[Sca-cooks] Grating bread - experimental archaeology

Terry Decker t.d.decker at att.net
Wed Sep 9 20:11:37 PDT 2009


It is next to impossible to cut or grate truly fresh (from the oven) bread. 
It takes about a day to lose enough moisture content to toughen the bread 
enough to cut or grate.  The sandwich rolls, while packaged to maintain 
freshness, are usually a couple of days old by the time you buy them  Breads 
are often shipped frozen to extend storage time, which also alters the 
moisture content.

The experiment you should try is baking four loaves of bread made of flour, 
water, yeast and salt.  Start with a loave that has just cooled from the 
oven to test, then run your test each day for the next three days.  Wheat 
bread without modern packaging or refrigeration goes stale in about four 
days.

Some points you haven't considered is how often did a noble house bake and 
how was bread kept and distributed?  A household with a lot of people might 
bake daily, while a smaller household might bake every two or three days. 
Bread was baked and stored, although I doubt it was often fresh from the 
oven as the pantry almost certainly used a first in, first out system. 
Since the baker often arrived a couple days before the rest of the household 
and stocked the pantry so the bread supply could keep ahead of the eating, I 
would expect most bread was a day or two old.

Bear

>
> So the question was asked if had I ever tried to grate fresh bread, and
> I realized that the answer was no, and that it was unacceptable.
>
> I know that they had graters that were similar enough to modern ones -
> there's a beautiful example of one in Vincenzo Campi's "Kitchen" (see
> URL) where it's apparently being used to grate bread.
>
> http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/c/campi/vincenzo/2kitchen.html
>
> The question then is just how effective is this on fresh bread?
>
> So I stopped on the way home and picked up a pack of sandwich rolls.
> When I bake bread, I use a fairly simple recipe (flour, water, yeast,
> fat, salt, sugar) and get a reasonably firm bread.  The rolls I bought
> aren't quite as firm, being somewhere between my bread and Wonder in
> terms of smushyness.  Fine, if I can grate them when they're fresh then
> I figure something less doughy will work equally well or better.
>
> I got out the cheese grater and used the side for turning hard cheese
> into fine crumbs, and after a rather tedious few minutes I had a bowl
> full of very fine bread crumbs.  There were some larger bits in there
> that came about mostly near the end of the process, when the piece of
> roll I was holding was too thing to grate properly and would tend to
> roll up, but they were easily picked out.  I believe at least one of the
> gingerbread recipes says to sift the crumbs after grating.
>
> The final product was indistinguishable from what I get by putting fresh
> bread in a food processor.  The grating process is simply more physical
> work and wastes a bit of bread.
>
> So I'm inclined to believe that in period they used reasonably fresh
> bread for the following reasons:
>
> 1.  It is possible to grate fresh bread.
>
> 2.  None of the recipes I have seen instruct the cook to use stale or
> dry bread or to dry the bread before use.  I have seen recipes for foods
> other than gingerbread that do specify old or dry bread, so I'd expect
> them to say so in the gingerbread recipes if it was meant to be so.
>
> 3.  Using dried bread crumbs gives the gingerbread an unpleasant (to
> me), gritty texture, which requires an additional (and somewhat
> ineffective) step of letting the gingerbread rest to soften the crumbs -
> with this additional step also notably absent in the period recipes I've
> seen.
>
> Your mileage may vary,
>
> - Doc
>
>
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