Hanif Sadr grabs a baseball-size chunk of dough, flattening it into a circle. He’s making kolaas, a yeast-raised Iranian flatbread of his youth, at his Berkeley home and test kitchen. The fingers on his right hand curl down, making it look like a bear claw. As his left hand deftly rotates the circle of dough, his bear claw flattens and stretches it.

“This is called panje kesh, an Iranian technique to shape the dough with fingers,” he tells me.

It’s ready when it becomes a large, thin oval, an expanse of dough hills and valleys from the pressure of his hand. His bear claw pats on a glaze made of milk, yogurt, turmeric and olive oil, and he then sprinkles the top with poppy seeds, dried nettles and dried wild garlic.

“In Northern Iran, women bake kolaas inside of a tannur,” he says, referring to a ground oven made from clay, also known as a tandoor. “But here I only have an oven and a preheated sheet pan.”

It’s a balance Sadr has to strike daily as he cooks the Northern Iranian cuisine of his childhood at Komaaj, his pop-up restaurant and catering company in Berkeley. He gets what he can from his family farms and producers in Northern Iran, like hogweed and a large variety of teas, everything from ceylon to borage flowers. Sometimes he has to adapt to American ingredients, but to Sadr it’s more important to introduce Americans to the unique regional cuisine of Northern Iran than to be authentic.

“So many Americans just think of kebobs when it comes to Iran,” he says. But the subtropical climate in Northern Iran is different from other regions, as is its food. In the lowlands near the Caspian Sea, they grow tea, citrus and rice, which is turned into flour and used to make naturally gluten-free breads. In the Alborz Mountain range, you’ll find wheat, herbs, borage flowers, cattle and sheep. Residents eat seasonally, which means vegetarian dishes are popular, as is garlic and sour flavors, which come from sour orange or sour pomegranate molasses. “A lot of the same foods that grow in Northern Iran grow well in the Bay Area, which is why I wanted to bring it here,” Sadr says, as he stretches the second piece of kolaas. He also wants to show that despite the historically tumultuous relationship between Iran and the United States — most recently, the travel ban list set by President Trump — food is a great way to connect.

Back to Gallery Bay Area chef circles back to childhood with Iranian breads 9 1 of 9 Photo: Hanif Sadr 2 of 9 Photo: Hanif Sadr 3 of 9 Photo: Hanif Sadr 4 of 9 Photo: Hanif Sadr 5 of 9 Photo: Santiago Mejia, The Chronicle 6 of 9 Photo: Santiago Mejia, The Chronicle 7 of 9 Photo: Santiago Mejia, The Chronicle 8 of 9 Photo: Santiago Mejia, The Chronicle 9 of 9 Photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle

















Sadr never meant to be a chef. He was trained as an engineer and came to the Bay Area to get his master’s degree in sustainable energy in 2013, but his program was canceled. He took a job as the cook for Golestan, a Persian immersion preschool in Berkeley, his first professional kitchen experience. As he cooked unprocessed, organic foods with local produce and grass-fed meat, he realized that he could support sustainability and the environment by cooking thoughtfully.

In 2015, Sadr got a crash course in Northern Iranian cuisine from his family cook, Baaji, which in turn inspired his first pop-up. He spent a few months in Northern Iran studying the food with local chefs, foragers and producers, and is turning the footage from the trip into a funded documentary. In addition to pop-up dinners with Feastly, he hosts a Caspian Tea Party at Alembique Apothecary in Berkeley with his own blends of North Iranian tea, and he has plans to start a packaged-food business.

Today, though, his focus is on bread, and kolaas has special meaning to Sadr. As a kid, his family would eat kolaas hot out of the tannur at their farm in Raamsar. The bread would function as a snack before dinner, usually with a small platter of cheese, herbs, jam or honey, and tea.

“The women working on the family farm would bake every night, and it was hard work,” Sadr says. In his current kitchen, his oven is set to 375 degrees, but that family farm tannur — into which the women plunge their arms repeatedly — got as hot as 900 degrees. The bread is still made on the farm in the same way, and in his living room is a photograph of the women baking. When Sadr’s kolaas comes out of the oven, it’s perfectly browned from the glaze, with a bumpy top thanks to his panje kesh technique. It’s crunchy like a thin-crust pizza, which makes it the perfect vehicle to transfer his garlicky fava bean stew, baghali tareh, into the mouth.

Next up is a crisp turmeric cracker Sadr invented, which he tops with a feta-herb-walnut spread and shaved slices of radish. He also makes a Northern Iranian version of komaaj, a rice flour bread-cake hybrid that he cooks two ways: on a stove as a rustic pancake, and baked in a cake pan in the oven. The tender bread is a sunshine-y yellow thanks to turmeric and freshly ground saffron, and he tops it with dried rose petals and a combination of orange blossom honey and orange syrup.

It’s one of his favorite breads from childhood, one his grandmother would make for his birthday. He loves it so much that as a kid, he told her that one day he would be “super rich and hire a chef to make komaaj for me every morning.” And indeed, Sadr has grown into the chef of his dreams, championing Northern Iranian cuisine and making all of the komaaj he can eat.

Leena Trivedi-Grenier is a freelance writer living in the Bay Area. Follow her on Twitter at @Leena_Eats. Email: food@sfchronicle.com

Iranian breads of the Bay Area

Bread, or na a n in Farsi, is an essential part to any Iranian meal. As chef Hoss Zare, an Iranian Azerb a ijani, told me, “If you take barbari bread away from an Azerbaijani, they die. They eat bread with bread.”

Luckily, the Bay Area is home to some great examples of the various Iranian breads. In addition to kolaas and komaaj, Hanif Sadr also makes kestha, a nonleavened flatbread made with rice and wheat flour, and butternut squash.

Chef Faz Poursohi, owner of the Faz restaurant empire (which includes locations in San Jose, Sunnyvale, Pleasanton, Oakland and Danville), has fond memories of growing up in Soh, Iran, on his family farm. They grew their own wheat, stone- ground it at his grandfather’s watermill and use d the family tannur to bake it into barbari and taftun (taboon) breads. He now makes barbari in his restaurants. “It’s a yeast-raised bread with a similar texture to foccacia,” he says, “that you can glaze (with a flour paste called roomal) and top with sesame seeds or poppy seeds before baking.”

Zare, who grew up in Tabriz, Iran, recalls eating freshly baked barbari and sangak, another popular Iranian bread that he says is traditionally cooked on a bed of small river stones. This, he explains, creates different thicknesses and textures in the bread, some crispy and some chewy. He reminisces about eating those breads as a child with a local baker on his family orchard. Another farmer, who raised sheep and goats on the same farm, would give him tea and top the bread with his wife’s homemade preserves and his own kaymak, a rich dairy product similar to clotted cream: “That bread, that cream, that tea, his hand, hardworking and covered with scars, the smell of fresh grass and animals around you, it’s the best place to eat bread,” says Zare, who teaches Persian cuisine (including his own barbari bread) around the country for Bon Appetit Management Company.

Zare also likes to bake shirmal, a leavened sweet bread that has regional variations throughout Iran. It can be made with cardamom or stuffed with dates and walnuts, and it’s finished with a glaze made from milk, saffron and egg yolk. Locally, the Persian grocery store-bakery Super Tehran in Concord sells fresh shirmal a few times a month. Yeganeh Bakery in San Jose makes sangak from scratch, but instead of using river stones they have an oven with a conveyor belt that has bumps on it to mimic the process.

— L. T.-G.