Two big takeaways. First, and this is truly huge, this paper seems to prove that wheat and barley were sifted through multiple sieves. It is not news that Neolithic breads were sifted — but the analysis of the phytoliths, hard structures found in grasses — have wear patterns indicative of multiple sifting as in first…
Category: Bread
The Buttered Loaf
This is a style of bread that we, fortunately, yet unfortunately, have lost. For some hundreds of years there was a dessert made by opening up a warm loaf or roll and pouring into it with sugar-sweetened melted butter flavored with rose water into the warm crumb, now irresistibly yummy. The cultural question might be…
Greek Bread Baking Methods
While this is obvioulsy a tandoor style oven from ancient Greece, I have not been able to find confirming archeological evidence for tandoor oven from Greek archeological sites. If you know of evidence for a tandoor oven from a Greek site, please leave a comment. The video I have included here shows breads placed up…
An Experimental Recipe for an Historic Pumpernickel
Join me in attempting to bake a pumpernickel that is black through-and-through. Please post your results in the comments, and also on my Facebook Group, Bread History and Practice. Note: Just after publishing this on January 2, 2024, I discovered that I can read Carin Getner’s book, “Pumpernickel: Das Schwartz Brot Der Westfalen” 1991 through…
A Rare Egyptian Stamped Bread
This is an important Egyptian bread. While it is rarely reproduced. As far as I am aware, this is the only surviving Egyptian bread whose entire surface is marked with a stamped pattern. I would put this into a class of “stamped breads.” This is the only example I know of of a surviving bread…
Ezekiel Bread, Book of Ezekiel, Torah
Ezekiel’s Vision, William Blake, (1803-05) There are many interpretation of “Ezekiel Bread” online, in cookbooks, and even in commercial products. While the most vocal interpretation is that it is a sprouted grain bread, all of the interpretations are for breads presented as being wonderful, good tasting breads. Reading the text taking into account period culture,…
American Bread Recipes from the 19th Century
These recipes were originally posted for people attending my Bread History and Practice Seminar #68 on American Bread, December 15, 2022. If you are attending the seminar, please make one of the breads that I am posting here so that we all have some experience with the taste and texture of the bread. Insights can…
Starch Gelatinization and Starch Conversion to Sugar in Bread Dough
For much of the 19th century, American breads, were often made with cornmeal and If you can get a bread dough into the gelatinizing temperature range appropriate a given bread grain — in the 19th century American context, rye, and corn — gelatinizes multiple changes will take place altering the taste and texture of the…
Miss Leslies Book of Household Management, 1840 “Rye and Indian” bread.
A mix of rye and cornmeal, “Indian,” in the vocabulary of 19th century American cookbooks, was a common bread in New England for most of the 19th century. Emily Dickinson won second prize for her version of this bread at an agricultural fair in Massachusetts in 1856. This bread pairs well with molasses which was…
American Soda Bread
It was in the 1830s that leavening bread with an alkaline salt first became an important leavening. There was substantive uptake of this modern leavening — calcium carbonate mixed with muriatic acid was the first popular alkaline leavening for bread — in both Ireland and in United States. Less so elsewhere in the Anglophone world….
William Rubel 