Medieval baking

Bread is an interesting subject. For the medieval person the saying "our daily bread" was totally natural, most of the energy intake simply came from bread. In essence bread is simply flour and water that's been heated up to become firm. There are so many variation on bread though, and recently I got curious about experimenting with medieval bread baking. In Swedish original sources, like food inventories at castles, there is always a difference between "herrebröd" - the lords' bread and "svennebröd" - the servants bread. In general it says that the finer bread was made from sifted flour, while the servants had to make do with bread from coarse and unsifted flour. But what kind of flour did they use?

Since I live in the middle of Sweden, well this is where it gets tricky if I want to recreate a bread that could have been eaten in my region. Wheat was a luxury, due to the climate only small amounts of wheat were harvested, and that was in the south part of Sweden. Barley was the most common crop in the north of Sweden well into the 20th century, since it's possible to grow it here. Rye started to make inroads into the medieval farms, but when looking it up it seems as if rye was harvested up to to around Lake Mälardalen. The people working at Västerås castle in the first decades of the 16th century were mostly supplied with bread made from rye. It is known that the area around Falun mine, so where I live, had to import food to supply the comparatively large population here, and my guess is that even if barley was harvested locally it was mostly rye that was imported.

So in the choice of flour for my medieval bread I could use wheat, rye or barley. They have very different qualities when it comes to baking bread though. The region where I live is still sometimes called the "crisp bread belt", the reason is simple barely can't be used to make nice soft loafs of bread, instead you make the thin and hard crisp bread from it. Since the inventory from Västerås talks about rye and wheat, I decided to work with those flours instead.

regular wheat flour, a mix of sifted rye and wheat flour, coarse rye flour

In order for the bread to raise you also need a leavening agent. All the modern cookbooks that offer medieval recipes that I've seen talk about the use of sourdough for the leavening in the Middle Ages in the Nordic countries. It is worth noting that there might be a lot of geographical differences within Europe as to what kind of leavning to use. Even if it's later Townsends has an episode on 18th century cooking talking about how sourdough was not used in the references that they have found, which are mainly in English, at the same time though when reading the Kajsa Warg's "Hielpreda i hushållet" in Swedisn from the 18th century she talks about making bread from sourdough. My secondary sources say that the kind of yeast you use for beer or baking yeast was not available here. I decided to go for sourdough, and thankfully you can find sourdough startes in some largers supermarkets so I could skip that step.

On the back of the package of the sourdough starter there was a recipe, I used that quantty of water, but nothing else from the recipe. Most modern recipes, even those saying they are historical, add extra fresh yeast to the dough, but I went with only the sourdough. The top metallic bowl is for the servants' bread. For that I simply just used the coarse rye flour, water and 1/3 of the sourdough packet. The dough was really hard and compact, no matter how much I needed it. This is what I suspected, since the rye doesn't have the same gluten content that makes wheat flour so great for baking.

For the lords' bread I used the mix of 60 wheat flor and 40 sifted rye flour that you can buy (rågsikt) and 2/3 of the sourdough. Inspired by a recipe from a Danish cookbook from 1616 (transcribed into both Danish and English) that makes a bread with sourdough and mentions several spices I also added ground aniseed and caraway seeds and about a table spoon of honey. This behaved much more like a regular bread dough and it was nice and soft to knead it and feel it starting to become elastic.

Both doughs were set to raise for an hour, then turned and left for another hour. Then it was time to turn them into bread shapes. The servants bread was still very dense and compact, it hadn't raised at all. So I baked it into a fairly thin round shape, similar to a crisp bread but it was so dense that I couldn't get it quite as flat as a crisp bread. The lords' bread was baked into four smaller round shapes.

For the baking I used 200 degrees for the servants's bread, for the lords' bread I put it into the oven at 250 degrees to form a very hard crust and then lowered the temperature to around 220. Both breads were soft and nice straight from the oven when they were warm, but got hard and chewy when they got cold. The people who tasted it claimed that both tasted really good, especially with butter on them. There were jokes about the servants' bread, similarities with the Discworld dwarf bread and possible use of it as a projectile weapon.

The lords' bread is very similar to what I imagine a medieval daily bread would be. It can be used as a plate, it can be softened with liquids and used to scoop up soups and drippings.  It is also pretty similar to the fairly flat shape of bread you can see in medieval images.

Even if I'm happy with the lords' bread, I don't think the servants' bread is something that would have been handed out from a castle kitchen. Did they maybe add in some wheat flour to the coarse rye, just to make it easier to bake? Or did they use a finer rye flour than I did, to make it more similar to a modern dark rye bread? For now I have a lot of flour in my pantry, but I would like to do this kind of bake again and then I would switch the premade wheat/rye mixed flour with my own mix of spelt/dinkel wheat, which is closer to the medieval wheat, and fine rye flour. And I would try and make the servants' bread from fine rye flour instead of coarse rye flour.

The inspiration for the bread baking came from an article about the food inventories of Västerås castle 1517-1520, and I have written more about that article over at Historiekullan (in Swedish)