this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
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That person should try to eat a medieval peasant bread sometime. It was made from a coarse meal, not refined flour. It wasn't leavened. And it had zero salt inside. It also had sand in it. The taste of that shit is god awful and it destroys your teeth.
What're you basing that off of? The only reason you'd make a flatbread is if you couldn't cobble together some sort of oven/stove communally. Otherwise sourdough is a no brainer even with sandy rye flour.
They also had yeast that they could get from the local brewer.
And since bread was highly regulated, it was generally made by a trained baker, who used the highest quality flour they could get... which was still often very coarsely ground with the occasional bit of sand from the grindstones.
But it was leavened, and had salt, because everyone could get salt. The stuff was everywhere. And still is.
Yeah even the iron age gauls did that.
I don't think you could stick it together though unless it was fine grain. Also they presumably wouldn't have had yeast so it would have been flatbread.
Leavened bread was a pre bronze age thing. The whole point behind passover unleavened bread is the refugees theoretically had no time to let dough proof (not that I think the Exodus actually happened). As long as you're dealing with something that has gluten, leavening it is trivial. Iron age armies would make rolls, proof them with sourdough starter, and cook them on skewers over an open fire while on the march. Coarse grain rye might take a day or more to proof with sourdough, but it'll be sweeter and easier to digest after.
When it comes to if you make flatbread or not, it's more a property of does the grain itself have enough gluten to even rise (which things like barley does not). Usually if it doesn't, you'd make a porridge with it, but keep in mind that even making a porridge takes hours to really break down the grain. Leavening is almost always available.
If you just leave dough outside you'll have yeast. Yeast is already around you. How do you think best was discovered?