Well we tried each of the breads in class today. Baking fail!
None of the loaves are something that I would want to sit down and eat. We did a poll of the students and each of the breads except barley was voted by at least two people as their favorite sample. Even though they didn't turn out well as something to eat, one can really taste the different flours and the ways that the flours interact differently with the sourdough starter. Same starter, same conditions, but the tastes are totally different. This is fascinating.
Today in our class we also talked about different types of wheat and passed around some samples of wheat berries from Camas Country Mill. Students had a chance to be explore the Calorie count and nutritional analysis of various wheat varieties. I was surprised by how many Calories there are in a cup of wheat flour.
Our bread experience got me thinking about the book The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder where the family experience a record setting cold winter in the late 1800s and the family had nothing but wheat berries that they ground into a bread for weeks on end. As a food product goes, they were able to get a lot of Calories from the bread so they could survive months when the trains couldn't get through to their new frontier town of De Smet, South Dakota. Writer Aimee Levitt reflects on the book in a piece from earlier this year in the midst of the cold Chicago winter.
Our breads were so hard, dense and not pleasant to eat, and we even had the benefit of a warm kitchen where we could do our work. We were not also twisting hay to just keep a fire burning, grinding a coffee grinder all day to have enough flour for the meal, or eating seed wheat from our neighbor. I cannot imagine the perseverance of the Ingalls family to eke out their survival during this terrible winter. Wendy McClure and Courtney Crowder used a period recipe and coffee grinder to try out a "Long Winter" bread. It looks very brick-like much as our breads did today.
I am surprised that this version of the bread includes a sourdough starter. What would they have fed it to keep the starter alive? And at some point the Ingalls family must have run out of bacon drippings, salt, and soda. What did they do then? I also really wonder if our version of bread that we baked yesterday is really any better (or worse) than the "Long Winter" bread. It would provide us with sustenance, but certainly would not be considered comfort food like so many other breads.
Our experiment with bread baking really drove home the point that one of the most important (and difficult to control) ingredients in bread baking is time. I love your links to the Long Winter bread. I'm sure our breads would have tasted better to us if we'd been freezing and starving.
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