק, לכבוד אישה שלמדה את עצמה בלי לפחד, לכבוד חסדים שמזדמנים גם במקומות שבהם נדמה שהכל מתפרק, לכבוד כוחן של משפחות, לכבוד אימהות ובנות האופות את דרכן זו לזו ולכבוד שנה חדשה, שתהיה מתוקה אפילו טיפה יותר, אני מביאה בפניכם מתכונים של קרן אגם, אופה עם ידיים יוצאות דופן.
עוגיות מגולגלות במילוי תמרים וחלבה
קרן מוסרת ש"אני מאוד קשורה ומחוברת לאח שלי, ואם יש משהו שמשמח אותי זה לראות אותו מחסל בלי סוף מאפים שלי. זה קורה בעיקר עם עוגת רוגלך וקינמון ועם עוגיות מגולגלות עם תמרים, שהן לגמרי החולשה שלו ואני אוהבת להכין לו. המתכון הזה הוא אחד המתכונים הוותיקים בבלוג. הוא מבוסס על מתכון של אהובתי קרין גורן, שהאהבה שלי למה שהיא עושה היא אחת הסיבות שאני במטבח, אופה כל היום. הכמות במתכון מתאימה ל־4-3 רולדות.
צילום: איתיאל ציון,
החומרים:
√ 5 כוסות (500 גרם) קמח רגיל
√ 1/2 (120 מ"ל) כוס שמן
√ 1/2 כוס (120 מ"ל) מיץ תפוזים
√ 1 ו־1/2 כפות אבקת סוכר
√ 1 שקית אבקת אפייה
√ 200 גרם חמאה רכה
למלית:
√ 1/2 קופסה ממרח תמרים
√ 1/2 קופסה ממרח חלבה
√ 150 גרם אגוזי מלך קצוצים
לקישוט:
√ אבקת סוכר
אופן ההכנה:
במעבד מזון מניחים את הקמח, אבקת האפייה, אבקת הסוכר והחמאה ומעבדים בכמה פולסים קצרים. מוסיפים את השמן ומיץ התפוזים ומעבדים עד שמתקבל בצק אחיד. אם הבצק מעט פירורי, ניתן להוסיף עוד נוזלים.
יוצרים כדור ומניחים במקרר ל־15 דקות. בינתיים מחממים את התנור ל־180 מעלות. מוציאים מהמקרר, מחלקים את הבצק ל־4 חלקים שווים ומרדדים כל חלק למלבן בגודל 30×20 ס"מ.
מורחים על חצי מלבן ממרח תמרים ועל החצי השני (לאורכו) ממרח חלבה, מפזרים אגוזים קצוצים ומגלגלים לרולדה. אפשר להמיר את ממרח החלבה בעוד ממרח תמרים, ולמעשה אפשר למלא את הרולדות בכל ממרח אחר שאתם אוהבים.
מניחים בתבנית תנור מרופדת בנייר אפייה, מסמנים על הרולדות חריצים ומכניסים לתנור
ל־35 דקות. מוציאים מהתנור, מצננים מעט, מפזרים מעל אבקת סוכר ופורסים את העוגיות.
עוגת דבש לחה
הכמות במתכון מתאימה לתבנית עגולה (עם או בלי חור) בקוטר 24, או ל־2 תבניות אינגליש קייק
צילום: איתיאל ציון,
החומרים:
√ 2 כוסות + 2 כפות (300 גרם) קמח לבן רגיל
√ 1 שקית אבקת אפייה
√ 1 כפית אבקת סודה לשתייה
√ 1/2 כפית מלח
√ 1 כוס (360 גרם) דבש או סילאן
√ 2 כפיות קינמון
√ 1 כוס (200 גרם) שמן קנולה
√ 2 ביצים בגודל L
√ 1 כוס (200 גרם) סוכר חום בהיר או סוכר לבן
√ 1 כוס (240 מ"ל) מים רותחים
√ 1/2 כוס (120 מ"ל) מי ברז
לעיטור:
√ powdered sugar
How to prepare:
Preheat the oven to 170°C and grease a baking sheet thoroughly. In a medium bowl, mix boiling water with honey or silan and baking soda. After the honey has melted, add the tap water and mix well.
In a separate bowl, mix the flour, baking powder, salt and cinnamon. By the way, white flour can be replaced with white spelt flour or 50% whole wheat flour, and then the cake will come out less moist - but tasty.
In another bowl (last, I swear), whisk the eggs and sugar into a puffy and slightly light mixture. Add the oil, continue to whisk a little more, transfer half the amount of flour mixture to the egg mixture and mix well. Pour in the water mixture, stir again, and finally add the remaining flour. Mix well and transfer to a baking sheet. Note that the batter is very liquid - that's fine.
In a heated oven, bake the batter for 45-40 minutes, until a toothpick stuck in the center of the cake comes out and has moist crumbs on it. It is important to remember - cool well before extracting.
Like any honey cake, the cake only gets better with the days and will taste good even three or four days later, when it can be kept in the fridge or on the countertop.
Honey cookies
Photo: Etiel Zion,
The recipe makes 25-22 cookies.
Ingredients:
√ 1/2 cup (100 g) canola oil
√ 50 g soft or melted butter (for a fur version, you can replace the butter with an additional 1/4 cup of oil)
√ 1 cup (200 g) white or brown sugar
√ 1/4 cup (90 g) honey
√ 1 tsp. vanilla extract or puree
√ 1 L-sized egg
√ 2 and 1/4 cups (315 g) plain white flour
√ 2 level teaspoons (10 g) baking soda
√ 1/4 tsp. fine salt
√ 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
√ a few chopped nuts of any kind (if you like)
How to prepare:
Preheat the oven to 170°C and line a baking sheet with parchment paper. In the mixer, beat the oil, butter and sugar on high speed for a few minutes, until a slightly puffy mixture is obtained. Add the honey, vanilla and egg and continue to whip. Add the dry ingredients - flour, salt, baking soda and cinnamon (and nuts, for those who want) and mix well until a uniform mixture is obtained.
Using a spoon, place mounds of dough on top of the parchment paper (heaping spoonful at a time). Keep 3-2 cm spaced between cookies, as the cookies flatten while baking. Bake for 12-10 minutes, until the cookies are brown. Cool on a cooling grid and store in an airtight container at room temperature for five days.
Festive honeycomb
Photo: Etiel Zion,
The amount in the recipe is suitable for one large challah in an oven pan.
Ingredients:
√ 3 and 1/2 cups (500 g) bread flour/white/challah
√ 1 tablespoon dried yeast
√ 1 tsp (6 g) fine salt
√ 1/4 cup honey
√ 1/4 cup (50 g) white sugar
√ 4 L-sized eggs
√ 200 grams soft butter
√ 1/4 cup (60 ml) slightly warm milk
For coating:
√ 1 beaten egg
√ a few sugar crystals (if you like)
√ a little sesame seeds (if you like)
How to prepare:
In a mixer bowl put the flour, salt, yeast, sugar and eggs. Turn on the mixer and slowly add the butter and honey. Add the milk in a slow stream and knead for 12-10 minutes, until a smooth dough is obtained. It should be a little sticky, don't panic. He manages in the fridge at night.
After the night, transfer the dough to a slightly greased bowl and roll it in fat. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and a towel and let rise for the first time of an hour and a half at room temperature.
Divide the dough into two equal parts and roll each part into a very long strip. It is desirable that the strap be thick and plump in the center and thinner as you reach its edges. Place the straps on top of each other in an X shape and wrap them into a long screw. Roll the screw into a round comb, transfer the challah to a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and cover with a towel for about 45 minutes to an hour until it swells.
Preheat oven to 170°C. Brush the challah with the beaten egg and sprinkle with crystalline sugar or sesame seeds, bake for 40-35 minutes until it is brown-looking. Cool and wrap well until served.
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