When I was a child, my grandmother used to make Moroccan bread baked on pebbles for special occasions which she would fill with pieces of fat and cooked meat and a lot of paprika, onion and cumin.
I remember that on the holidays and weekends my parents, aunts and uncles and the children and grandchildren would excitedly gather around the big dinner table every week, and I remember my grandfather would slice the loaves and hand out the bread to everyone in the family.
Pieces of the bread that fell from his hands onto the table or on their way were snapped up within seconds by small and skillful hands and there were smiles of success and mischievousness on the faces of the grandchildren who managed to get their hands on crumbs or pieces of the bread.

About 20 years ago, one of the metamorphoses of this bread came into my life when I discovered a Foreen oven in a yard in Migdal which is situated close to the Sea of Galilee.
The bottom of the oven was padded with pebbles from the Sea of Galilee and its sides were heated by burning coals. A pan containing a meat casserole and chard in cumin was resting on the pebbles and like any adult who carries his childhood with him over into his present life, there in that yard, I missed seeing my grandfather slicing the bread.
When I went home that day, I spread a few pebbles around in our kitchen oven and baked bread on them made from thin dough.
The result was far from perfect and in fact, it was a big failure. The dough stuck to my hands and tore into pieces and it also stuck to the pebbles. Almost everything went up in flames, and the amounts of flour that were needed to straighten out the crookedness were clearly unreasonable.
My mother came to help and she suggested teaching me the secrets of thin dough. By about the tenth loaf, my body learned the movements required for quick and gentle kneading.

The shape of the distribution of the pebbles has a quality that a straight baking pan doesn't have. The varied surfaces of the pan enable the bread to be baked on them and to rise in a way that is not uniform.
The result is very special, light, soft bread with a high absorption capacity. Its flavor is relatively neutral so that the flavor of the food that comes with it is enhanced.
Today, I bake bread from thin dough every chance I get and I think about how to enable other people to have this primal experience.
I believe that a good baker isn't a baker who prepares bread for more people, but a baker who enables more people to bake bread for themselves.
I've been working diligently for about ten years on the development of a ceramic baking pan that will link the modern kitchen with the ancient recipe.

For those of you who tour around Israel, I hardily recommend that you come to the Western Galilee to a place called Hosen and when you get there, look for a little village bakery where you'll find Rimona baking bread on pebbles whose flavor will win your heart, I promise.