Bread

I've been thinking a great deal about bread baking lately. Specifically, how can one achieve a more period loaf of bread?

Medieval bread was:

1. Leavened with sourdough starter or barm (yeasty dregs from brewing)
2. Not made with bleached white flour, dough conditioners, etc.
3. Baked using fire
4. (for city dwellers) Baked by professionals

In my opinion, the most period experience of bread consumption that you can have is to go to New Seasons and purchase a loaf of their sourdough bread, either wheat levain (all whole grain) or their regular sourdough (which is part whole wheat and part white flour, which I believe is similar to the sifted flours used medievally). Why? The ingredients are period, the method is remarkably period (large, "hearth" style ovens), and my impression is that for most medieval people bread was something you bought, not something you made.

If you want to make bread at home, and you want a period result, you'll need to consider ingredients and methods. I like baking and I'm an opinionated person, so read on for my suggestions for baking tasty, plausibly period bread.

First, ingredients: I usually stick to a combination of white flour and whole wheat flour, both from Bob's Red Mill. I use either more white flour or equal parts of each. Occasionally I'll use rye and barley as well, or sometimes spelt (you can get white spelt flour from Bob's). I have yet to experiment with adding pea flour to make "horse bread". Any of these other types of flour (and especially pea flour) make your result peasant food by medieval standards, so to keep it authentic don't "fancy-up" a multigrain loaf (with sugar, raisins, etc.). In fact, except when following specific "cake" recipes I don't add anything other than salt to my bread dough for period baking.

Leavening: I make sourdough starter using equal parts of flour and water, mixed together and placed in a suitable container (I re-use cottage cheese tubs) and left out, covered with a cloth, until wild yeast has taken up residence and begun to multiply. Your starter will start to smell exciting and look bubbly. (By the way, if it ever smells more than exciting it's probably time to throw it away.) If you like, you can give it a boost at the beginning by adding either commercial baking yeast or the dregs of a batch of mead, beer, ale, etc. This barm can also be used on its own as a leavening agent. More on that later.

Incidentally, if you're reading this and saying to yourself "It's too bad I hate sourdough bread, I guess I can't make medieval bread," I would like to note that real sourdough tastes almost nothing like the sourdough you buy at the grocery store. "Sourdough" from Safeway (or the like) is pretty much just modern "French" bread with a whole lot of lactic acid added. Too much lactic acid, if you ask me. Proper sourdough is much, much tastier.

Methods: Once you have a starter good and ready (usually about a week), pour it into a bowl and add a cup or two of flour and enough water to reach a pancake-batter consistency. You now have a "sponge". Cover the bowl with a cloth and let it stand (an hour or more depending on how warm your kitchen is) until the sponge looks, well, spongy: lots of bubbles. (If you reserve some of the sponge, you can keep it going as your next starter. Just put it back in its container and set it aside.) Add salt to taste add enough flour to form a sticky dough, turn it out on a floured counter, and knead it several times. Don't worry if it's pretty sticky -- you want the dough to be very moist. Put the dough back in the bowl. Optional: rub oil, grease, or softened butter over the outside of it. Cover the bowl with a cloth and let it rise (usually several hours) until it has doubled in size. Punch it down, knead a few more strokes, and put it back in the bowl, this time with a sheet of baking parchment underneath the dough ball.

What? Parchment? What?

Ah ha, now you have come to the most exciting part (I think) of this whole process. So, up until now, we've pretty much been ignoring the fact that I have a modern oven. Someday I am going to build myself a cute little wood fired oven. But since I live in an apartment, and I can only imagine the management's reaction to a project like this, that day is not yet come. In case you've been living under a rock for the last two years, the foodie trend that has taken the world by storm is so-called "no knead bread." I must confess I haven't actually made this (I AM OPPOSED ON PRINCIPLE TO ANY BREAD THAT YOU DO NOT KNEAD -- you must make sweet love to the dough), but I have gleefully adopted what I think is the major innovation of the recipe which is baking bread inside an enameled cast-iron dutch oven. Not only does this give you tastier bread, I think that it also gives you a more medieval style of bread. Those cute little wood fired ovens have very different physical properties than modern ovens (different heating patterns, more steam is retained, etc.) that I think are somewhat approximated by using the dutch oven. I'd need to do more research (and especially field testing) to confirm this hypothesis, of course, but for now I am willing to say that putting a dutch oven inside your regular oven is a better way to go than just using your regular oven.

Once your loaf has proofed (risen enough that a finger poked into the side of it results in a dimple that stays instead of springing back -- this can take another couple of hours), put your dutch oven (empty) inside the oven and heat it (the oven) to 450 degrees (F). While it's heating, use a sharp knife to slash the top of the loaf. When the oven is heated, take the dutch oven out and CAREFULLY remove the lid and EVEN MORE CAREFULLY use the parchment paper to transfer your loaf to the dutch oven. Put the lid back on, put the dutch oven back in the oven, turn the heat down to 425 and bake for 30 minutes. Then remove the lid, turn the heat down to 400 and bake for another 20 minutes (maybe less). When your bread is done, take the dutch oven out and use tools to get the loaf out. Let it cool for at least 20 minutes (it is still baking during this time) before slicing.

Tada! Bread!

So what about baking with barm? Well, it's basically the same as using sourdough starter. When you make your sponge, you'll mix flour, water, and barm and let them sit until bubbly. I've found that barm is faster than sourdough starter (baking a loaf of sourdough bread is a day-long project) but otherwise the results are very similar. I made bread once using a very hoppy barm and it tasted horrific --- very bitter. Yesterday, though, I made a loaf using a combination of mead dregs, cider dregs, and sourdough starter that was originally derived from mead dregs to leaven a loaf of bread and the results were fabulous. Complex and flavorful.

Happy baking, I'll try to get some pictures of that loaf at some point.

Information on medieval bread:

http://www.whirlwind-design.com/madbaker/breadfaq.html

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~rcull/bread.htm

Medieval ovens:

http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~capriest/brikoven.html

http://www.larsdatter.com/bakers.htm

Baking with sourdough:

http://www.io.com/~sjohn/sour.htm

The infamous no-knead bread article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/dining/081mrex.html