Ancient Bread Recipe Test

Ancient Bread Recipe Test

- I've been reading a whole lot about food history and one of my favorites lately is A History of Food in 100 Recipes by William Sitwell. One of the first recipes he talks about is the ancient Egyptian bread. How do we know that this is one of their earliest recorded recipes? Well that's because of the hieroglyphics. These would be found on the walls of tombs that were instructions on how to make bread. Not for the living, obviously, 'cause it's in a tomb, but for the dead to take into the afterlife so that they wouldn't forget how to make bread. That's my kind of bread. I make money moves. No, respect your bread. So the translated directions states that you need to crush grain, wood sticks in a wooden container, which I have right here. So this is whole wheat grain, this is what gets pulverized and ground down into what we know as white flour. I don't have the tools to do so, but I'm gonna do my best. Put some grain in here, let's just start with a little bit first, see what happens. Ah. I was able to split one. This is gonna take a while. Alright I need to just fast forward to modern day and get my just to grind it up. It's still good, it's gonna turn into flour. And then I'll just process it. That's a beautiful thing. Next up, pass the crushed grain through a sieve to remove the husks. I basically pulverized this so this essentially is whole wheat flour, husks and all, but I'm just gonna pass it through anyway. Definitely went beyond what the recipe told me. Now I can mix the flour with enough water to form a soft dough. I like recipes like this, eyeballing. This looks like enough, I'm just gonna start kneading with my hand. The use of sourdough starter or yeast probably wasn't used. These breads most likely look like peta, you know, flat breads. But they were making beer. I like to think it happened like this; there were these around drinking beer, making bread. And then they got way too wasted, forgot about the bread, they let it sit out and then that became starter. It foamed up and they're like, "Oh, let's bake it." Bread. Knead the dough, either by hand or by treading on it lightly. I've been kneading with my hand, but what is tread on it lightly? ♪ I tread softly on the stove ♪ We're gonna transfer it to a flat surface so I can further knead and tread on it gently. There's something therapeutic about kneading bread. Cheapest therapy. This nice looking dough. It's time to tear it into pieces and shape it into rounds. You can cook it directly on a bed of hot ashes. I'm gonna loosely translate that to the stove. So I'm gonna coke them in some cast iron. Beautiful. I'm not gonna try these just yet, I'm gonna wait, because I want to try a recipe that's about 2,000 years later from the Greeks and the Romans it's called honeyed cheese cakes. It says wheat and flour is wetted, similar to what we did here, and then put into a frying pan and honey is sprinkled over it with sesame and cheese. there's something about the smell of fried bread that is just-- Ah, hot! I'm not too sure if this is what they mean by cakes, but it's as close as I'm gonna get. I'm gonna drizzle on honey. for the cheese I think they used something similar to fresh farmer's cheese. So in this case I have some queso fresco. I imagine something like pico would be delicious. I mean, they're really all the same thing, right? Salty fresh cheese. Sesame seed, I am excited about this. All of this sounds great. Usually when I try out vintage recipes, they're a little questionable. But ancient recipes, that's the . I'm gonna try the plain bread first. Tastes like bread. I'm really excited about this one, obviously. Mmm. Oh yeah, mhmm. Sweet, salty, nutty, I'm all for it.