Reverse Engineering a Roman Bread Recipe

Carbonized loaf of bread, AD 79, Roman, Herculaneum. 

© Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli e Pompei

The 2013 video that appears to the left of this post shows baker Giorgio Locatelli recreating a bread recipe that could have been used to bake the loaf found in the archaeological dig at Herculaneum; a loaf made over 2,000 years ago.  A written version of the recipe may be found here at the British Museum's website, and a picture of the grayish, carbonized loaf from Herculaneum may be found to the right.

Mr. Locatelli believes that the flattish loaf was a sourdough bread.  He believes that its odd shape came from affixing a string around the loaf and making cuts in the surface of the dough mass before baking.   Mr. Locatelli also suggests that the Herculaneum loaf may have been baked with a string tied around the dough so that the finished loaf could be carried by the string; a useful bit of convenience in a place and time in which sellers were not expected to provide buyers with containers for carrying purchases. Interestingly, he does not believe the dough was kneaded much.  Instead, he thinks it was merely mixed thoroughly until it achieved the right consistency and then allowed to rest at room temperature for about an hour before baking.

It makes sense that early leavened loaves would be made from sourdough.  No special equipment is required, and no yeasts need to be isolated for special addition to your flour and water dough.

As for the lack of kneading, About Food suggests that the purpose of kneading is to align gluten strands within the dough into a framework that will make the bread lighter.   A dough that has fermented, however, will have a similar gluten matrix, caused mostly by the fermentation process; it won't need much kneading.  Although one can certainly put a lot of effort into kneading sourdough (and doing so can produce wonderful results, as I learned as a child from my mother's sourdough experiments), it may not be necessary to do so, especially if you are not interested in getting your loaf to rise substantially.

The moral of this story is that anything a person can create, another person can recreate by logical deductions based on specific knowledge of the type of item and the materials and processes typically used to make such items.  That's as true of bread as it is of clothing, hairstyles, machines and computer programs.  It is fascinating to see such recreation techniques applied to food as they have been to other areas of material culture.

Chemistry First

After the last flatbread experiment, it occurred to me that while tastes and technologies may have changed since the heyday of the Vikings, the relevant food chemistry has not. Thus, it would make sense for me to see what kinds of recipes are used to make modern flatbreads, and then try to adapt those recipes with knowledge of known Viking ingredients and cooking techniques in mind.

It turns out that most of the flatbread recipes I found on line--for naan, ciabatta, pita bread, and the like--all contain an ingredient that causes the dough to rise somewhat either before or during the cooking process. The rising ingredients found in the other flatbreads are either baking soda, baking powder, or yeast.

Baking soda was not, so far as I know, used in food during the Viking age, and baking powder was invented in the 19th century, so that leaves me with yeast as a period rising agent.  Since the Vikings couldn't just visit a supermarket and buy a packet of yeast as the Internet recipes I've seen require, I have but one possibility to consider--sourdough.

I'm surprised I didn't think seriously about the use of sourdough by the Vikings sooner. My mother experimented very successfully with sourdough recipes when she was about my age, and all of her projects (particularly her doughnuts, yum) turned out very well.

Sourdough, as Wikipedia correctly explains, is made by a process that encourages yeasts that are naturally present in flour to ferment your bread dough. Essentially, you make a dough "starter" from flour and water, and in time the natural yeasts present in the flour begin their own fermentation process that results in leavening. Once the starter has reached an appropriate level of yeast activity, you just use a bit of the starter an an ingredient in your bread projects instead of store-bought yeast, periodically adding new flour and water to keep the existing yeast culture in the "starter" going, a process which can continue indefinitely (I think my mother kept our dough starter going for six months before she got tired of making so much bread).

Two sourdough loaves.  Front: 90% white flour, 10% rye sourdough loaf proofed in a coiled-cane brotform. Back: A 3-pound whole-wheat miche.  (Wikimedia Commons)

Use of sourdough would fit with Viking material culture in two other ways as well. First, breads made with sourdough are, as the name implies, slightly sour in taste, and sour tastes were very familiar to the Vikings (such flavors appear in period dairy foods such as skyr, whey, and cheese, to name a few). Second, and perhaps more importantly to a northern farming culture for which food preservation was a major issue, sourdough breads are naturally mold-resistant.  That is a factor that also matters to me personally, because I live in an area where high humidity is prevalent and breads tend to acquire mold quickly.

I cannot recall seeing much discussion of the potential use of sourdough by the Vikings (though A Culinary Journey Through Time includes a sourdough bread recipe).  But this seems like a useful avenue for experimentation.  I think I will read up on the process of making sourdough bread, and try making some pan-fried flatbreads with sourdough instead of simple flour-and-liquid mixtures.