Written by Bridget White
I continued my research on ancient grains and breads this month and came across a recipe for Bappir/ Bapier. It dates from 2402 BC, Lagash. It is a 5000-year-old Sumerian bread recipe using barley grain. The Mesopotamians had saltwater flooding their fields, and this made growing wheat impossible, as the wheat was intolerant of the salt. The next alternative was barley, which is a far more salt-tolerant grain. The resulting bread made with barley had a long storage life. The barley was malted and mixed with honey or dates, spices and water. It was a twice-baked bread, but it was not used as a bread for eating, rather for brewing barley beer. After the second baking, the bread was crumbled into small pieces and then remixed with water, honey and more malt and left to ferment.
I discovered an amazing author, Arim Hawsho, who has been working on the production of a cookbook inspired by the world’s oldest recipes, which were written on clay tablets. His book will be called Table of the Gods. Now that I’ve investigated how to make malted Barley, I can attempt baking Bapier…I have purchased a flour mill with which to grind the barley. I find it fascinating to know that foods that arose from Earth Care long ago can in some way bring nourishment to meals today.
I was reading Permaculture UK’s summer 2018 magazine, and an article on heritage bread revolution linked me straight back to last month‘s article about John Letts. He was the farmer who collected, grew and preserved heritage wheats and made a loaf based on a rye/ wheat mix. For those here who are keen on maths equations, the article went on to mention the Golden ratio or Fibonacci as we know it. In this recipe, 1 kg of bread flour is mixed with 618 mL of water to gain the perfect ratio. Sadly, modern bread manufacturers change the ratio to a profit ratio, adding water, fat, yeast, gluten and chemicals both into the bread and on the fields which produce the basic grains.
I came across an amazing thick mixture made of yeast, 50% flour and 50% water. It’s called Poolish. Reportedly, it has a less acidic taste than that of sourdough. Poolish was used to produce a liquid biga used in Poland in 1884, then taken through Austria to France, where bakers made a Vienna bread. It is a fermentation process of 18 hours in order to produce the levenning action and complex flavours.
I came across another bread recipe when my favourite author, Fiona McIntosh, could not get to the shops recently. She tossed some ingredients together and made a reasonable loaf. This was an admirable stopgap, perhaps while fuel costs are rising?
Image by Mariusz Matuszewski from Pixabay