[Sca-cooks] batter breads

[Terry Decker]

> Bear explained:
> <<< The key issue in the cooling is keeping the moisture in the  bread. 
> It's a
> thin bread and it will dry out faster than a French baguette.>>>
>
> Gulp. Faster? Those French baguettes dry out pretty quickly and make a 
> handy weapon.  Either very hard or they shatter into lots of sharp 
> fragments.
>

French bakeries bake baguettes three or four times a day just so they will 
be fresh.  While the French bakery here in Norman doesn't bake them quite 
that often, they do produce them daily.  Rather than weapon, think 
breadcrumbs.  Lots of beautiful bread crumbs to pass through a sieve and get 
coarse and fine breadcrumbs suitable for ones culinary needs.

As for injera, the texture is different, so they get tough and leathery.

>  <<< Batter breads have a fairly early origin and this particular  bread 
> is
> obviously related to some Yemini breads, suggesting cultural transfer
> between 700-900 CE, if not earlier.  Rather than saying that this sounds
> like a lot of period flat breads (which is not necessarily true), I  would
> say that it is a batter bread which makes it similar to all other batter
> breads including period batter breads.  >>>
>
> A batter bread? vs. what? a dough bread?
> Are all batter breads, flat breads? or vice-versa? Or are these 
> unrelated?
>

The difference is whether the mixture of flour and liquor are fluid or not. 
A batter flows easily while a dough does not.  The classification of the 
dough is immaterial to whether the final product is a flat bread.  Flat 
breads are flat breads because of their flattened shape.

> This has yeast. I thought all flat breads were unleavened. Are all 
> unleavened breads flatbreads?
>

The yeast in this case is a souring agent, not a leaven.  Foccacia is a 
leavened flat bread.  Tortilla is an unleavened flat bread.  The traditional 
American pancake is a chemically leavened flat bread.  So leavening has 
nothing to do with the concept of flat bread.  And to disabuse you of the 
idea that all unleavened breads are flat breads, consider pound cake, a 
specialized bread, which in traditional recipes has no leavening, but is 
baked in a mold and does not take on the flat shape.

> Lots and lots of bread varieties. I wonder if ale/beer or bread has  the 
> greater number of variations.
>
> Stefan

Bread has the greater number of variations.  Being solid, it has the added 
dimensions of shape and texture.  In addition bread can use ingredients that 
are difficult to turn into beer, say sawdust.

Bear