I had an incredible time this past weekend!
I’ve been doing Revolutionary War reenacting for several years now and have the privilege to be on the boards of two great Rev War groups, Col. Bailey’s 2nd Massachusetts Regiment and On the Army’s Strength. And through these two groups, at the “Battle for Newbury” event, I got to put together a camp market presentation. For two days I manned a table that was loaded with seasonal veggies, dried fruits, cheese and other dairy products, soap, switchel (which went quickly) and freshly baked bread! The soldiers in camp received their continental “pay” and were able to buy goods to supplement their meals.
All in all it was a HUGE success!
What was even MORE fun was the fact that I made the fresh baked bread myself, and was quite pleased when, by Saturday afternoon, there were no loaves left. I made 4 loaves of Anadama Bread (a wheat bread with molasses and cornmeal) and 5 loaves of Sourdough (or Leaven) Bread. And it’s the leaven bread that I’m going to talk about in this post!
To make Leaven Bread.
Bread made without barm, must be by the assistance of leaven. Take a lump of dough, about two pounds of your last making, which has been raised by barm. Keep it by you in a wooden vessel, cover it well with flour, and this will be your leaven. The night before you intend to bake, put your leaven to a peck of flour, and work them well together with warm water. Let it lie in a dry wooden vessel, well covered with a linen cloth and a blanket, and keep it in a warm place. This dough, kept war, will rise again next morning, and will be sufficient to mix with two or three bushels of flour, being worked up with warm water and a little salt. When it be well worked up, and thoroughly mixed with the flour, let it be well covered with the linen and blanket, until you find it begin to rise. Then knead it well, and work it up into bricks or loaves, and making the loaves broad, and not so thick and high as is frequently done, by which means the bread will be better baked. Always keep by you two or more pounds of dough from your last baking well covered with flour, to make leaven to serve from one baking day to another; and the more leaven you put to the flour, the lighter the bread will be. The fresher the leaven, the less sour will be the bread.
Farley, John. The London Art of Cookery. (London, 1787) Pg. 418-419
This particular receipt brought back memories of me baking bread in the pilgrim village at Plimoth Plantation. We would save a piece of the dough from the previous bake and put it in salt. Then, the night before, we would put the dough in warm water with some flour and let it sit and ferment overnight. Then next morning, the tub of starter along with a whole sack full of wheat flour and sack full of corn flour would be carried in a HUGE wooden trough down that person’s particular house, where the dough was prepped and allowed to rise till the afternoon, when the outdoor bread oven was fired up, heated, cleaned out, and the newly shaped loaves (usually anywhere between 10 and 24 of them) were put on the clay floor of the oven and closed in, baking for one to two hours depending on the heat. Then, the loaves were loaded into a basket, carried back up to our modern foodways kitchen, and one was set out with butter and devoured within minutes. SO GOOD!!!
Awww, memories…
Sadly, I currently don’t have a wood-fired clay oven in my backyard… yet…
But that doesn’t stop me from recreating the delicious leavened bread! And it was even more advantageous because my sourdough starter I have the counter was threatening to burst out of its container, which is the tell tale sign that it’s been too long since I’ve last baked with it.
The leaven bread dough actually starts the night before, so that the starter has time to reactivate (come ALIVE!!!). Now this particular receipt calls for 2 pounds of dough from your previous bake, which is ALOT of dough. Which means, this receipt is going to make ALOT of bread! I don’t have an oven large enough to accommodate ALOT of bread loaves, so I decided to bring it down quite a bit.
So I took two cups of my counter starter (look how bubbly and happy it is!!!) and put that with equal amounts of flour and warm water. So 2 cups starter, 2 cups warm water, and 2 cups flour. I did also add a packet of yeast, just to ensure there was a rise. I know this isn’t historically accurate, but I really only had time to bake these loaves once, and didn’t want it to fail. I thoroughly mixed the ingredients together and let it sit, covered, overnight.
(Forgive my hand shadow, it’s the only shot I had of the starter before I covered it up).
12 OR SO HOURS LATER….
Ta da!!! It certainly looks bubbly and happy! Success!
At this point I tasted the starter to see how sour it was (which was pretty sour) so I ended up adding 2 Tbl of sugar to tone down the sourness. But that is entirely a matter of taste so if you really like the sourness in sourdough you don’t have to do this step.
I also added 2 Tbl of salt, to add flavor and to slow down the starter’s growth.
At this point I divided up the starter, because I knew that I if I tried to mix the flour and salt all in one bowl it would just be a HUGE mess. So I decided to divide the starter into two bowls (3 cups in the blue one, 2 cups in the orange one) and then started to slowly add in the bread flour to each bowl.
Having brought the amount of starter in the receipt significantly down, I also realized that I wouldn’t need 2-3 bushels of flour (about 294-441 cups of flour, yes I looked it up). I would have to figure out how much flour would be necessary to form the dough. So, in 1/2 cup increments, I added flour and mixed the dough till it was too tough to stir.
At this point it was still too sticky but I added more flour and kneaded in the bowl (mainly because I hate to have to clean the counters after kneading dough) until it was smooth but not overly dry. It took me 2 cups of flour in the orange bowl and 3 cups of flour in the blue bowl to achieve this consistency. So, a one to one ratio for future reference.
There! Isn’t it pretty?!? And yes I put it back in the dirty bowl, it doesn’t hurt it and it is one less dish that I have to wash. Win!
I repeated this process for the starter in the blue bowl…
…and covered them and let them rest for 2 hours. What you want is for the dough balls to double in size. The amount of time for that to happen will vary depending on the humidity and warmth of the place it is sitting. So, for me it was 2 hours, but it could be different depending on where you are, how high up you are in altitude, how warm/cold it is, whether or not you’ve done a bread dance to the bread goddess, ect.
TWO HOURS LATER…..
Wait for it… TA DA!!!
This is such an exciting and gratifying sight! Look how much they’ve grown!
Yes, yes, I know. I said I didn’t want to make extra dishes, but I needed the blue bowl for my other bread and found that this red one worked just as well for the rising part.
I punched down the dough and kneaded it again till it was elastic. Then, after I weighed out each piece dough to a pound per loaf, I shaped them in a round bowl, and cut a circle round the top with two slits, essentially making a pig nose on top. The slits are necessary to make sure the bread will grow in a certain direction in the oven, rather than having one part of it growing bigger than the other side. That, and who wouldn’t want the top of their bread to look like a piggy nose!!! Don’t answer that…
And then, once 5 loaves were formed, they were put back under the towels to rise for a 2nd time, this time for about 35 minutes or so…
Second rising done!
I should say now that I also preheated the oven to 375 degrees F while the dough was rising a 2nd time. So, from here, they went straight into the oven to bake for a little over an hour (about 70 minutes). Now my oven is very finicky, so it would be better to keep an eye on them until they are brown and sound hollow when they are thumped on the bottom.
And they’re out!
I also should add that I sprayed the pans with cooking spray and added cornmeal so that they didn’t stick to the pan as well. And it also adds a little rustic texture to the bread too!
Now, if I wasn’t using them for the camp market, I probably would have cut one open, still warm, and slathered it up with butter and eaten it! Then I would have suffered from a stomach ache because just warm bread like that isn’t done cooking. It would have been worth it though.
But because I needed it to sell at the market I put the loaves on a drying rack and allowed them to cool overnight before wrapping them up to go to market.
But, when my sourdough is ready to spill out of its container again soon, I think I’ll make another batch to eat warm with butter, or make some delicious toast with!
This bread is REALLY good as toast!