Bread in the Middle Ages (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Bread in the Middle Ages (2013)

medievalists.net

56 pointsalexellisuk36 comments

Tangentially related - I recently discovered poolish, which is a form of pre-ferment that helps dramatically improving the taste of bread baked using commercial dry yeast.

If you are about to make a loaf, take half of the flour, mix it with water 1:1, add a minscule amount of yeast and let it ferment overnight. Then add the rest of recipe and bake as usual. What you get is a bread that taste bread-ier. Sounds silly, but it's just ridiculuosly good.

If anyone's interested in specifics, the Ken Forkish book (Flour Water Salt Yeast) has a good recipe. Highly recommended to try if you are into breadmaking.

I had a revelation recently regarding commercial dry yeast and poolish. The sour part of sourdough comes from the lactobacillus bacteria making lactic acid. Commercial dry yeast makes for a fast rise, which isn't enough time for the minuscule amount of bacteria that's present in the flour to flourish (pun intended?). Letting the mixture ferment overnight lets the bacteria grow more, which creates the flavor. My guess is this technique can be used to stand up a sourdough starter from scratch faster than mixing raw flour with water over the course of a week or so.

This revelation is usually in the introduction or first chapter of any book covering sourdough specifically or fermentation generally. But yes pretty much correct. Acetic acid bacteria are also a factor.

Anyway though, the long fermentation probably does give some chance for the bacteria to develop but it's not the main flavoring factor on that time scale. It's just esters from the alcohol and enzyme byproducts and shit idk I'm not a chemist. You can pasteurize your flour before adding yeast to prove it though, it's an uncommon but known cooking school demo.

It either does or doesn't work for speed running a sourdough starter depending on what your goal is. If you want a workable starter to bake with it will be super fast, but the bread is indistinguishable from one baked from a poolish with commercial yeast. Which is basically what you're doing. If you want any of the flavor or texture indicators of sourdough they wont be there in that time frame though, since you won't have enough bacteria.

Over time it will drift towards standard starters and after weeks or months will be indistinguishable from them.

Don't forget to use the parachute when getting off your high horse.

I mean you purported to add to the knowledge base of a domain older than written language without doing the absolute minimum engagement with the earned knowledge of that domain. Who is really lacking humility here lol.

You are pissing on the wrong person.

But even regardless of that, lapetitjort was sharing something that they realized themselves. No need to be a dismissive ass, even if it concerns the use of commercial dry yeast that is somehow older than written language.

The benefit of poolish and other styles of pre-ferment is usually attributed to enzymatic breakdown of proteins and starches (especially of starch into dextrins and maltose, which benefits the color of baked bread as well). An overnight ferment probably isn't long enough to get a substantial bacterial population going, hence the multi-day or week process of creating a sourdough starter. Why would the addition of commercial yeast speed the bacteria along?

I'll preface that I'm a beginner and not a food scientist in any right. I tried to make a starter twice and failed both times. I can't say for certain why, but it could have been from impatience not seeing the start rise every day while the colonies built up. If I were to see the starter rise due to yeast action, I would be more likely to maintain it, which would give the bacteria more time to create a colony. So it's not speeding the bacteria along, but rather "faking it until you make it".

If you like this sort of histotainment BBC used to make good series like Tudor Monastery (1500s) https://youtu.be/0-uqQknglio or their original 'Tales of the Green Valley' (1620) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6LJQOAaGj2magtWkqqRQ... both where historians attempt to farm as they did in the period, capturing wild yeast from apple trees to make bread and ale which Tudors lived off of

On a related tangent, I found the book Against the Grain, by James C Scott, to be very interesting. In it he discusses how farming existed long before cities, and how certain grain crops contributed to (and were leveraged for) the emergence of city states.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34324534-against-the-gra...

There are several more of these! Ruth, Peter, and (usually) Alex are so amazingly good at this.

Random fact: Ruth Goodman's demonstrations of how laundry was washed through the ages and why those methods worked has changed how I do my own laundry. It turns out the washing machine isn't nearly as effective as a half-hearted manual wash with a laundry plunger, while causing substantially more wear.

Funny, watching those shows had me frequently thinking "yeah, I could do that... seems ok" (I have a farming background) except for the laundry stuff :)

Well, the laundry stuff and all the particulate garbage they were breathing from the wood and coal fires.

Bookmarked to read for later. Thank you for sharing :)

Wanted to also say - ACOUP, the best history blog I have read yet, has a great series on bread, wheat, and farming in the Western European/Mediterranean, (iirc between ancient times through medieval)

https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...

https://web.archive.org/web/20220105170648/https://www.medie...

When you don't want to deactivate your AdBlocker...

The original rendered just fine with my adblocker on.

Two things I know about bread: Roman soldiers baked bread, using beer as a raising agent instead of yeast, on account of the fast that beer was readily available.

A "baker's dozen" is the number 13. This is believed to stem from medieval England, where bakers gave an extra loaf in order to avoid penalties for being underweight.

Compared to ancient beer the yeast of modern beer is killed off before bottling, so you can't use it as a yeast replacement, but instead this allows the beer to be stored for a long time.

You need bottle conditioned beer. Many wheat beers are.

'Killed off'? Or just filtered? (Genuine question - I brew a bit, and have used mine for bread, but don't really know anything about commercial brewing.)

I'm just a home gamer so could be wrong. In large commercial breweries it is killed off, flocculated out with a flocculation agent then filtered out. It is killed at a certain time so the amount of remaining sugar is controlled.

Some microbrews don't do this and you can recuperate live yeast from those beers for brewing or baking.

I've always heard filtered to bring it to sterility, but there have to be other steps to flocculate. Micro brews or traditional European brews are often bottle finished.

Some micro breweries use a finishing yeast that's different than the fermentation yeast to keep that proprietary. I think anchor brewing comes to mind for this.

That was typical of all premodern breads, other than sourdoughs. Yeast was isolated in the 1800s.

Bread in 2021.... https://www.reddit.com/r/Cheap_Meals/comments/rvy340/bread_i...

> Bread in 2021.... https://www.reddit.com/r/Cheap_Meals/comments/rvy340/bread_i...

That's not a recently developed product, let alone a recent invention:

https://newengland.com/today/food/new-england-made/bm-brown-...

> It’s not clear when B&M (the letters stand for co-founders George Burnham and Charles Morrill) started selling their version of the classic New England bread (a sweet variety made from cornmeal, wheat and rye flours, and molasses), but like its Necco Wafer and Moxie soda kin, the canned bread has been around so long it’s hard to imagine a time when it wasn’t for sale.

The article has an ad for it from the 40s.

Surely canned bread is as old as canning.

I'd argue that bread in 2021 has returned more to its roots thanks to the sourdough trend from 2020. I started baking along with everyone and I just cannot go back to mass produced bread.

For me, there's 2 entirely different kinds of bread:

* homemade bread: good flavor and texture

* supermarket "bread" for sandwiches: consistent size, soft texture for a sandwich where the fillings don't fall out, especially for eating away from home

Supermarket "bread" is more of an edible wrapper, but it has its purpose.

Where does an industrially produced supermarket baguette that's nonetheless made with just flour, water, salt and yeast fall?

I don't buy a lot of baguette. We use it occasionally for cheese fondue or baguette pizza. So for me it probably goes into the "edible wrapper" category - a means to an end, but not something I enjoy on its own merits.

True! I also find it fascinating that the first recipe in the linked article (Wroclaw Trencher Bread) includes beer as an ingredient, which has had a popular revival recently as a bread hack to add maltiness/flavor. I've seen YouTubers complain that it isn't "authentic" somehow, but it looks like it really is more traditional than it seems!

Any premodern bread that wasn’t made like sourdough was made with beer barm. Bakeries and breweries were typical colocated. I’m not sure what was done in predominantly Muslim areas for yeast though, since they wouldn’t have had breweries.

> the sourdough trend from 2020.

ITYM ~2005 (±5?).

For sure, however the trend really kicked into gear in '20. A local kitchen store owner said he sold more bannetons in '21 than he sold in the last ten years. As he said, the trend quickly switched from "gluten will kill us all" to "home baked bread or die".

Not sure, seems like Zwieback-type breads (twice-baked, very dry) were common for a long time as shelf-stable bread and canning reserved for other things. It certainly was a thing by WW2 though.

I don't know anybody who's actually eaten canned brown bread who knocks it.

It's tasty stuff; I'd take the raisin variety over a muffin or banana bread.

I grew up with the occasional can of B and M. I can't find it here in SE Florida.

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