Making Bread With No Yeast In Early America - 18th Century Cooking

welcome to 18th century cooking I'm your host John Townsend today we're going to be baking bread with wild yeast and bacteria sounds great doesn't it thanks for joining us today as we savor the flavors in the aromas of the 18th century bread has arguably been the most important food source for people for thousands of years it was so very important in the 18th century especially for those people in the lower classes those working-class folks in England in North America super important to understand exactly what's going on with bread so people in the urban centers they had access to bread that was from the baker so whether it was a inexpensive bread or an expensive bread depending on what they could afford bread was available in the urban areas but out in the rural areas bread wasn't as available and especially what it takes to make bread that we typically consider yeast and barm that you would get from the brewer to make your bread nice and fluffy and bread always hazard almost every bread has basically four ingredients its flour its salt its water and it's a leavening agent if it's 11 to kind of bread so something like yeast but what happens if you're in a rural area and you want to make bread but you don't have that available that's the thing that I've been studying and trying to understand for a decade and it's very hard to get this information because it's not something that's typically written about it doesn't show up in cookbooks because it's it's low-class food it's made every day and and those folks they don't write down their recipes they just do it and so what we're left with there are descriptions of breads and descriptions of how they make them many times those people writing it don't actually understand exactly what's going on with the bread but today we're gonna dig down into where this comes from a couple of weeks ago i read from william alice's book about oat cakes remember the the whole journey cake episode which is an and bread but in that same section here he says by mixing oatmeal with water and a little salt which they let stand together 20 or more hours and then they needed into a dough or batter multiple references here in William Alice's book from 1750 talked about multiple different kinds of oak cakes and one of those is a kind of bread that they called a sour cake and it was a dark loaf it was sour and it was probably leavened in this technique where they knead it together and then they let it set 20 or more hours that's the hint here what's going on in this 20 or more hours well let's talk about that here are some dough's that I've made up earlier and they have here's one this is just a standard dough lump kind of made about the same consistency as you would do the bread itself and then we let that set for this has been setting for probably about 30 hours and you can see it's starting to break up it's starting to expand it's starting to get all kinds of air bubbles look inside this it doesn't have any yeast in it well it doesn't have any East yeast that I added as a particular ingredient no barm what what has happened is is this has got the yeast that is available in our environment it's in the air it's on my hands especially it's in this dough bowl that I mix the dough up originally and you can see there's little pieces of AB dough that's left over and that's on purpose that you don't clean your dough ball out too much because it actually Elevens the next batch this has talked about in so many different books here in the 18th century and you can even find references to that going on in the book of Exodus in the Bible where it says the whole reason why they didn't have unleavened bread was because they couldn't get access to their bowls that that's what was leavening their bread so this is what's going on in this that the yeast that's that's available in our environment and even on the grain itself is doing the leavening action and we can make a very wet version of this a sponge and that's talked about in in these cookbooks also just they don't talk about it in this particular context of making a very primitive bread many times they just talk about this in a in a yeasted bread or one that uses what they called leaven or the old dough technique or you might start off with yeast you make you make your bread you take off a little piece and you use that the next day or two days later or even a week later if you store that insult so they had different techniques for making these inexpensive or kind of worker bread so for us today we know that what's happening here is that it's yeast its bacteria it's all sorts of things that are in our environment that are making this happening in the 18th century they had not identified yeast they had not identified bacteria they just knew it worked they called it leaven they called it sour sometimes they just you know they would say it's sour dough it's a piece of dough that's gone sour right so they didn't know what was going on they hadn't identified those little things that are happening in there but they knew it worked now this dough is just simply a little bit of wheat flour some rye flour because that's kind of important and it was one of the inexpensive grains in the time period and then salt water and mixed up into an a soft soft dough and this is in our dough Bowl so it's going to get some of that yeast from the bowl I get some from my hands or from the flower itself it's going to start percolating over time we're have to let this set though quite a while like this and we want to set it someplace warm the dough Bowl is perfect it's wood its insulating and we're gonna set it someplace warm it's cold today I'm gonna set it close to the fire not too close we don't want to bake [Music] so we've baked our loaf exactly like we've made our farmer bread last year and that is with our cast-iron pot turned up over a nice warm stone and then we can add some fire to the top of that to keep that nice and warm and that will bake it just like you would you know in a Dutch oven or actually you know a larger oven except we used a piece of equipment that almost every household would have so the bread looks amazing it's set up nicely has a wonderful very very interesting not a standard you know a bread out of the oven smell but definitely a bit of a sourdough smell to it and again this is you know no special thing right this was just dough that's at around for multiple you know like a day and a half or so and let's find out what it tastes like I mean maybe I'm a little worried but I don't know now this is bread that's fresh freshly baked many warnings in the 18th century don't eat bread when it's still warm when it's right out of the oven don't do it it's bad for you well we didn't do it anyway because it's wonderful he's got some amazing flavors to it different than standard bread you're gonna get out of the store obviously this has got a little bit of rye in it it's just other wheat bread other than that with a little bit of salt and of course I just put a touch of butter on it but the flavour is something that boy you just can't get any other way it is very very good so again this is bread that's made with just flour salt water and then the yeast that comes out of the air in your hands from from the flower itself and anyone can do it anyone can try this out really just you know mix up that dough let it set for a day two days three days if you want to try it and it'll do different things over that time you can add flour to it you can experiment with it it's something everyone should try because it is just so fun and makes makes such a a different bread experience that I think you're really going to enjoy so I love episodes and recipes like this because we have to put together the pieces of the puzzle to understand what's going on with this simple primitive bread that you're gonna find in poor homesteads on the frontier all these places that you know you can't you just can't go to the Baker and buy bread and so many people were in that kind of situation it's so interesting to you know dig in on these topics I just love them if you want another one that's like this make sure to check out this farmer bread episode

Channel: Townsends

Views: 546,384

Keywords: 18th century, 18th century cooking, 19th century, history, jas townsend and son, jon townsend, reenacting, townsends

Id: 8J1PNDnqsfA

Length: 9min 54sec (594 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 10 2020