Here are the screen specifications for making the common grades of rye flour, including white wheat flour, which is a flour that you will sometimes encounter in the historic record. Flour Type Mesh Size Particle Size (µm) Extraction Rate White Rye 60-70 250-300 65-70% Light Rye 50 300 ~80% Medium Rye 40 425 ~85% Wholegrain…
Category: Bread
Making a Small Cob Oven
This video shows how to make a small cob oven. I have added commentary pointing out details that I think will be helpful to many viewers.
Confirmed Well Sifted Mesopotamian Late Neolithic Bread circa 6400 – 5900 BCE (8,600 – 7,800 BP)
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…
The Bread of the Baker’s Wife
What is there to say besides? Wow! Please, open a bakery in my town! The cheerful handsome baker and his wife showing of a selection of their breads captures, forever, the spirt we find in bakeries throughout the world. Proud artisans. The baking couple was not invented in the 17th century. The couple, whether within…
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 sugar-sweetened melted butter flavored with rose water into the warm crumb, now irresistibly yummy. The cultural question might be why…
Greek Bread Baking Methods
While this is obviously 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…
The Egyptian Triangle Bread
One apparently common bread during the pharaonic period was a bread shaped in the form of an equilateral triangle and painted white. The example here is from the the downtown Egyptian Museum. Note the white covering and the areas where the white has chipped off. The equilateral triangle was an important shape in ancient Egypt….
Egyptian Text: The Inundation
Joy over the Inundation They tremble, that behold the Nile in full flood. The fields laugh and the river-banks are overflowed. The god’s offerings descend, the visage of men is bright, and the heart of the gods rejoiceth. Pyramid Tex circa 2500 BCE. The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians, Adolf Erman, Ed. Aylward M. Blackman,…
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…