A Viking Meal

hi I'm Kira with serve alder Vikings with another video for you today we're gonna talk about food in the Viking Age and I am going to take you through cooking a Viking stew over an open fire so food in the Viking Age very much Vikings were farmers and so they grew a lot of root crops mainly because it was really easily growable in the ground that they had their season for growing was quite short they did grow grains such as barley we spelt was a wild grown grain that they could gather during the spring and certainly hazelnuts and berries were available there are blackberries millions grown during that age blueberries grew wild as well as lingam berries which is a nice sweet little red berry so today what I'm using if you can imagine that it's early spring it's still there's still snow on the ground there are a lot of avalanches coming down around me they kind of look like waterfalls but honestly we can't start to plant any vegetables right now so I've gone to my Stuber which is the name of a storehouse during the Viking Age and I have found a parsnip I have found a turnip and you can see they're starting to grow it's it's you know they've had them all winter long I have a leak which is a common vegetable that was grown during the Viking Age and I have a few carrots as well that we're left and I also have an apple it's kind of wrinkly and soft but it's gonna be nice and sweet because apples go really well with pork and this is from a freshly butchered Pig from my farm I also have some barley here that was in our storehouse a little bit of salt one of the things I wish I had right now it's not late enough in spring that the ramps have or Ramson is what it's called in Norway and they are a green leafy wild garlic with a very mild garlic flavor but that would go really well in this - if I had some so these are as I said this would be typical of what I would keep in my storehouse over the winter in order to make food and as I said today we're gonna cut all this up and we're gonna put it in the pot and we're gonna cook a nice stew over the fire [Music] [Music] so the other thing that we're going to cook today to go with our Vikings to will be some flatbread and what I'm going to be using is a combination of rye barley and wheat flour some honey and some blueberries to go in and in order to get some moisture in there I'm using the last of the winter ale it's a little bit flat but it will put a little yeast in my in my bread and it'll cook nicely on the stove now the flowers would have been ground on a corn Stone B in order to be able to use them for this one of the other things we could have done if we were making fresh ale or beer is to take the grain from that process and also grind that up and use it for the bread because it would have a natural yeast in it so flat bread was probably one of the more common breads during the Viking Age it was easy quick and there are many ways to make there you don't always use leavening with a flat bread sometimes you get something that is going to be a little bit more like a cracker and you make bread like that a flat bread it just depends upon what supplies you have at what time of the year in order to make your bread now some of the other ingredients you can use for flat bread are sour milk and you can also use buttermilk which is left after churning your butter all right I'm gonna get started done getting this bread coming together and meeting it a little bit so I could start adding it a little at a time and get this into a nice dough that we can work with later we're doing this before we cook our stew mainly because we want this dough to have a chance to settle a little bit and if we do get that yeast working we want it to be given a chance to rise as well and you can see I'm just kind of kneading this in the bowl to get it all together a little bit more flour so a lot of people when we're doing this at an event to ask us about things like lefse is a very well-known flatbread in Scandinavia right now it was not possible to have left at that time because there were no potatoes in Norway potatoes did not come to Norway until mid 1700s just a touch more so I'm gonna add my blueberries nicely now you may be wondering why we're putting blueberries into bread I'm gonna have with us too but you know we need as much vitamins as possible and they happen to find some and there we go there's our bread dough and we'll set this aside for a while and see what happens well our breads been sitting for a while it hasn't risen much which I didn't expect because as I said we were using some old ale but I am going to take it out and I'm gonna start making little cakes in order to start cooking them on the fire so course like we do with any other bread to knead it or work with it we're gonna put a little flour down and I am just going to show you what the devil looks like is is this and I just want to knead this a little bit just it alright house kind of fluffed up a little bit I can tell you that just by the feel of it so the yeast did do a little bit to make this dough rise just a little bit okay that's nice feels really good so I am going to just start taking off some pieces and making balls I eat a little more flour on my hands they're sticky it's in this case a little bit of stickiness I'm not gonna worry about mainly because we want this to be a nice light dough so it doesn't turn into a cracker then I'm gonna flatten him out like this kind of looks like a cookie but you're not gonna roll them with a pin I could but then I would get something thinner have a tendency to cook fast and possibly turn into a something that was more like a cracker [Music] [Music] [Music] some bread to eat and a little bit of butter that we returned and so help yourself to fight it - - whatever you you like here ok little flat breads look amazing the little blueberries in there a little crispy on the grill/griddle but you know waste not want not we cut off the burnt part and it's beautifully cooked inside cooking on that griddle is a little bit difficult it's hard to keep the heat consistent but you know it all turned out pretty well I'm gonna taste this now right off the fire mm-hmm very hot I think it's a good hearty stew here certainly looks like it I know the last time that you made this kind of a stew you used lamb and that was really good and you used a lot of barley so this time you did a little bit less and some pork so yeah yes I did about that but being a farmer we would have different kinds of meats to eat pork would be one lamb mutton and then the men would possibly hunt for elk moose deer and then of course there's always fish because you have to be near a stream or the ocean so oh okay how is it it's really good what I'm not burning my mouth well I am I think it tastes pretty good too but you know of course your input is worth more than mine cuz I'll probably like anything that I cook for myself see I'm the opposite I like anything that anybody else cooks for me so we're both good well thank you so much it's so much it's not just fun but when you cook with family and you cook with friends there's a lot of love that goes into a meal and this has certainly been that kind of day for us thank you so much thank you toddler tira you're welcome I really enjoyed cooking with you I hope you enjoyed this video as well and I hope in the future if we are at an event either one of yours or one of ours that you will stop by and and visit with us at sewer voldar Vikings and ask any questions that you may have and hopefully get to meet you and shake your hand be well

Channel: Sjorvaldar Vikings

Views: 5,061

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Id: WHCIqyAgEqM

Length: 15min 13sec (913 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 11 2020