Rye Flat Bread Experiment

This week we experimented with making rye flatbread. All the ingredients and cooking techniques were the same as in our previous flatbreads, but for this recipe we used rye flour.

Here are all of our ingredients!

Step 1: Put rye flour in bowl.

Step 2: Add a pinch of sea salt.

Step 3: Melt butter.

Step 4: Add honey to melted butter.

Step 5: Mix buttermilk into the butter and honey mixture.

Step 6: Pour liquid ingredients into dry ingredients. 

Step 7: Mix and knead mixture with hands.

Step 8: Form dough into balls.

Step 9: Flatten dough balls into circles; cook in pan until both sides are brown.

Step 10: Serve hot with butter and honey.

 
We liked the taste of the rye bread better than the taste of the barley bread, but less than the oat bread. We found that the rye had a drier, and slightly tart taste to it, compared to the barley and oat breads.

We were planning to make a leavened bread using a fermented rye flour starter this week as well, but our rye starter died and so we had to abandon that experiment. We believe the rye starter died due to a recent drop in the local temperature. The natural yeasts require a 'cozy' environment to keep on bubbling. Perhaps the kitchen it was kept in does not stay as warm as a Viking longhouse with cooking fires tended to all through the winter. It would be interesting to learn what the temperature inside one of those dwellings was during a Nordic winter. Rest in peace, rye starter!
During the Viking Age, the materials used in bread-making would have been similar to what we used in our experiment, with a few notable differences.

1. Vikings would have used flour that was ground with a quern (Graham-Campbell 1980). Their flour would have probably had a less consistent texture, and may have had small granules of rock in it that had flaked off of the quern during the grinding process. Grinding flour by hand takes a lot of time and upper body strength. Out of curiosity, we attempted to grind a small amount of barley using a stone mortar and pestle, but it took the best part of twenty minutes to produce a single coarse tablespoon. We used commercially produced whole-grain flours for our experiments because they were more affordable and they saved a significant amount of time.

2. Vikings may have used a combination of whey leftover from cheese-making and water as the liquid portion of their bread dough. We used commercially produced buttermilk as a substitute for whey, since it has similar bacterial cultures (Hurstwic.org).

3. Viking women would have kneaded their bread dough in a long wooden trough (Graham-Campbell 1980; Short; Ward). We did not have a wooden trough available to us, so we resorted to using a variety of metal, plastic, and wooden bowls.

4. In the Viking Age, they would have cooked bread over the embers of a cooking fire (Hansson 2002). We did not have access to a fire to cook our flatbreads over, so we used an electric stove set to a low-medium heat.

5. Viking Age bread would have been made in a long-handled cast iron pan (Graham-Campbell 1980; Short; Ward). Modern cast iron pans have a much shorter handle, but the technology is otherwise much the same. We used cast iron pans when making the oat and barley flatbread, and we used a non-stick pan for the rye flatbread as cast iron was not available. There was no notable difference in results when using the non-stick pan versus the cast-iron pan.

- Jennifer

Bibliography

GRAHAM-CAMPBELL, J., 1980. Home Life. In: The Viking World. USA: Ticknor & Fields, pp.
113-129.

HANSSON, A-H., 2002. Pre- and Protohistoric Bread in Sweden: a definition and a review. Civilisations, 49(1/2), PAIN, FOURS ET FOYERS des temps passés / BREAD, OVENS AND HEARTHS of the past, pp. 183-190. Institut de Sociologie de l'Université de Bruxelles. Available: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41229648 [Oct 8, 2013].

SHORT, W-R., Food, Diet, and Nutrition in the Viking Age, Hurstwic. Available: http://www.hurstwic.org/history/articles/daily_living/text/food_and_diet.htm[Oct 9, 2013].

WARD, C., Viking Foods, The Viking Answer Lady. Available: http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/food.shtml[Oct 9,
2013].