Focaccia: A Neolithic culinary tradition dating back 9k years ago | Hacker News Reader

Focaccia: A Neolithic culinary tradition dating back 9k years ago

phys.org

21 pointspseudolus18 comments

They probably cut it in half, stuffed it with some prosciutto, some gorgonzola, cherry tomatoes and rocket, and washed it all down with a glass of prosecco or an espresso. Delicious. Served using a piece of slate for a plate.

Costs £35 and takes 45 minutes to make but you can be sure it's delicious.

Cherry tomatoes delivered across the Atlantic by pterodactyl, no doubt.

By a Quetzalcoatlus to be precise

"These investigations suggested that large loaves made with water and flour might have been baked on these trays, placed in domed ovens for about two hours at an initial temperature of 420°C."

That's 788°F. You sure about that? And yes, the original paper cited uses the same value.

ETA on further review, it does seem to be in the correct range for baking bread in this manner.

I share the same doubt. Also, I wonder how the scientists came up with the exact temperature :D

In the original paper they made replica ovens and measured how hot they got:

"The parameters on which the trials were based were drawn from the results of a long-standing experimental activity previously conducted13,14. Solid doughs made from stone-ground organic flour mixed with other ingredients were baked in replicas of HTs. These were placed in dome-shaped ovens, similar to those found in the settlements where these types of vessels were discovered, at an initial temperature of 420 °C for about two hours. In the former case, the resulting products resembled large bread loaves, while in the latter case, the presence of lipid ingredients made the products softer and more flavorsome, akin to a sort of ‘focaccia’ type bread (Fig. 3a) (SI Appendix, Fig. S1)."

But that doesn't prove anything, does it?

It proves that they could have made bread this way.

It doesn’t necessarily prove that they did.

Although the article presents pretty convincing evidence that they did. (Ceramic formation on the clay trays that matches the temperature and composition of focaccia residue).

So unless they are just making up data for their paper (which is something that definitely happens), it sounds legit to me.

Prove? No. Let's look at the quote we are discussing again

>"These investigations suggested that large loaves made with water and flour might have been baked on these trays, placed in domed ovens for about two hours at an initial temperature of 420°C."

That's why they are using words like "suggested" and "might". When dealing with ancient civilization often all we have leftover are tools that survived. It's not like we have cookbooks from that era. So all we have is guessing what they might have done, based on attempting to solve the same problem with the same tools.

Even if we did have cookbooks from the era, they didn't have thermometers. We'd have things like Cai Xiang's Record of Tea.

If you see tiny “shrimp eyes” in your water, he wrote, the water is roughly 155°F. If you see “crab eyes”—a slightly bigger bubble—then you’re reaching 175°F. Larger “fish eyes”: 185°F. String of pearls: 195°F to 205°F. And finally, when your hot water has reached a rolling boil, or a “raging torrent,” you know that your water is 212°F."

Well, doing experimental history like this at least establishes the bounds. There are limits to how hot you can make an oven given the different fuel sources.

It says initial temperature, and I think you'd want to be at coals not roaring flames at that point so they probably don't add any more fuel during the bake. It probably finishes at more like a "normal" modern bread baking temperature which is still 450ºf or higher.

And we're talking about a six pound loaf apparently which is just massive. I'm a pretty experienced bread baker, have done it professionally albeit briefly. My baker's intuition is that this would work.

Obviously Late Neolithic humans were just as obsessed with getting good oven spring as modern YouTube chefs are.

It's way hotter than we'd deal with in an oven today, but a wood fire gets that hot easily

A good way to temp check your traditional Woodfire pizza oven is when the black soot on the inside of the dome turns white. Which is at temps around 420c aka 800f. You should be able to cook a pizza in about 40 to 50 seconds tops :)

Compare to another popular Italian bread, ciabatta, which was invented only in 1982.

Or the pinsa that was created in 2001 - however you can see many pinsa offerings claiming that it was already eaten by the Romans. That was quite the successful marketing move by that guy Corrado Di Marco. Seems do be a European thing, though, as there's no English Wikipedia page?

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinsa

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