Ahead of the barony meeting last night, we did bread again. Meisterin Johanna made some wheat breads - some plain, some enriched with eggs and honey and seeds. Very tasty!
I went the less fancy route. I made a loaf of rye and a batch of oatcakes.
Rye Bread
I forgot the recipe I'd found online. I wasn't so sure about all of its particulars anyway, including the 8 Tb of sugar. I know they had honey in the Middle Ages, but I just don't see it being an addition to daily bread. (Special bread, sure.) So what I did was:
- Make the pseudo-barm from Jas. Townsend: packet of instant yeast, 1 Tb flour, warm water, let sit.
- Mix in a bowl: 2 c. whole wheat flour (King Arthur's White Whole Wheat), 1 c. rye flour, 1 tsp salt.
- Add barm, then enough water to form dough (a bit more than 1 c., all told)
- Knead; rise an hour; punch down and knead; bake. Bake longer, because it was a dense and wet bread.
It's coarse (the rye is stone-ground) and... well, it's a reasonably good bread to put things on, almost crackery in flavor. It is not a bread that makes me want to eat big slices of it. But seriously, what did I expect? It's a heavy bread made with rye flour, which even in period was considered less desirable than wheat.
I possibly did not knead it enough, based on the springiness of Johanna's properly-kneaded dough. I think maybe I should just make a bunch of modern white bread loaves to understand bread basics, and then maybe come back to weird period variations.
*shire Oatcakes
North England - Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, and others - have an oatcake tradition very different from the Scottish one I experimented with earlier. These are soft floppy pancakes. They are definitely griddled and also fit the description of "bread from oat flour cooked on a griddle" so I decided to try them, too. I used this recipe from My Kitchen Witch.
- Mix together 1.5 c. whole wheat flour and 1.5 c. "oatmeal." Across the pond, I am getting the impression they have oat products like we have corn: flour, meal, coarse meal, etc. I used Bob's Red Mill oat flour, because I don't think porridge oats (steel cut oatmeal) is what was meant. Pictures of the finished oatcakes don't show lumps of visible oats.
- Mix in 2 tsp. salt and 1.5 tsp. yeast.
- In separate bowl, combine 2 c. hot water and 2 c. cold milk to make 4 c. warm dilute milk.
- Add to dry stuff and stir to combine. It forms a watery batter.
- Cover with plastic wrap and put in fridge overnight.
Other recipes just let it sit out for an hour or so. I wonder if that might be better? I am not sure how well the yeast did after refrigeration. It thickened slightly as the oats absorbed some water, but it was still a very thin batter - thinner than my pancake batter.
In the morning, I made a pair of oatcakes in a greased skillet. They seemed to cook up okay. They stayed soft and gooshy in the middle, and I wasn't sure if that was because I undercooked them or if it was because of the soluble fiber in the oats. They were bland, and greatly helped with some cheese and/or egg. (They are traditionally used as a breakfast-on-the-go wrapper.)
I put the remaining batter back in the fridge until 3pm. It then sat out on the counter from 3pm until 6pm, when I made the rest of the oatcakes. The batter was barely bubbly in the bowl, although it bubbled okay when it cooked. Johanna thought she could taste raw flour in one, so I started cooking them longer. That helped (and overall improved the taste) but also made them salty where they cooked to crispness. (And this time, I did not use salted butter to cook with!) Keeping a little bit of a gooshy center seemed to help take the edge off the salt, as Mistress Graciela pointed out when she arrived for the meeting and had a taste-test.
I used a cold one to wrap around eggs and cheese this morning. It was fine. It's not exactly a flavor taste sensation, much like a plain tortilla isn't. But it inoffensively does the job it's meant to do. Also, it would be really really easy to make over a campfire.
Comments