I'm going to gently pour. Whoo. Whoa. [CHUCKLES] It's a
cheese curd party. [BLASTING] [PARTY HORN BLOWS] Hey there. I'm Sohla El-Waylly, and this
is "Ancient Recipes with Sohla." In each episode, we're going to
take a dish you may recognize and attempt to recreate one
of the oldest versions of it to ever exist. It's a little history,
it's a little cooking, and it's a whole lot of me. What's not to love? [UPBEAT MUSIC] In this episode, we're going
to recreate a fossilized bread that was found at Pompeii. [BLASTING] [SCREAMING] Yep, there was
carbonized bread found underneath all of the ash. And what goes better
with bread than cheese? The Romans weren't
the first ones to make bread or cheese, of course. But it will be really
cool to recreate a version from Pompeii. [BLASTING] We're going to start by
beginning to make the cheese. The Romans worked
on and perfected many types of
cheese-making techniques, so we're going to
give one a try. So here I have one
gallon of goat's milk. We've already brought
this to a boil and then let it sit
for about 15 minutes. You want it to cool
off just a little bit. If you bring it
to a boil and then just go right in
there with the rennet, it's going to be too hot. The rennet wouldn't
be in pill form. That's how you get it nowadays. So I'm going to use
one rennet tablet, and I'm going to dissolve
it in a little bit of water before adding it to the milk. I like to break it
up with my fingers a little bit before adding the
water to help it-- you know, make it easier to smush. OK, so here's some tap water. We're going to add a
splash, a little splash. You just want to dissolve
it so it incorporates into the milk really easily. I would probably use a
little tiny whisk nowadays. They didn't have whisks
back then, so we're gonna-- we're trying to keep it as
ancient as possible, right? It's a little smashy smash
with wood-on-wood tools. It's a little harder
without a whisk. OK, success. [LAUGHS] OK, so my
milk, it was boiled. It's now cooled just slightly,
but it's still pretty warm. And we're going to
add our rennet in. Now, once you add your rennet,
mix it up really well and then, like, stop touching it. [WHISTLE BLOWS] OK, now is the point where
I'm going to stop touching it. You don't even want to
move it from the stove. Like, put it in
one area and don't go near it because the curd
is going to start to set now. And if you agitate
it too much, you're not going to have a nice curd. You're going to end up
with cheese that's dry. Too much whey is going
to come out of it. So we're going to let this
stand now for one hour. And while that does
its thing, we're going to start making the bread. [UPBEAT MUSIC] The bread we're
trying to recreate is called panis quadratus, and
it has an interesting shape that you can see here
from the pictures of the ones found in Pompeii. Some were even found
still in the oven. All right, so we're
going to start by dissolving some salt into
our water, oop, just like that. And dissolving the
salt into the water like this just makes it a
little easier to incorporate. Now, we're going to
be making this bread with a sourdough starter. That's what they
would have back then. They didn't have instant yeast. So this is going to be totally
naturally leavened, which is another reason why
it's important to dissolve the salt into the water. If you put salt
into your starter, it's just going to kill it. It'll just be dead
before you started. OK, so here I have some spelt. Now, I'm going to mix this
using the well method, so right here on the counter. So we're going to
start by dipping it. OK, when you're making
a well, it's really fun. Like, there's no reason
to do it anymore. You could just use a
big bowl or a mixer, but sometimes I do it when
I want to feel old-timey, you know? So see how I'm like-- I kind of took my time to tip it
out into this nice big pyramid. This is going to make it
a little easier to make a nice well with high walls. That's really important. If you don't start
out with high walls, it's going to just,
like, rupture. And you're going
to have a flood, and it's going to be
so sad and such a mess. Spelt is, like, over
5,000-year-old wheat. It's coming back now
because everyone's into those ancient grains. Now, check out how high
walled my well is, right? This is good. We're going to widen
it just a little bit. You have to take your time
when you're building your well. This initial foundation
is going to make it a lot easier when you get mixing. OK, now I'm going to add
my sourdough starter right into the middle. I'm not going to put it
all in there just yet. We want to incorporate
this slowly so we don't have massive collapse. OK, so turn your hands
into, like, a fork. [BELL DINGS] All right, and now, I'm
going to just gently fork in some of the walls of my spelt
and slowly start incorporating the sourdough into the flour. This is going to get messy,
but I think it's a lot of fun. So we're slowly just-- the
well is slowly getting wider. I'm slowly mixing
some of my flour into my sourdough starter. Now we've got a
little more room, I'm going to add
the rest of this. This is going to get everywhere,
[LAUGHS] but it's cool. OK, getting it all in there. All right, so we
just keep doing this. Slowly, take your time. Incorporate the flour
into the starter. This is a pretty
high hydration dough. So we've got, like, two parts
flour to one part water, which is going to give us nice,
big bubbles, hopefully a nice crust. Spelt has a really nice
flavor compared to, like, modern bread flour, which is-- modern flour is great
for a lot of things. It's great for fluffy
cakes and tender crusts, but it's not the most flavorful. But it does develop
gluten really well. Spelt flour, on the other
hand, takes a lot more to work it to develop the same
amount of gluten as you would with, like, a
modern bread flour. So even though I haven't
tried this before, I'm predicting it's not going
to be as fluffy and tender. It'll probably be
more of a dense bread, but we're going to find out. I feel like it's
time to add water. This is where it gets
risky and a little scary. But my well is still--
it's still intact. So yeah, I'm pressing
with my fingers against the surface
of the counter to make sure that
I'm like, scraping. Kind of like if you were
using a dough hook the way it, like, scrapes along
the sides of the bowl, you're just doing
that with your hand. You're turning your
hand into a dough hook. [BELL DINGS] OK, here we go,
folding more flour in. The well is getting-- I should have started
it further out. It's getting dangerously close
to the edge of the table. [DRAMATIC MUSIC] But I think that's
part of the fun, right? It's a little risky. Let's see what happens here. There was actually over
30 bakeries in Pompeii. Bread was such a big
staple of their diet. And that seems like a lot. That seems like a lot of
bakeries for one city. I do think it's more bakeries
than we have here in Manhattan. OK, oh, gosh. It's getting crazy. Hold on, hold on. We're bringing it in. We're coming back. Come back to me. So we're just adding
a splash at a time, slowly incorporating it. I think I'm going to go
for all of this water. And then if it looks too wet,
I'll add a little more flour back into it. This is a workout for
my fingers, though. They're really-- they're
doing a great job as forks. OK. It's a really nice, soft dough. So in Pompeii, they
would actually bake bread on the floor of the oven. They did have clay vessels that
they would form the bread in, but they didn't actually
bake the bread in there. Oh, that's it. OK, that's the
last of the water. So now I'm going to see
how much of this flour we're going to need. We might not need all of it. That is the cool thing
with the well method. When you do it in a
stand mixer or just, like, a bowl and you dump it
all together, you kind of-- it's like a one-shot deal. But here, since we're
incorporating it slowly, we can kind of gauge
how much flour we need. This is probably how they
did it back then because they were just making bread by eye. You know, you probably
weren't measuring. OK, I think I'm going
to move into kneading. So I'm going to try and get this
stuff off my fingers into here. Let me-- I'm going to
clean off my fingers with my other fingers. OK, here's a fun trick. You take some flour, and
the dry flour helps rub the scraps of dough off of you. Now, I find it a little easier
to knead my dough if my hands are relatively clean. Because the dough on my
hands, you know, some of it's gotten crusty. And if you try and-- if
you accidentally get that into your bread, you're
going to have, like, a crusty chunk of dough. And I think it's going
to be a bit of work. All right, knead. So everyone's got
a different form. Once you get into
kneading, you'll figure out what works best for you. So we're just-- it's
like a folding, pressing, stretching situation. I do this push thing
with my right hand while I'm pulling
forward with my left. Now, it's feeling a
little wet, so I'm just going to do
this, like, little sprinkle situation as I go. As you keep kneading, it's
going to get silky and soft. So don't, like, overdo it with
the flour at the beginning, because then you're going to end
up with a really dense dough. I'm doing this like,
push, turn situation. Ah. Push, turn, flip forward. And we're just
going to keep going until it's nice and smooth. You get into a groove,
and it's really fun. Push, turn, pull. You know? I'm into it. You're going to get into it. It takes a minute,
but it's fun once you get into a nice groove. Everyone has a different
kneading form, though. So you don't have
to follow mine. Find your own kneading rhythm. We are getting nice and smooth. You can see I haven't
added much more flour, but it's starting
to look less sticky. As you knead, the starch kind
of absorbs that moisture. So that's why it's
good to not add too much flour in the
beginning, because that's how you end up with dry bread. Sometimes, if I've
got a high counter, I like to stand on something. Can I stand on something? [BEEP] So this bread ends up in
a kind of unique shape. There's a lot of debate out of-- over how the shape was made. But some people think that they
pressed a wagon wheel into it because it has
these, like, divots and this center
hole that kind of looks just like a wagon wheel. Today, we're going
to use a dowel. We're so close, and we're
going to get into it. I'm going to avoid adding flour. [SMACKING] Get out of here. Because I want nice
texture on this dough. We got lots of flavor going
from those extra additions. You can see it's
really transforming. Oh yeah. OK, this is a
little high, so I'm going to adjust
with a little squat and then get a
full body workout. OK, I'm going to stop. I feel good about that. I don't think that
with this dough, I'm going to get
any more smoothness. OK, returning to
my original height. [LAUGHS] [BEEP] All right, so we got our dough. It's nice and smooth, taut. It's a lot less sticky
than it was before, but it's still nice and moist. Now I'm going to grab this
wooden bowl for proofing. Grease it up just a little
so it doesn't stick. You could also flour
it up, I suppose. But this board looks like
it needs some oil anyways. You know, you have
to oil your wood. It's alive. It's my favorite thing
to do once a month. I sit down. I oil all of my wood. A little oil. Now, we want this to
stay in a nice ball. All right, and we're
going to let this proof for an hour and a
half to two hours until it's almost
doubled in size. I'm going to cover
it with a damp cloth just to make sure that
we don't form a skin. And I'm going to take a
little break, clean up, and then we're going to come
back and drain our cheese. So our milk and rennet
situation has been hanging out, and it has become
set like a curd. You know it's ready
when you jiggle it and it moves as one,
kind of like a panna cotta or a Jell-O mold. You want to see a good wiggle. But don't get too aggressive
because we want to cut the curd when we want to cut the curd. We don't want it to
just break on us. And I'm going to use a dagger-- [EPIC CHORAL MUSIC] --because I feel like they
would use one in Pompeii. [EPIC CHORAL MUSIC] So the reason we're going to
cut our curd rather than just breaking it up is we
really want to control the way the whey is released. If you cut this up into
lots of itty bitty pieces, too much whey is
going to come out, and it's going to
end up really dry. I'm going to cut, like, one-inch
squares, kind of a grid. So one inch going
in one direction, and then we're going to
go in the other direction. So we want to get nice big
cubes so the whey can drain out slowly and we don't
end up with, like, this really tight, dry cheese. All right, so that's good. And now I'm going to line a
colander with some cheesecloth so we can drain it into here. And I'm just going
to pour my curds in. Let them drain. That whey is going
to fall through. All right, I like
to start by ladling some so the whole thing doesn't
just come out and go splat. And then we're going
to switch to a pour. See how wiggly, jiggly it is? It's just like Jell-O. OK,
I'm going to switch to a pour. I'm going to gently pour. Whoo. Whoa. [LAUGHS] It's a
cheese curd party. [BLASTING] [PARTY HORN BLOWS] OK, awesome. So I'm not going to squish
or press or twist or anything right now. We want to let the
curds initially just drain on their own. So we're going to set
this aside for one hour. If you start, like,
wringing it out right now, you're going to end up
with a really dry cheese. So you need to just let
gravity and time do its thing. So we're going to
come back in one hour, and then we're going
to twist and press. [UPBEAT MUSIC] So my bread has been proofing
for a couple of hours, and we got a little poof-- [BLASTING] --a little fluff. It's alive. There's some bubbles. Now I'm going to transfer
it over to a peel so we can bake it. Before we put it
in the oven, I'm going to give it a few marks
with the dowel to try and get that quintessential
pan quadratus shape. I'm going to very gently-- I don't want to deflate
the bubbles we created during the fermentation. So I'm going to
try and be gentle. Awesome. And now, I'm going to make
our imprints with the dowel. Now, the original
bread had like, a little hole in the middle. But we're just going
to go with the dowels. I feel like this
is going to make it really easy to break
the bread after it's baked, you know? Because it's already
got these impressions. And now, I'm going to put
this in the oven to bake. Here we go. [UPBEAT MUSIC] OK, so my curds have been
hanging out for an hour. And we just let them
naturally drain, and you can see they
already look a lot drier. You can press this and age it. Throw it in a salt brine. We're going to eat this
fresh, so I'm going to season it up right now, right here. I'm going to sprinkle
in some salt. I'm waiting to do it now
because so much of the liquid is going to press out. So if we had put
it in earlier, we would have just lost that
salt. So now is a good time. But if you were going
to, like, age this, you could press it, and
then have it hang out in brine or age it
straight into salt. But we're going
to eat this today. So seasoned it up. And now I'm going to press it. To just help remove
the remaining moisture, I'm going to twist
up this cheesecloth and then weigh it down. Now, the Romans,
they actually would use wicker baskets or
even a ceramic mold to separate the whey
from the cheese. They actually found
a mural in Pompeii of the whey separating from the
cheese in the wicker basket. But we've got colanders now. So I'm going to just
let this hang out. This can go for a couple
of hours or even overnight if you want a firmer cheese. But we're going to get
back to it in a little bit. And now I'm going to
finish up my bread. [UPBEAT MUSIC] We got our bread
out of the oven. Sometimes the bakery
would use a baking stamp to put their emblem on
it as a way of branding and to even signify if
the bread was kosher. All right, so let me
check out our cheese. This has been pressing
this whole time, so it's firmed up quite a bit. And I'm going to just try
and flip it out on this plate so we can get a nice slice. So you can see how
firm it's gotten, but it's still pretty soft. It's just like flipping a cake. You've got to do
it with confidence. [DRUM ROLL] I don't know how much
confidence I have. [LAUGHS] All right, here we go. Ah. [TRIUMPHANT MUSIC] So look at that. It totally just set
up in no time at all. [UPBEAT MUSIC] And I guess let's
break into our bread, make a little cheese
plate, Pompeii style. I'm going to get--
follow these ridges. Get a nice hunk of bread. And they would
normally serve this up with figs, mint, walnuts. So we have all of
the accouterments. And let me get a piece--
a bit of this cheese. I'm going to make,
like, a toast, you know? Like an ancient toast. Get it on there. Look at that. A really nice, dense
texture, but still crumbly. It's a fresh cheese, you know? All right, so I got my fig. I love figs. I call them jam bags. We got some walnuts. Let me sprinkle it with
a little bit of mint. A fancy toast. You know what, let's
just put it all on there. If I was in Pompeii, this
is how I would do it. I wonder if they
brunched there, right? This could be on a brunch menu. Let's tear open a jam bag, even. Nice. A little bit of sweetness. This is going to be a big bite. [CHUCKLES] All right,
I'm going to go in. Going in there. [UPBEAT MUSIC] Sorry. Sorry, guys. So the cheese is really mild. It's a lot like a
farmer's cheese. Creamy, but you can
still feel the curds because it's not aged at all. A little bit crumbly,
almost like a cottage cheese, but a
little bit tighter. The bread is super nutty
from that spelt flour, but it's also a little
bit dense, because it's just leavened with sourdough. But the figs add
a nice sweetness. Altogether, it's a
nice piece of toast. I would do this. I would brunch with this. [UPBEAT MUSIC] If you enjoyed this episode,
be sure to subscribe. And if there are any vintage or
ancient recipes that you think would be really cool
for us to check out, let us know in the
comments below. And I'll see you next time. [FIRE CRACKLES] [SEARING] [UPBEAT MUSIC]
starting to get the feeling this series was just an excuse for her to play with swords
I like Sohla when her experience shows. Baking a high hydration spelt loaf requires some experience and a deft touch. But if there's a theme for this History show, it's not Sohla doing ethnic foods. She's covered Pizza, Mochi, Tacos, Fancy Toast. She's riffing on ancient renditions of currently trendy foods.
She also signed with a talent agency that reps film/tv stars like Keira Knightley, Michael Fassbender, and Michael Shannon. So expect to see more Sohla coverage in general and, as we've seen, in mainstream outlets like NPR and TIME going forward.
This is giving me all sorts of fancy toast ideas.
Loving this new series with her.
I want to cut cheese with a dagger.