Week 6 Lab Journal: Bread

This week in lab we experimented with making bread! I was pretty confused about how this was actually going to look because I have never heard of anyone baking bread over a fire with a cast-iron pot, let alone bread that has no yeast in it. I think I came into this thinking of breadmaking as a very involved process, that only people with very specific expertise could do, but it turns out that simple bread-making is pretty accessible to everyone. Certainly, I can see how becoming really good at it, and making consistently fantastic bread takes much more time and effort. But overall, the bread that my group came out with was worthy of being excited about! We began with a simple flour and water bread, using unprocessed flour where you could really see and feel the difference from bleached white flour. There was very little water added to this, and no yeast! Of course, because of this, it did not rise, but it turned out nicely. Definitely it was pretty dense and gummy. I think one of the main challenges as with a lot of  our cooking/fire-related activities in this class was temperature control. This was about tracking both the temperature of the pot and of the bread itself. Getting the outside nice and crusted, while also making sure the inside was actually baking was pretty difficult. It meant that we had to replace, remove and repeat a lot with our pot on the fire, off the fire and with coals on top of it. The second loaf used feta cheese inside it which was something I have never even heard of before! I really expected the cheese to melt inside the bread and kind of glue it all together but it totally stayed in solid chunks. Crisping the outside of this and making sure the inside was baked was similarly finicky to the first loaf since there was no obvious rise to it. I think my group came out with a very solid loaf! We made sure to break the cheese into as small of pieces as we could, which made sure the flavor distribution was really nice all around. Paired with poppy-seeds and honey, this loaf was absolutely to die for! I really enjoyed the way that the honey cut through the saltiness of the cheese. I have never tried this combo before but will absolutely be implementing it into my snacks and salads! The final loaf was pre-proofed for us with a rising agent. It was fun to literally watch this rise as we periodically removed the lid from the pot. And, of course, it was also incredibly delicious! This is the one that I think we had the best bake on. The outside was done just right and the inside had a really nice porous look and was cooked just all the way and not too much or too little. While transitioning from the different breads, we also worked on the mill, grinding wheat and barley into flour. I probably sound like such a broken record but this was so much more complicated than I thought it was going to be. First, the pestle was much heavier than I thought. It was not easy to break the grains up, let alone grind them into flour bits. I do not envy people in antiquity having to do this everyday; I have massive respect for this. I will say, I spent about ten minutes on it and did get into a nice peaceful zone with it. I get the idea that this repeated task can really encourage solace and help quiet down the mind, similar to spinning!