[Sca-cooks] question about breads

[Terry Decker]

A teaspoon or so of sugar is used in modern bread recipes to boost the 
activity of the yeast insuring a good rise.  It is completely unnecessary to 
the process so commercial recipes tend not to include it.

In period, breads were most commonly leavened with ale barm or a sourdough 
starter.  Neither requires the kick of additional sugar.  The recipes for 
bread within and shortly after period call for flour, water, leaven and salt 
and are enriched with eggs, fats, malt, etc.; not sugar.  An exception to 
this is rastons (restons), which is a sweet, enriched bread served as we 
would a dessert.  Judging from the way the recipes are written, the sugar in 
rastons is being used as a sweetner rather than a yeast booster.  I also 
suspect rastons may have been prepared by the cook rather than the baker. 
Honey works well as sweetner but is not as effective as a yeast booster.

One of the reasons I am certain that sugar was not used in standard breads 
in period is baker's profits were limited by law.  The law applied to all 
bakers whether owners of a bakery or in the employ of a household.  To use 
sugar when it was not called for, would cut into an already slim profit 
margin.

Bear


> Bear commented:
>> Period breads don't use sugar.
>
> I'm curious why you are so sure of this. I realize that sugar probably 
> wasn't cheap enough until at least the 16th century to be used this way. 
> There seem to awfully few recipes though to make this statement from. Or 
> do you have some other information that indicates this?
>
> In a regular, modern bread how much sugar is used? I assume this is a 
> small quantity used for something other than sweetening the bread. Is this 
> for the yeast? Or is this similar to what we discussed here before, where 
> just a touch of sugar doesn't really sweeten the taste of item, but brings 
> out other flavors?
>
> Does honey have this same effect?
>
> Stefan