I happened to conduct this extended experiment a few years ago as part of a larger research project. At first I used a natural sourdough leaven, along with commercial flour and a modern oven. It was good bread, but there was hardly anything medieval about it.
Commercial flour is a modern, hard high-protein wheat, milled in a completely different way than stone-ground wheat. A gas oven is also entirely different, with a steady even heat. A baking stone with some moisture added into the oven approaches the effect of a wood fired oven, but otherwise reveals very little about the physical experience of baking bread in the middle ages.
I started by growing a European low-protein wheat with a long historical pedigree. I gathered the seed by hand on a farm in Finland. I then planted the wheat in my backyard in wooden barrels. Predictably there was some rye among it, and what appeared to be a few stalks of oats. No matter, that was probably fairly typical in the past. European low-protein wheat from seed harvested in Finland. The wheat grew extremely well in the winter in California and I harvested at best twice the amount of wheat I had planted.
Apparently I am not a great farmer, but I was nonetheless able to cut the wheat, thresh, and winnow it in a large basket by hand, more or less as would have been done in the Middle Ages. Next came the stone grinding, which was done with a small hand quern. It took about half an hour of milling. To this was added about a cup of natural starter made only with flour and spring water, fed every day with more flour and spring water for about two weeks until the yeast and bacteria were nicely balanced and it smelled pungent.
I had been using it for a month or so to make sure it was strong enough before using on the backyard flour. The starter, flour, more water and a little salt were kneaded into two loaves and each left to rise for about 3 hours, then kneaded again and placed into a wicker basket forms, covered with a cloth and left to rise about 18 hours until nearly tripled in size. Now turn back the clock about a month, when I built the wood-firing oven. I did not follow plans and was determined not to spend a lot of money either.
Essentially I laid out cinder blocks on top of which I patted a slab of clay about a foot thick. On top of that I laid a refractory clay shelf, which can withstand direct flame.
Then a hemispherical dome of wet sand. On top of that I laid another foot of clay all around. After letting it harden for a few days I scooped out the sand. A slab of clay and a dome of wet sand atop the oven. In retrospect, I should have let it dry completely and fired it in situ, but I decided to cut the entire thing into bricks, all carefully labeled and then fired them in a kiln.
Little did I realize how hard the reassembly would be when the bricks were labeled with uppercase, lowercase, and Greek letters!
Fiberglass insulation would have made it much more efficient at heat retention, as would straw in the bricks, which would have been more historically accurate as well. In any case, the oven worked fine, easily reaching about degrees, which is excellent for baking. Smaller sticks work better than heavy logs for some reason. With about an hour or two of burn, the oven was extremely hot inside and could still be touched on the outside, meaning that it did hold the heat fairly well.
Once it got hot enough I dragged the ashes out with a shovel and cleaned the floor of the oven with a wet mop. The loaves were turned out onto the peel, quickly slashed with a very sharp knife in a star pattern allowing the dough to rise upward, and finally slid into the oven.
The door was closed and the loaves baked until they sounded hollow when rapped. The result you can see in the final image below. Whether this bears any resemblance to a medieval loaf is beside the point; I was able to experience more or less what the medieval baker would have done every day, on a larger scale. And incidentally, the bread was fabulous.
ArtofFood is a series about food in art in medieval, Renaissance, and early modern Europe. Different types of bread made from wheat were as follows:. Middle Ages Food - Bread cooked in embers In the earliest times bread was cooked under the embers. The use of ovens was introduced into Europe by the Romans, who had found them in Egypt but embers were still being used in the eleventh century By feudal law the lord was bound to bake the bread of his vassals, for which they were taxed, but the latter often preferred to cook their flour at home in the embers of their own hearths, rather than to carry it to the public oven.
Middle Ages Food - Unleaven Bread The custom of leavening the dough by the addition of a ferment was not universally adopted. For this reason, as the dough without leaven could only produce a heavy and indigestible bread, they made the bread very thin. These loaves served as plates for cutting up the other food upon, and when they became saturated with the sauce and gravy they were eaten as cakes.
These were called trenchers. The use of trenchers remained long in fashion even at the most splendid banquets. These were then given away, usually to the poor to eat. It may sound a little strange but people had to eat whatever they could get nourishment from in medieval times.
It was a popular practice to use plain or toasted bread in other medieval recipes. Breadcrumbs were ideal to thicken sauces and to stiffen custard. With the addition of spices and honey, breadcrumbs could also be baked into an early form of gingerbread. Here is my medieval gingerbread recipe. The poor who lived in the countryside generally baked their own loaves of bread.
By contrast, people living in the towns were able to buy their bread from professional bakers. My medieval bread recipes page goes into much more detail about medieval baking if want to learn more. My husband makes all the bread in our home and I often wonder how people coped during the bread rationing that lasted in WW2 right up to the mid 50s.
Thank you. Bread rationing would be difficult to cope with. More difficult, I suspect, than all the other things. Goodness knows how we would cope with such a crisis now, when an even greater proportion of food is imported.
Wicked cool! Excellent stuff, April! OOoh I love learning where sayings come from. The hubby is going to be amazed by my knowledge of the story behind upper crust.
This was fascinating. It make sense that different social classes would have access to different types of bread, though. Diet was very varied. It depended on where you lived and how wealthy you were… and on the weather. Funny how we seem to have turned full circle and white bread is now the cheaper option while all the fancy grains cost an arm and a leg. The part about communal ovens is interesting. On a trip to Tangier in , our guide took us round the old town and explained how the communities worked — this included the communal baker.
All the community would bring their dough to the baker in the morning, along with their evening meal in a tagine, and would pick it later in the day. The guide was very proud to tell us that the baker knew whose bread and tagine were whose. Interesting to think about who has done better, us for moving on from communal facilities, or the Moroccans who have kept this as a way of life. Thanks, John. In, I think, the eighteenth century, many homes had no kitchen at all.
Homes with ovens were rare in Ireland right up until the 18th Century, but there were a few, and as metal stoves became more widespread they began to be incorporated more into ordinary farm houses.
On days that the oven wa going, there would be a whole series of food cooked. Starting with bread, which needs a hot oven, and ending with milk puddings once the temperature had dropped. Barley and oats would have been the major crops here, even still. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account.
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