Bread centrepiece of every meal

'We prefer to make it at home because it's baked with our own hands.'

Every day before dawn, Jamil Ghafori gets to work on the floor of a cramped Kabul bakery with five other men churning out thousands of traditional flatbreads - the staple of every Afghan meal.

The common bread Ghafori has made for 27 years is fluffy with a satisfying crunchy edge, where each piece has been slapped onto the wall of an earthen oven sunk into the floor.

Afghans rely on bread, he said. So he and his colleagues, each in charge of one part of the five-step process, take pride in their work.

"We always try to provide good bread for people, our customers must be satisfied," he said in the north of the Afghan capital.

Piles of bread - some round, some stretched into canoe-like shapes, some sprinkled with sesame seeds or sugar - overlap like roof tiles lining the slanting display windows of bakeries in the Afghan capital.

Their bright lights pour out over streets on seemingly every corner.

"Afghanistan has a long tradition of relying on bread," said bakery worker Shafiq.

"Here bread consumption might go up, but it will never go down."