How in Rus' they baked bread without yeast. Bread cooking
The birth of sourdough
The starter is prepared once, and then only used and replenished. It is a living dough that can lie dormant in the refrigerator, or can actively rise if you feed it. Sourdough biomass consists of natural microorganisms (fungi, bacteria, etc.) that live on rye grains.
The point is to revive, multiply and grow these microorganisms so that they self-organize into a stable symbiotic colony. Life itself in nature is built on the principle of symbiotic colonies of micro- or macroorganisms (for example, soil, ocean, intestinal microflora). Organisms in symbiosis support and complement each other.
Sourdough is prepared simply from flour and water. Ratio: 2 parts flour and 3 parts water (exactly one and a half times more water). You will need a room thermometer, digital kitchen scales, a glass saucepan or jar with a capacity of 1.5 liters, and a wooden spatula. This will take four days, and by the fifth you can start baking bread.
Sourdough should be prepared exclusively and only on the basis of rye flour, because rye sourdough, in comparison with wheat and other sourdough, is the most stable, healthy and strong. Those microorganisms that live on rye grains are quite sufficient to organize a well-coordinated symbiotic colony.
Washing the grain does not have a significant effect on microorganisms, so you don’t have to worry about it. But high-temperature drying kills most of the necessary microorganisms, so sprouted grains for sourdough should be dried at a temperature no higher than 41 °C. Obviously, industrially produced flour is not suitable for creating high-quality sourdough.
As already mentioned, the starter is prepared once, then it can be used continuously, saving part of the batch for the next baking.
Cooking technology:
1. Load the measured weight of grain into the mill, grind the flour directly into the pan, rice. 13. The grinding degree should be set to the finest fraction.
2. Measure out the required amount of warm water on a scale, at a temperature no higher than 36–37 °C. The water must be clean, filtered, not chlorinated. You can take spring water, boiled or distilled, infused with shungite and flint.
3. Pour water into the pan with flour and stir with a wooden spatula so that the flour is evenly combined with water. You will get a dough with the consistency of thick sour cream, rice. 14.
4. Cover the pan (or jar) with a lid, not airtight, cover it with a cotton napkin from light, and place it in a secluded place, away from drafts and electrical appliances. The optimal temperature for feeding sourdough is about 24–26 °C, not higher. Find such a place in the kitchen using a thermometer. Closer to the ceiling - warmer.
This procedure will need to be repeated four days in the morning and evening:
Day 1. Morning 40 g flour, 60 g water. Evening 40 g flour, 60 g water.
Day 2. Morning 40 g flour, 60 g water. Evening 40 g flour, 60 g water.
Day 3. Morning 40 g flour, 60 g water. Evening 40 g flour, 60 g water.
Day 4. Morning 40 g flour, 60 g water. Evening 40 g flour, 60 g water.
Day 5. In the morning we already have 800 g of starter. 500 g will be used for the first bread. We put the rest in the refrigerator until the next baking, rice. 15.
The starter should have a pleasant smell of natural kvass. If the leaven has a bad smell, it means that you violated the technology in some way or used dirty dishes. If everything is done correctly, but the smell is still nauseating or chemical, then perhaps the environment in the room where the starter is made is not environmentally friendly. Or the initial raw material - grain - was found to be of poor quality or containing some foreign impurities. In this case, you should find grain from another producer and trader.
Some recipe writers write that the smell of burp or something else in the sourdough starter is “normal.” But this is not normal. The starter should not have any “disgusting smell”. If on the fifth day the starter smells of alcohol, acetone, vinegar, or even moldy, you can throw it away and start over. Try not to violate the technology, and you will succeed.
At the same time, excessive perfectionism is not required here. The behavior of the starter is quite stable, so all parameters can be slightly varied. For example, it is desirable to maintain the temperature, but not necessarily too pedantic. Now some practical advice.
It is better to choose electronic scales that have a reset function. The principle is as follows: a container (container) is placed on the scales, a button is pressed, the scale readings are reset to zero, then the product is loaded into the container, and the net weight is thus displayed on the display. It's comfortable.
To store that part of the starter that goes into the next baking, you need to choose a container - made of glass, ceramics or food-grade plastic. The lid should not be airtight, but not too open, so that the starter does not absorb odors from the refrigerator. If the lid is plastic and closes tightly, you can make several holes in it with a needle. Dishes for fermentation should not be washed with household chemicals. Everything is easily washed off with warm water.
The starter can be stored in the refrigerator, on the top shelf, where the temperature is not the lowest. Long breaks in baking bread are undesirable. The starter must be renewed regularly. Personally, I tried leaving it for half a month, and it came back to life safely. Perhaps the starter can survive for three weeks, but it is better not to leave it longer than this, otherwise you will have to start it again. After all, sourdough is a living colony of microorganisms, and you need to treat it like a living entity. If you are going away for a long time, assign someone to look after and feed you at least once a week.
Flour should always be ground just before use. There is no need to store it - it is a perishable product. Vitamins and nutrients oxidize quickly when exposed to air. That is why industrially produced flour cannot be considered a natural product - manufacturers will do any tricks just to increase the sales period.
The grinding degree is set to the finest fraction. This is done because in a home electric mill it is still impossible to achieve the same degree as is achieved in an industrial environment. But this is not required. The quality of bread, what REAL bread should be, is determined by completely different parameters:
1. Sprouted grain.
2. Freshly ground flour.
3. Natural, natural leaven.
4. The presence of shell and germ in flour.
5. Lack of chemical and synthetic additives.
Flour should not be white like starch, even if it is wheat. It is impossible to describe what it should be like. When you first make your own flour, smell it, taste it, feel it, you will understand what REAL flour should be like.
Bread should also not be white and fluffy. It must be REAL, not synthetic. Real bread is also impossible to describe in words. When you try it, everything will become clear to you. It has both a special and noble smell.
One question remains open: if there is no mill or dehydrator yet, but you want to bake your own bread now, what should you do? You can try your luck by looking in local stores or on the Internet for whole grain rye flour or at least first grade flour. If you are lucky and come across a product from a conscientious and honest, and, importantly, sane manufacturer, then both the sourdough and the real bread (well, or almost) can be obtained.
In any case, it is better to get everything you need to get rid of system manufacturers and traders who care only about profit, but not your health, as well as from a system that is directly interested in your UNHEALTH.
100% Rye bread
To achieve the best result with the least amount of time and effort, it is advisable to use a bread maker. Of course, you can get by with a regular oven, but it’s easier with a bread maker. This is the case when the system's products are used to bypass the system itself.
The bread machine works simply: all the ingredients are loaded into it, a baking program (recipe) is selected, a button is pressed, and then it does everything itself - kneads the dough, heats it so that it rises, and then bakes.
All programs are hardwired and designed exclusively for yeast. Don’t be fooled if you see a bread machine with such “natural” programs as “yeast-free”, “gluten-free”, “whole grain”. At best, this means that the recipe does not use yeast, but a chemical leavening agent. The system is hypocritical.
For our purposes, we will need only two programs: “Yeast Dough” and “Baking”. In fact, we will deceive the system, we will not use yeast, and we will ignore the firmware programs. The main thing is that in the “Yeast dough” mode, the bread machine must be able to knead the dough and warm it up a little so that it fits. You also need a timer to set the time in the “Baking” mode.
It is not necessary to choose a multifunctional and expensive bread maker. The two named programs are all that is needed for our real bread. The presence of additional options and programs, such as a dispenser, delay start, pie, jam, cupcake - at your discretion, if you need it.
A bread machine should be chosen with a power of at least 800 W, otherwise it will not cope with heavy rye dough. The working container (bucket) should have two mixers and be shaped to form a “brick”. The weight of the baked bread is at least 1 kg. For convenience, it wouldn’t hurt to have a window so you can observe the process.
Another important point: the design of the bread machine should allow you to open the lid during operation. If the display and buttons are located on the body and not on the lid, then most likely this is possible.
Recipe for 100% rye bread:
500 g rye sourdough
400 g rye flour
200 g water
3 tbsp. flax seeds
1 tsp cumin seeds
14 g salt
The process begins with awakening the starter left in the refrigerator. During the very first baking, our starter is already ready, so we skip the first 7 points.
Cooking technology:
1.
Remove the starter from the refrigerator and place it in a warm place for an hour until it wakes up. The optimal temperature for sourdough is 24–26 °C.
2.
After an hour, measure out 220 g of rye, load it into the mill and grind the flour into the same container in which the starter was born, for example, a saucepan. Obviously, whatever the weight of the grain, the same weight will be the flour.
3.
Measure out 330 g of warm water, temperature 36–37 °C, and pour into a saucepan with flour. For example, put a glass on a digital scale, reset the readings, pour in cold water, and then add a little hot water from the kettle, so that it turns out to be exactly 330.
4.
Stir with a wooden spatula until the flour is evenly combined with the water. The ratio of water and flour for sourdough is 3/2. For the test the ratio is different. Why are these numbers 330/220? Because we need to get 500 g of starter, and at the same time take into account that the dough partially remains on the dishes, so we need to take it with a reserve so that the amount of starter does not decrease each time, but rather increases. It might come in handy for pancakes.
5.
Load the awakened starter into the pan and stir again with a spatula, now not so diligently so as not to particularly disturb the living entity - the colony of microorganisms.
6. Cover the pan with a lid, not airtight, cover it with a cotton napkin from light and place it in a secluded place, away from drafts and electrical appliances, as was done before. If you are going to bake bread in the morning, this procedure should be done in the evening. Conversely, if the bread is baked in the evening, the leaven is introduced in the morning.
7.
The point of this whole procedure is that we take part of the leaven left over from last time, awaken it, feed it, as a result of which the colony of microorganisms grows, develops vigorous activity (good party!), the leaven rises, then falls, bubbles slightly, and after It takes 10–12 hours to reach the desired condition, when she is moderately hungry and active, fig. 16.
8
. An hour before preparing the bread, soak three tablespoons of flax seeds in water at room temperature or warm, rice. 17. Flax seeds quickly swell and become softer. Soaking is also required because at this time the seeds wake up and neutralize their “preservatives” - inhibitors.
9
. After an hour (or maybe half an hour), put the flax in a sieve to let the water drain, rice. 18.
10
. Measure out 400 g of rye, load it into the mill and grind it into a large food-grade plastic container with a tight lid. Measure out 14 g of salt (fine, preferably sea salt) and a teaspoon of cumin seeds, add them to the flour and rice. 19, close the container with a lid and swirl slightly to mix everything.
11
. Measure out 200 g of warm water, preferably around 40 °C. Remove the mold (bucket) from the bread machine, pour water into it, lay out 500 g of sourdough and flax, rice. 20. The principle is this: first, liquid ingredients are loaded into the mold, then thick, then dry. To conveniently measure exactly 500, you can place the mold on the scale, reset the readings and unload the starter there directly from the pan, to the desired weight.
12
. Unload the rest of the starter from the pan into a specially designated container and put it in the refrigerator. This will be the basis for the next baking. It is better to maintain the amount of this reserve at about 200–300 g. When the excess accumulates, you can use it for other purposes, for example, for kvass or pancakes.
13.
Pour flour from container into pan, rice. 21. The preparatory stage is over. Now it's up to the bread maker.
14
. Insert the pan into the bread machine. Launch the “Yeast Dough” program. First there is a batch, about 25 minutes, with possible stops. During this period, the lid can be opened. You will see that rye dough, unlike wheat dough, is not mixed, but pounded in place, since rye dough does not have the binding gluten fibers that are found in wheat and rice. 22. Therefore, you need to help from time to time with a wooden spatula, directing the dough from the walls to the middle. It is not necessary to do this all the time - mainly at the beginning and end of the batch.
15
. When the kneading is completed, the stove switches to low heating mode. The lid should be closed and the stove should be covered with something on top for insulation, for example a folded terry towel. The temperature inside should be around 37°C. You can check this by placing a thermometer on the dough to also make sure that your oven is actually heating. (If there is no heating, you will have to remove the mold and place it in a warm place, for example, above the back wall of the refrigerator or above the radiator.) This will continue for about an hour.
16.
When the program is finished, the bread maker beeps. You will need this signal to count down the next period. Yeast dough rises within an hour. Sourdough dough takes twice as long. This is why standard sourdough programs are not suitable. So we don’t remove the towel from the stove, we don’t do anything, we wait another hour or an hour and a half.
17
. So, it took 2–2.5 hours to rise after kneading. The dough should almost double in size, fig. 23. Now we launch the “Baking” program, having previously set the “Medium crust” option (if available), as well as the time on the timer. Baking time depends on the weight of the loaf and should be indicated in the instructions. The weight according to our recipe is a little more than a kilogram. The average baking time for this weight can be about 1 hour 10 minutes.
18.
Finally, the oven beeps, the bread is ready. You can pull out the mold, but not with your bare hands, but with oven mitts. Let it cool for about 10 minutes (no more, otherwise the bread will sweat), lay a linen or cotton towel on the table and shake the bread out of the pan, rice. 24.
19
. Wrap the bread in a towel and place it upside down on a wire rack or wicker rack to allow the bottom to breathe and not become sweaty. So you need to let the bread cool.
It may seem that all this is very difficult and long, but this is only the beginning. When you master the technology in practice, you will be convinced that your eyes are afraid, but your hands are doing, and that everything is actually elementary, and your actual participation only takes a few minutes.
The whole process comes down to weighing, pouring and transferring raw materials from one container to another. Moreover, by performing all these manipulations, especially with living substance, you tune in to the frequency of vibrations of living Nature. At this moment, your “usb ports” are freed up - you disconnect from the matrix, which means you begin to think freely and SEE the real state of things.
Other options
You will be convinced that even the very first bread made using this technology has an exquisite taste. And the older the starter, the tastier the bread will be. In some countries, in some bakeries, where they know how to value and preserve traditions, there are sourdough starters that are several hundred years old. But you won’t be able to buy bread like the one you get at home, because even bakeries that follow old recipes don’t use sprouted grains. This is the most ancient and long-forgotten technology.
Of course, this same technology can be implemented in industrial settings. There are no special difficulties here. But the general race for profit zombifies people - they cease to understand and see what they are doing and why. Do you think a technologist at a bakery is aware of what surrogate ingredients he is dealing with and what kind of surrogate product is obtained as a result? Nothing happened. His consciousness once and for all stuck at one point: “this is how it should be.” How exactly it is necessary is determined not by his consciousness, but by the system, the matrix.
The Matrix distributes programs to both bread makers and people – it is equivalent. Both producers of surrogates and their consumers cease to understand and see what they are eating and where they are going. More precisely, they do not go, but they are led. In the system - you become a cyborg - you eat synthetics, you eat synthetics - you become a cyborg. However, maybe some people are quite happy with this. Well, God bless you.
So, you have become acquainted with the unique technology of pure rye bread. Why should you bake rye bread? Because it is healthier, easier, more pleasant for the body in every way. However, wheat-rye bread is also very good if the wheat is sprouted. Here is his recipe.
Wheat-rye bread
500 g rye sourdough
400 g wheat flour
150 g water
3 tbsp. flax seeds
1 tsp cumin seeds
14 g salt
As you can see, less water is taken here because wheat is less hygroscopic. Rye absorbs more water. Everything else is done in the same way. The only pleasant feature is that the bread machine handles wheat-rye dough itself; there is practically no need to help with a spatula (except a little).
This feature is also one of the reasons why 100% rye bread is not produced industrially. (Other reasons are that wheat bread is white, soft, airy, but these are dubious advantages.) Rye dough is more difficult to knead. Although, of course, this problem is not a problem, everything is being solved. But we don’t care about this issue, especially since we have hands and a few minutes of free time.
I don’t know which way you like best, but personally, I find it more convenient to knead the rye dough by hand, without the help of a bread machine. To some extent, doing this yourself is easier and more convenient than using a stirrer. Try the manual method. Here are the amendments to the technology (see pp. 288–292), starting with paragraph 9:
9.
Remove the pan from the bread machine. Launch the “Yeast Dough” program. The stove will “knead the dough” as much as it should according to the program, but in vain. During this time, you can knead the dough by hand.
10.
Place the flax in a sieve and then prepare all the other ingredients.
11.
Pour flour mixed with cumin and salt from the container into an enamel bowl. Make a depression (crater) in the flour. Unload flax, leaven and water there. (Like a stove shape, only in reverse.)
12.
Mix all ingredients until smooth, rice. 26. It is convenient to do this with a wooden spatula, making turning movements from the edge to the middle and at the same time turning the bowl with the other hand. Rye dough, unlike wheat dough, does not require complex manipulations (kneading, resting, kneading again, proofing, etc.). Rye protein is water soluble, so you just need to mix the dough well for 5-7 minutes.
13.
Place the dough in the mold, first removing the mixer blades from it, fig. 27. It is not necessary to level the dough too much; it will spread and settle on its own.
14.
As soon as the bread maker finishes stirring and starts heating, carefully insert the pan into it, using oven mitts to further protect against any stray voltage that may pass through the heating elements, especially if the network is not grounded. Next - everything is the same, starting from point 15.
Instead of flax, you can try soaking sunflower or pumpkin seeds or pistachios in the same way. Only the soaking time for them is several hours. Instead of cumin, you can put coriander seeds, perhaps you will like this taste better. Or don’t use seasoning at all, although it’s more interesting, of course.
Instead of wheat, you can just as well use spelt (spelt). The advantage of spelled is that it is usually grown without the use of chemicals, and is superior to wheat in protein content. Everything else is a matter of taste.
Finally, let's consider another option - baking in the oven. To do this, you will need one or two non-stick pans and a frying pan that can be placed in the oven (no plastic parts).
Oven technology:
1. Knead the dough by hand as described above.
2. Place in molds, fig. 28. It is better to bake rye dough in molds, because it spreads on the baking sheet.
3. Place the molds in the warmest place in the kitchen and cover with a linen or cotton towel. Proofing time is 2–3 hours. The dough should rise to almost double in size, fig. 29.
4. Once the dough has risen, preheat the oven to 240°C. At the same time, pour water into the frying pan, bring to a boil over heat, and place on the oven floor. This is required to prevent the bread from drying out.
5. When the oven has warmed up, place the pans with dough on the top shelf.
6. After 15 minutes, reduce the temperature to 200 °C. Bake for another 35 minutes. Or another 40–50 minutes if all the bread is in one pan. Time can be controlled using a timer.
7. Bread is ready, rice. thirty.
Some people may prefer an oven rather than a bread machine, it's a matter of taste. Both options have their own merits. The advantage of a bread machine is that it itself maintains the required temperature when proofing dough and baking.
Finally, some practical tips:
“You can eat hot bread, but it’s better to let it ripen.” The bread continues to ripen for several hours, adding quality and richness of flavor.
– Bread is better preserved in a food-grade plastic bag, such as polyethylene. Only cooled bread can be placed in the bag.
– If the top of the bread has sagged, then you should slightly reduce the amount of water in the recipe. The proportion of water can depend significantly on the moisture content of the grain and other ingredients, such as soaked seeds.
– Do not greatly underestimate the proportion of water in the dough. Rye bread should be “damp” in consistency; this does not spoil it at all. Dry bread is less tasty.
– If the dough does not have time to rise sufficiently, you should increase the proofing time by half an hour to an hour. Or it indicates that the proofing temperature is low. Or the starter is weak for some reason. Read the technology carefully.
– It makes no sense to allocate more than three hours for proofing. The dough may first rise and then fall. You should not wait until the critical point when it begins to subside. During baking, the bread will also sag a little, this is normal.
– A new bread machine may give off an unpleasant odor during the first 2-3 bakes. Then this smell will go away.
– Basic safety rules. It is advisable not to touch the metal parts of the bread machine with bare hands or metal objects. Use a wooden spatula and oven mitts or oven mitts. Your feet should be wearing slippers with rubber soles. There is nothing special to be afraid of, but low voltage can sometimes break through, especially if there is no grounding in the network.
– If the dough is kneaded in a bread machine, you will have to put up with such an inconvenience as the presence of blades from the mixer in the bread. You need to take them out immediately or cut the bread carefully.
– You shouldn’t cook bread in a bad mood. Unkind emotions have a negative impact on the quality of bread.
– Real bread is an independent and self-sufficient food. But in small quantities it is compatible with many dishes. Goes well with vegetables and herbs. A special delicacy is a crust of bread, spread with a dessert spoon of cedar or pumpkin oil, with garlic and cayenne pepper to taste.
* * *
Now you know everything you need to know. It remains to add that real bread in your home is not just an everyday dish - it is a philosophy, a lifestyle, and freedom. Freedom from the conditions and framework that the system imposes on you. And what is also obvious is your health and clear consciousness. A healthy body will make your life complete, and an unclouded mind will allow you to create your own world. Real homemade bread is your green oasis in a technogenic environment. Your new hope. Your new Arkaim. But not the only one and not the last. It happens that the past lies ahead.
For thousands of years, grain grinding was carried out between stone graters - millstones. With this grinding method, there was no loss of high-quality substances - all valuable vitamins, aromatic substances and enzymes were preserved.
In the middle of the 19th century (1862), grinding between metal rollers (rotating at different speeds) was invented, and the entire complex process of grinding wheat grain in a modern varietal mill is aimed at separating the endosperm as best as possible (from which flour is now obtained ) from the germ, scutellum, aleurone (enzyme) layer, shells (bran). That is, the most valuable components of grain that play an extremely important role in human nutrition are removed and sent to waste for animal feed.
Later the plow appeared, although it did not completely replace the plow. The peasant decided what to plow. It depended on the soil. The plow was more often used on heavy fertile soils. Unlike the plow, the plow not only cut the layer of earth, but also turned it over. After the field is plowed, it needs to be “combed.” They did this using a harrow. Sometimes a spruce log with a large number of long knots was used as a harrow.
In those days there were no weather forecasts, so the peasants relied on themselves and folk signs. We observed natural phenomena in order to start sowing on time. Sowing day is one of the most important, but also the most solemn days in the agricultural year. That’s why the first sower went barefoot (his feet should have already been warm) into the field in a white or red (festive) shirt, with a basket of seeds hanging on his chest. He scattered the seeds evenly, with a “secret, silent prayer.” After sowing, the grain had to be harrowed. Peasants planted grain crops not only in spring, but also in autumn. Before the onset of severe cold, winter grains were sown. These plants had time to sprout and appear on the surface before winter.
The day the harvest began was called Zazhinki. Everyone took on the harvest together, the whole family went out into the field. And if they realized that they couldn’t handle the harvest themselves, they called for help. The work was very difficult. I had to get up before dawn and go to the field. The most important thing was to harvest on time. Everyone forgot about their illnesses and sorrows. What you collect is what you live with all year. Harvesting is work, although hard, but bringing joy. If the rye grew tall and thick, they preferred to use a sickle, and low and sparse fields were mowed with a scythe. Mown plants were tied into sheaves.
Usually the harvest was completed by the day of the Dormition of the Blessed Virgin Mary - August 28 (August 15, old style). The popular name of this holiday is Spozhinki.
The sheaves were first transported to a barn or barn. Barn is an outbuilding in which sheaves were dried before threshing. The barn usually consisted of a pit where the stove was located without a chimney, as well as an upper tier where sheaves were stored. Riga – a building with a furnace for drying sheaves of bread and flax. Riga was larger than a barn. Up to 5 thousand sheaves were dried in it, while in the barn - no more than 500.
Ripe grain was taken directly to the threshing floor - a fenced area of land intended for storing, threshing and other processing of grain - and threshed there. This was one of the most difficult stages of labor. Richer people tried to invite someone to help do this work. And the work consisted of this: they took a beater (threshed) or a flail and hit the sheaves to “release” the grain. To obtain the best seeds and unbeaten straw, they used a sheaf against a barrel. Later, these methods began to be replaced by threshing using threshing machines, which were powered by horse or steam traction. A special trade was created for threshers who worked on their machines for hire. The threshing of bread did not always happen immediately; sometimes this process was delayed; threshing was done in the fall and at the beginning of winter. After threshing, the grain was winnowed - usually standing in the wind with a shovel.
A significant step forward was the invention of the manual grinding mill. Its basis is millstones - two heavy plates between which grain was ground. The lower millstone was installed motionless. The grain was poured through a special hole in the upper millstone, which was driven by the muscular power of humans or animals. Large heavy millstones were rotated by horses or bulls.
Grinding grain became easier, but the work was still hard. The situation changed only after the water mill was constructed. In flat areas, the speed of river flow is low to rotate the wheel with the force of a water jet. To create the required pressure, the rivers were dammed, the water level was artificially raised and the stream was directed through a chute onto the wheel blades. Over time, the design of the mill was improved, windmills appeared, their blades were rotated by the wind. Windmills were built in areas where there were no bodies of water nearby. In some areas, millstones were set in motion by animals - horses, bulls, donkeys.
The dough recipes were different, but the main components remained flour and water. If there was not enough flour, they bought it at the market. To check the quality, the flour was tasted by tooth. They took a pinch of flour and chewed it, if the resulting “dough” stretched well and did not stick too much to your hands, then the flour was good.
Before kneading the dough, the flour was sifted through a sieve. The flour had to “breathe” during the sifting process.
In Rus' they baked black “sour” bread. It was called black because rye flour was used for its preparation, and it has a darker color than wheat. “Sour” – because sour starter was used. Having kneaded the dough in a kneading bowl - a wooden tub - and formed rounded loaves, the hostess collected the remaining dough from the walls into a lump, sprinkled it with flour and left it for leavening until the next time.
The finished dough was sent to the oven. Stoves in Rus' were special. They heated the room, baked bread on them, cooked food, slept, sometimes even washed and treated themselves.
They put the bread in the oven with prayer. Under no circumstances should you swear or quarrel with anyone while the bread is in the oven. Then the bread won't work.
The shells (bran), which is fiber, remove organic dirt - excess gastric juice enzymes, bile acids, bilirubin, cholesterol. Bran helps normalize the intestinal flora - they adsorb pathogenic microorganisms, leaving E. coli alone, and normalize intestinal motility. In addition, bran is polysaccharides, the best food for our bifidobacteria: in 1 cm3 of gastric juice there are about 10 million bifidobacteria. Therefore, it is quite natural that when we unknowingly deprive bifidobacteria, which produce, for example, vitamin B12, of food, the mechanism of diabetes mellitus is triggered.
When grinding between stone millstones, high-quality substances are not carried away - all valuable vitamins, aromatic substances and enzymes are preserved. A manual mill makes it possible to grind soft and hard varieties of wheat, rye, barley, oats, soybeans, amaranth, etc. Barley is generally an amazing crop and, probably not coincidentally, barley is called the “arrow of light.” In ancient times, barley was fed to gladiators and slaves, that is, those who required, first of all, strength and endurance. Rye is a natural medicine. In the old days in Rus' it was believed that eating rye increased vitality and lifted the mood. Rye has a general strengthening effect and normalizes metabolism. And the best of bread kvass is rye kvass. This is the most nutritious and biologically valuable drink of all existing today. It is no coincidence that this tasty and healthy drink was admired by foreigners traveling around Russia.
Wheat flour (cereal), obtained using this grinding method, has baking properties that cannot be obtained otherwise.
In other words, a hand mill, having a service life of tens of years, will serve you, protecting the health of your family, for several generations.
Firstly, and this is very important, after grinding the flour remains “alive” only for several days.
Secondly, the entire complex process of grinding wheat grain in a modern varietal mill is aimed at separating the endosperm (from which flour is now obtained) as best as possible from the germ, scutellum, aleurone (enzyme) layer, and shells (bran).
That is, the most valuable components of grain that play an extremely important role in human nutrition were removed and sent to waste for animal feed, including vitamins.
The role and importance of vitamins in nutrition is well known. Their absence or lack of food causes serious illnesses. When, for example, they began to remove supposedly indigestible components from bread grain and rice and pride themselves on snow-white flour and rice, this did not cause problems for a long time. Then specific disorders appeared, such as paralysis and other neurological disorders, which were called “beriberi.” Later it became clear that people were missing something. And what was missing was contained precisely in the rice husks, which were thrown away or fed to animals. Then they began to look for the missing link and found it. Chemically, it turned out to be an amine, which, obviously, was the carrier of life (vita (lat.) - life). This is how the name “vitamin” arose.
This vitamin B, like other vitamins, is almost completely separated and disposed of as waste using the most modern equipment.
The distribution of vitamin B as a percentage of individual parts of wheat grain is as follows (According to D. Heathcock, D. Heathcock and B. Shaw):
32% - in the aleurone (enzyme) layer;
62% is in the scutellum, the remaining amount of vitamin B (6%) is approximately evenly distributed between the entosperm, embryo, and pericarp.
A similar picture is observed for other vitamins. It turns out that in 150 years man has not gotten any wiser!
They knew about this back in biblical times, considering whole-milled flour to be a pantry of health, one of the main conditions for longevity.
Bread according to the recipe from the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel “Take yourself wheat and barley and beans and lentils and millet, pour them into one vessel and make bread from them for yourself...”.
Strange as it may seem, modern flour, which contains nothing, is more expensive than fresh (and therefore living) whole-ground flour.
However, the madness doesn't end there. Flour, whose natural color is creamy due to the presence of carotenoids (provitamins A), is bleached using a chemical that is standard in the flour milling industry - chlorine gas. The US Environmental Protection Agency classifies this gas as a pesticide and defines it as a flour bleaching, aging and oxidizing (remember this) agent that is a potent, lethal irritant that is hazardous to inhale. Several years ago, on one of the central channels of the central heating system, data were announced that the refusal to chlorinate water and the transition to other, safer methods of disinfection leads to an increase in average life expectancy throughout Russia, according to official data - by 8 years, according to unofficial data - by 15! Chlorine, when in contact with wheat (duplicate contact of chlorine with flour occurs at the time of kneading dough with chlorinated tap water in all bakeries) forms another substance called alloxan, which is known to disrupt the activity of the pancreas.
Alloxan destroys the pancreas so well that scientists even use it in clinical studies to induce diabetes in experimental laboratory animals!
So where did the whole grain flour that our ancestors used to make bread go? Only whole grain flour, as we already know, contains B vitamins, macro- and microelements and germ, which has fantastic healing properties. Refined flour is devoid of both the germ and the shell - instead of these healing parts of the grain created by nature, all kinds of food additives are added to the flour, chemically created substitutes that can never make up for what is created by nature itself. Refined flour becomes a mucus-forming product, which forms a lump at the bottom of the stomach and pollutes our body. Refining is an expensive, costly process and at the same time kills the vitality of the grain. And it is needed only to preserve the flour from spoilage for as long as possible. Whole flour cannot be stored for a long time (in summer), but this is not required. Let the grain be stored, and flour can be made from it, as needed. It has always been this way. The grain is alive. When it is ground, the aging process immediately begins. You could say that white flour keeps better because it is dead. Experiments with feeding rats have shown that already 14 days after grinding, the amount of life in flour is reduced so much that when fed flour and bread made from such flour, animals in the fourth generation, as a rule, lose their viability. And isn’t it time, in the name of convenience of trade, to stop the vicious practice of turning a God-given healing food product into a dead mucus-forming mass that has an attractive taste due to sugar, salt, fat, heat-treated at high temperatures and becoming carcinogenic.
Back in the 19th century, in the “Handbook for the Sick and Healthy by Dr. Platen,” published in 1895, it is said: “If a person eats refined white bread (and then yeast was not yet used; the replacement of sourdough with yeast occurred about 50 years ago), he will definitely come to mental and physical destruction.”
Remember our Russian culture regarding food, in particular bread. When did our wise grandmothers bake white bread (even sourdough)? Only on major holidays, sometimes on Sundays and never during the week.
On fasting days, they ate kulaga, which had high biological value, which was prepared from malt, and he from sprouted grain. Kulaga is an excellent medicine. What is sprouted grain? This amount of vitamin B1 increases by 1.5 times, B2 by 13.5 times, B6 by 5 times, E by 10 times!
On fasting days they baked bread made from a mixture of rye and wheat flour (Karelian pies - wickets), from a mixture of wheat and buckwheat - real Russian pancakes (Guryevsky), from barley-wheat (Latvian bread), from oatmeal they prepared raschinny pancakes and tsezhi for Belarusian and Polish soups, and mixed with wheat - cookies.
Unfortunately, something has happened to us over the past 100 years, and this is a very alarming fact for all of us!
People have forgotten the taste and aroma of real bread.
Moreover, they don’t remember that in the old days bread was always baked using sourdough. All components of the starter are exclusively of plant origin and cause the fermentation process. The famous peasant sourdoughs (sourdough is a liquid dough fermented with hops, raisins, with the addition of natural sugar or honey, white and red malt) were prepared from rye flour, barley, and wheat. It was these starters that enriched the body with vitamins, enzymes, biostimulants and, above all, saturated it with oxygen. Thanks to this, the human body became energetic, efficient, resistant to colds and other diseases.
Since the mid-40s, after the war, hop starters were replaced with yeast. Scientists have found that the main property of yeast is fermentation. Yeast transmits this property through bread (1 cc of mature dough contains 120 million yeast cells) into the blood, and the blood also begins to ferment. The resulting fusel gas, which is akin to cadaveric poison, enters primarily the brain, disrupting its functions. Memory, abilities for logical thinking, and creative work sharply deteriorate. Acting at the cellular level, yeast causes the formation of benign and cancerous tumors in the body. An effect occurs on the cell, depriving it of its ability to divide, i.e. produce healthy cells.
One of the miracles of our body is the regeneration process. For example, if 70% of the liver is removed, then after 3-4 weeks it can fully recover. The pancreas also has the maximum ability to regenerate.
The main condition for regeneration to occur is the absence of fermentation processes in the body. And fermentation in the body is caused mainly by yeast. Common yeast does not survive in the human body due to high body temperature. But thanks to the “efforts” of geneticists, a special type of heat-resistant yeast was developed that reproduces well at a temperature of 43-44 degrees and is able to withstand 500-degree temperatures in an oven.
This yeast is able not only to resist the onslaught of phagocytes, responsible for immunity, but also to kill them. Yeast cells destroy the least protected cells of our body and release toxic substances of small molecular weight. Saccharomycetes, unlike tissue cells, are very stable and are not destroyed either during cooking or under the influence of enzymes and acids in the gastrointestinal tract. This yeast from the digestive tract enters the bloodstream, multiplying exponentially. This disrupts the normal functioning of all digestive organs: stomach, pancreas, gallbladder, liver. The processes of putrefaction increase in the intestines.
Scientists around the world have long sounded the alarm. The mechanisms of the negative effects of yeast on the human body are revealed. French professor Etienne Wolf, academician F.G. Uglov, P.P. write about this. Dubinin (Proceedings of the Plekhanov Institute of Natural Sciences), Rosini Gianfranco (“The presence of a killing feature of yeast”, Canadian Journal of Microbiology, 1983, volume 29, number 10, p. 1462), S.A. Konovalov (“Biochemistry of yeast”, 1962, M., Pishchepromizdat, pp. 13-14), special correspondent of “Izvestia” L. Volodin, (Paris, February 27 by phone, published on February 28, p. 4), B.A. Rubin (Fermentation. - BME, t . 3, 1976, pp. 383-384), V.M. Dilman (“Four models of medicine”, Leningrad, Medicine, 1987. pp. 40-42, 214-215), Marilyn Diamond, Donald Shell, (USA “Acid-base balance”), V. Mikhailov, L. Trushkina (“Food is a serious matter.” M., “Young Guard”, 1988, pp. 5-7). The bibliography on this topic can be continued, but we’d better look at what thermophilic yeast is and food products prepared with its use.
So, let us repeat: Saccharomyces yeast (thermophilic yeast), used in the alcohol industry, brewing and bakery, is not found in the wild in nature, that is, it is the creation of human hands, and not the creation of God. According to morphological characteristics, they belong to the simplest marsupial fungi and microorganisms. These Saccharomycetes, unfortunately, are more advanced than tissue cells and are independent of temperature, pH, and air content. Even with the cell membrane destroyed by saliva lysozyme, they continue to live. The experience of the French scientist Etienne Wolff, who cultivated a malignant tumor for 37 months in a test tube with a solution containing fermenting yeast extract, is worthy of attention. At the same time, an intestinal tumor was cultured for 16 months under the same conditions, without connection with living tissue. As a result of the experiment, it turned out that in such a solution the size of the tumor tripled within one week. But as soon as the extract was removed from the solution, the tumor died. From this it was concluded that the yeast extract contains a substance that stimulates the growth of cancerous tumors (Izvestia newspaper).
Scientists in Canada and England have established the killing ability of yeast. Killer cells, yeast killer cells, kill sensitive, less protected cells of the body by releasing toxic proteins of small molecular weight into them. The toxic protein acts on plasma membranes, increasing their permeability to pathogenic microorganisms and viruses. Yeast first enters the cells of the digestive tract, and then into the bloodstream. Thus, they become a “Trojan horse”, with the help of which the enemy enters our body and helps undermine its health.
Thermophilic yeast is so tenacious that when used three or four times, its activity only increases. It is known that when baking bread, yeast is not destroyed, but is stored in gluten capsules. Once in the body, they begin their destructive activities. Experts are now well aware that when yeast multiplies, ascospores are formed, which, when they end up in our digestive tract and then enter the bloodstream, destroy cell membranes, contributing to cancer.
It is no coincidence that at the Second World Congress of Herbal Medicine in Prague in 1990, Professor Larbert spoke with alarm about the detrimental effects of refined white bread prepared with yeast on health. Long-term consumption of such bread (and we eat it for years) led to a number of disorders described by Larbert called hemogliasis. This disease is manifested by headaches, drowsiness, irritability, digestive problems, thinking slows down, sexual activity decreases, and blood viscosity increases. Larbert believes that hemogliasis is more common and more dangerous than tuberculosis.
Baking bread in folk cuisine has always been a kind of ritual. The secret of its preparation has been passed down from generation to generation. Almost every family had its own secret. We made bread about once a week using various sourdough starters. The use of unrefined rye flour resulted in the fact that, although the bread was coarse, it contained all the beneficial substances found in cereals. And when baked in a Russian oven, the bread acquired an unforgettable taste and aroma. We can safely say that there has never been such bread as in Rus' in the world. It was consumed in large quantities. The average peasant, for example, in the 19th century ate more than three pounds of bread daily (a pound is equal to 430 grams). It was this bread that made it possible to regulate the functioning of the intestines.
0 To catch up:
Spelled (spelt) is one of the varieties of wheat, valued for its special nutty aroma. US-grown spelled is sold under the trade name kamut, which creates some terminological confusion. In fact, spelled, spelled and kamut are different names for the same variety of wheat, which has not been crossed with other varieties and has retained its unique properties.
It is used primarily as a cereal, but spelled can also be ground into flour. Spelled contains almost all the nutrients that a person needs, in a harmonious and balanced combination - and not only in the grain shell, but evenly throughout the grain. This means that it retains its nutritional value even when ground very finely.
Spelled flour products have a pleasant smell and good texture. Spelled porridge has a pleasant nutty aroma and is incredibly healthy for children, because gluten protein, which this cereal is especially rich in, contains 18 amino acids essential for the body, which cannot be obtained from animal food.
Spelled wheat is an ancient variety of wheat, wild wheat with low gluten content.
Age 6000-8000 years. A rare grain crop that has not yet been genetically modified. Does not tolerate fertilizers and is not irradiated by radiation. The surface layer of useful substances is so large that after grinding the grain is retained in significant quantities. Unlike cultivated wheat, it has enormous beneficial properties.
Spelled, also called spelt.
To what was written in previous messages, I will add that this type of wheat can be eaten by people who cannot tolerate ordinary wheat. Spelled has a high gluten content, but is suitable even for those who suffer from gluten intolerance (only for such people it should be introduced into the diet gradually). My husband is wheat intolerant, but he always eats spelled without any problems.
In my opinion, its taste is very different from ordinary wheat, but I like it.
It is also much heavier than regular wheat, so baking anything from it is much more difficult, but the “finished product” is worth all the effort.
Spelled is very easily and quickly absorbed by the body (hence the rapid saturation after “eating it”) and, unlike simple wheat, when digesting its body does not produce “extra” mucus, so it can be eaten by people who often “suffer” from colds, coughs, runny nose, etc. .P. (it is not recommended for such people to eat regular wheat, because their body already has a high content of mucus (and pus) and eating wheat (and dairy products) only aggravates this problem
)
Use wooden, ceramic, glass dishes and spoons, spatulas for mixing. There should be no Aluminum in the dishes at all!!! Let the inventors from DuPont use non-stick coatings, they themselves banned it long ago for food production. But they are imported as goods from China.
As a non-stick when baking and frying (stewing) we use parchment (sub-parchment) paper, melted!! oil, ceramic molds, cast iron (not very good) Leaves of horseradish, sycamore, cabbage, grapes.. That's it!
Sourdough starters
-various, on fermented bases. Rossola - any, cucumber, rare cabbage, from pickled apples......,
-fermented milk - with sour cream (country style), yogurt (we only take bacteria and milk, nothing foreign), etc...
-on sprouted grains...
How to do
-one of the old recipes was (briefly the essence): Take flour, go to the forest, to the meadow, etc. to your favorite place. With gratitude to the Creator, nature and local spirits, ask for help in a good deed :). Knead until the sour cream thickens, cover, leave overnight. By morning, the helpers will have done everything that needs to be done. Thank you, take it away and leave it to gain strength at home in the warmth.
Or we prepare the sourdough at home. Usually on the 3rd day it starts to smell like fermentation. The smell is good, not sour. Don’t rush, there is not much strength in the sourdough yet and it will come gradually. The ancestors supported it for years. If it turns sour, try again and again. If someone shared, it will still be yours after a short time. You can prepare several starters at once and then store them in the refrigerator, alternate. Personally, I have stored them for a month without updating and nothing, only the smell becomes sharp and concentrated. The shelf life of the starter depends on the composition.
I don’t use sugar to prepare and update the starter. Some truth is that without it it may not initially ferment.
You can start in a week
So, after all sorts of “torments” with different grains, I came to the following:
For everyday bread I use flour made from whole grain spelled (I have stopped using wheat and almost never use it) and rye.
BREAD
after many recipes I came to the classic, about which I later found only a couple of mentions, and those were in the village.
I'm tired of these books with notes and I'm tired of remembering and keeping them in my head, so the formula is simple
1-1-1
Instead of one, any number :) and the number is the number of measures. Any measure
This is my mug.
In the evening I take (for two small loaves):
-2 mugs of water (milk or a mixture with water, but usually I take fresher spring water)
-2 mugs of rye flour
add the starter and mix (don’t forget about the dishes and spatulas). This is a KNEAD!!! after mixing immediately without adding anything, I put a couple of spoons in the starter container for the next time (a glass jar). If you have guests or you need a lot of bread, set aside more. In general, starter There can never be too much, don’t be afraid to shift.
I cover it with a wet towel or plate and leave it to ferment overnight.
In the morning:
I add
2 Spelled or wheat mugs
After wetting my hands with oil or water, I mix the DOUGH. It turns out heavy and sticky (not “quick” bread, but “slow”)
I immediately divide it into 2 parts and lay it out in a mold lined with parchment paper, or cabbage leaves, etc.. I cover it with a tall bowl (you need room to rise) and leave it for about 4 hours. Then I bake it in a preheated oven at 180-200 degrees 35-50 minutes. Check after an hour by the color of the crust. From brown to darkish.
I bake pure rye according to the same recipe, only it tastes more sour.
Salt, nuts, seeds, chopped fruits, raisins, poppy seeds, etc. are added to the DOUGH as you like or whatever you eat. If you add 1 teaspoon of unrefined sunflower oil from the market, it smells strong and tasty.
AFTER you get the bread out, place it on a towel and cover with another clean one until it cools!!!
Eating bread until it is warm is not recommended because all processes have not yet been completed.
The bread does not go stale for a long time (covered) It does not mold. The crackers are also delicious. Children love it with milk just like that and sometimes they don’t want to eat anything else. They came running from the street, half a loaf of bread with milk and again for half a day.
I remember the first time the bread turned out so my son couldn’t get enough for a week and now the other one hardly eats. Skin problems have disappeared and so on. This is not about that.
Bon Appetit everyone!!! Text hidden
Main food for all time
There is a word in the Russian language that is difficult to find analogues in the languages of nations. This word is hospitality. It is usually pronounced when they want to emphasize hospitality and cordiality during a meal. Hospitality has always been inherent in the Russian people; many rituals and beliefs, proverbs, sayings, legends and fairy tales are associated with it. Russian people believed that a guest treated kindly in the house would not do harm to the owners.
In the old days they said about a hospitable owner: “The house is like a full cup, bread“The salt doesn’t leave the table.” As a token of gratitude for the heartfelt treat, the following words were often uttered: “We are satisfied with bread and salt - our eyes do not look.”
Bread and salt accompanied all the joyful and sad events that took place in the lives of Russian people. The most eminent and young people were greeted with bread and salt on their wedding day, a woman in labor was treated to bread, and it was the first thing they stocked up on when they set off on a long journey. The housewife's homeliness was determined by her ability to bake bread... Our ancestors believed in the sanctity of bread. They, for example, believed that a person who dropped a piece of bread should pick it up and kiss it. According to another belief, all the pieces and crumbs of bread that a person throws away are picked up by the devil. If, after a person’s death, the bread he throws weighs more than he himself, then the devil will take his soul. But you never know, there are too many rituals and customs associated with bread to count.
And this is no coincidence - none of the other types of food among the Russian people can be compared with bread.
Bread is a special product. Engels called the cultivation of cereals the lowest stage on the path of human development from savagery and barbarism to stone civilization. Indeed, the ancient farming peoples, who knew how to grow grain, were significantly superior in their cultural and physical level to the peoples who lived mainly from hunting, cattle breeding and fishing.
It is believed that people first learned the taste of cereals during the “scientific age”, about 15 thousand years ago. We cannot argue how reliable these data are; perhaps bread was known to man much earlier.
At first, primitive people simply collected wild grains and ate them raw. Many centuries passed before they learned to grind these grains and knead them with water. Thus, bread was born in the form of liquid floury-grainy porridge, bread soup, which is still consumed today by residents of the East and African countries.
the main dish of all times
Then people probably noticed that the grains were separated from the ears more easily if they were “placed in a pit with very heated stones (the predecessor of modern mi). In addition, roasted grains turned out to be much tastier compared to raw ones. One way or another, gradually, by touch, man learned the amazing benefits of bread.
Millennia passed before people learned to cultivate cereals. Moreover, wheat appeared much earlier than rye. About 8 thousand years ago, the Babylonians, Egyptians, and Assyrians began to cultivate wheat, barley and millet. Jews and other peoples.
As we have already noted, the oldest bread is considered to be in the form of stew or porridge made from crushed or coarsely ground grains. Over time, the stew became thicker and thicker until it turned into dough.
The next stage on the path to modern bread is unleavened flatbread. They were known to the ancient Egyptians, Jews, and Persians. These flatbreads were baked from unsifted wholemeal flour, sometimes adding river sand to it. Why was this done? It's hard to say.
Flatbread, of course, had undeniable advantages over bread soup. The stew quickly turned sour and dried out, which made it impossible to persecute it; the man needed a supply of poverty. The flatbreads were well preserved for a long time; they were taken with you on the road. Before eating, the flatbread was soaked in water.
The flatbread lasted a long time. Until the beginning of the Middle Ages, many peoples actively used it in their diet, and even today unleavened flatbread is not uncommon in many national cuisines.
A huge step forward was the invention of a method for fermenting (loosening) dough. The ancient Egyptians made this discovery 5-6 thousand years ago. Then the Greeks learned about it, from the Greeks the Romans, and from them it came to the rest of the hells of Europe.
In Ancient Greece, loosened bread was considered a great delicacy. Aristocrats ate it as a separate dish. The more noble the owner and the richer his house, the more generously he treated his guests with wheat bread. Already in those distant times, there were many varieties of bread - from the simplest coarsely ground bread with a large amount of bran to exquisite butter breads. Bread roasted on a spit was also popular among gourmets.
Around the second half of the 11th century BC, special bakeries arose. So the baker's craft is several thousand years old.
...Since ancient times, bread served as the basis of nutrition for the East Slavic peoples. “The Father of History” Herodotus argued that even 500-400 BC, tribes living in the steppes of the Black Sea and Azov regions grew excellent wheat. Even earlier evidence of this are finds made during excavations of settlements of the so-called Trypillian culture on the territory of modern Ukraine. The remains of adobe houses with ovens for baking bread, clay vessels for storing grain, a grain grater - all of them are silent witnesses to the fact that already in the 3rd millennium BC the inhabitants of this region were not experts in the field of baking.
Bread has always been considered the wealth of Rus'. The Slavic land “will give birth to rye and wheat in enormous abundance,” wrote Olearius, “you rarely hear that? Bread was expensive. In some places of the country where there is no grain, the land is not cultivated at all, even if it was convenient; they do not stock up on grain, being content with that. what is needed for the year: for every year will reap its rich harvest. As a result, an abyss of beautiful, fertile land remains uncultivated...”
The role of bread in the life of Russian people was so great that in those years famine began in the country, despite the abundance of animal food, the forests were distinguished by an abundance of animals and birds, and the rivers - fish and waterfowl. However, as many sources testify, meat for Russians did not replace bread; they almost did not value animal food at all.
In ancient times, bread in Rus' was called not only baked bread, but also grain. The Slavs consumed cereals as food either in the form of soaked and roasted grains, or in the form of flour, from which porridge was cooked in water or milk, or in the form of bread itself, which was baked on a hot stove and later in an oven.
The main grain crops in Rus' have long been considered rye, barley, millet, and oats.
The Russians learned about rye much later than wheat. It is believed that its homeland is Transcaucasia (the state of Urartu). It penetrated the Slavs, one might say, “illegally” - it “settled” in the crops of cultivated wheat, like any weed, and did not enjoy the favor of farmers.
That's how it was until then. until the peasant noticed the amazing ability of rye to withstand cold and bad weather. In other years, when crops failed, rye saved people from hunger. In the end, it became an independent culture, and by the 11th-12th centuries in Rus' they ate mainly rye bread.
This, in particular, is evidenced by the precious literary monument of the 11th century, “The Life of Archpriest Theodosius,” which the chronicler calls “pure bread,” which was consumed by the monks with honey as a delicacy. Every day bread was baked from rye.
Various porridges were mainly prepared from oats, barley, and millet. In addition, obtained from these cereals, it was often used for baking bread, pancakes and other flour products.
Already the first written sources indicate that the art of baking bread in Ancient Rus' was very high. For example, the above-mentioned “Life of Archpriest Theodosius” tells how blessed Theodosius skillfully baked prosphora. He often came to the bakery and happily helped the bakers knead dough and bake bread.
To grind grain they used hand mills - millstones. At the same time, if they wanted to get “purely pure bread,” the grain was ground more thoroughly. The threshed grain was stored in bags or in bulk, as well as in a hole specially dug for this purpose. Some townspeople, especially those involved in the grain industry, stored grain in the basement of the house, using barrels and kegs for this purpose.
In Rus' they especially loved sour bread made from leavened dough. The methods of fermentation were very different. Usually, leaven grounds, yeast or a piece of old dough were used as leaven.
Street scene. First half of the 19th century
What the bread of our ancestors tasted like can be judged from the memoirs of Archdeacon Pavel Alensky, who in the book “The Journey of the Antiochian Patriarch Macarius...” wrote: “We saw how carters and other commoners had breakfast with it (bread), as if it were the most excellent halva. We are completely unable to eat it, because... it is sour, like vinegar, and it has the same smell.”
True, it is hardly worth completely trusting the descriptions of Russian life left by foreign travelers. On this occasion, the historian V. O. Klyuchevsky noted: “A foreigner unfamiliar or little familiar with the history of the people, alien to them in concepts and habits, could not give a correct explanation of many phenomena of Russian life, often could not even evaluate them impartially.”
But nevertheless, apparently, the bread of those times really had a sour taste.
The procedure for baking bread was difficult and quite complicated, so they baked it once or twice a week. It looked something like this.
In the evening, before sunset, the housewife, as a rule, the most experienced woman in the house, began to prepare the kvass. The bowl was constantly in use and was rarely washed. By the way, there were a lot of jokes about this among the people. According to one of them, a woman lost the frying pan in which she was baking pancakes. She spent a whole year looking for what was missing and found it only after she washed the kneading bowl...
The kneading bowl was rubbed with salt mixed with the leaven, filled with warm water and a piece of dough left over from the previous baking was thrown into it. Having stirred the leaven with a wooden spatula - a whorl, added warm water and poured flour sifted through a sieve or sieve from a special wooden or dugout trough. Then the dough was stirred to the consistency of thick sour cream, the dough was placed in a thawed place and covered with a clean cloth on top.
By the next morning, the dough had risen and they began to knead it - this is quite labor-intensive work that requires skill. The dough was kneaded until it began to pull away from the walls of the kneading bowl and from the hands. Then it was again put in a warm place and after it had risen again, it was kneaded again and cut into round, smooth loaves. They were allowed to rest and only after that they were “put” into the oven. It was first heated well, and the ashes and coals were swept away with a broom. The floor where the bread was baked was covered with cabbage or oak leaves. Bread was also baked without leaves; in this case, the shovel on which the rolls were “planted” in the oven was sprinkled with flour.
Baker and kvass seller
The uniform heat in the Russian oven contributed to the good baking of the bread. In order to determine whether it was ready, the bun was taken out of the oven and, taking the left hand, tapped from below. Well-baked bread should ring like a tambourine.
The woman who baked bread enjoyed special respect in the family. The housewife, who mastered the art of baking better than others, was considered the most homely and was proud of it.
The monastery bakers were especially distinguished. Thus, in the Pechersky Monastery there was a special group of Chernets led by a “senior baker” who baked bread. It is interesting that the room where the monks ate (the refectory) was called a “bread cell” in Ancient Rus'.
The baker's work was treated with reverence and respect. This is evidenced, in particular, by the following fact. In the 16th and 17th centuries, ordinary people were called derogatory names in everyday life and in official documents - Fedka, Grishka, Mitroshka. The masters of their craft, who were bakers, were called by their full name - Fedor, Grigory, Dmitry. Sometimes surnames or nicknames were added to the name.
The baker was required not only skill, but also honesty. After all, there were frequent crop failures in the country, the people were starving. During these difficult years, bakeries were under special scrutiny, and those who allowed “mixing” or spoilage of bread, and especially speculated on it, were severely punished. In 1624, even a special government instruction appeared: “In memory of the bailiffs appointed in Moscow to oversee the baking and sale of bread.”
The bailiffs (“bread weight scavengers”) Bogdan Beketov, Dorofey Ivanov, Vasily Artemov were considered the menace of Moscow bakers of that time. They were afraid of them like fire. Everywhere - in the markets, in bakeries, in the bags of buyers - they looked for evidence of the dishonesty of the “self-seeking” bakers: they weighed the breads and checked their quality so that “there was no thickening or mixture at all.”
Bailiffs had broad powers. They controlled the monastery and palace bakeries, visited the boyar estates and even the metropolitan court.
True, the instructions also required absolute honesty and impartiality from the controllers themselves: “Do not be friends with a friend, and do not take revenge on an enemy with promises (bribes. - V.K., N.M.) and funerals (gifts. - V.K., N. .X1.) have nothing from him or anyone.
(It is interesting that representatives of the city public were also involved in monitoring the work of bakers and bakeries. Participation in this matter was considered extremely honorable.)
Well, sometimes, after buying a modern loaf of bread in a modern bakery. baked in a modern bakery, one can only regret that those controllers, with their unmodern zeal for fulfilling their duties, remained in the distant 17th century...
The baking process was constantly improved, and the range of different types of baked bread expanded. This was facilitated by the high art of flour milling in Rus'. Thus, during the time of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, 25 varieties of rye and 30 varieties of wheat flour were produced.
The best Russian dough makers and bakers, mukoseys and kalachniks were so successful in their skills that often ambassadors of other states sent Russian bread as a special delicacy to European courts.
The main role was still played by rye or, as it was also called, “black” bread. It was much cheaper than wheat - “white”, and more filling. In the preface to the “Expense Book of the Patriarchal Order of Food served to Patriarch Adrian and people of various ranks from September 1698 to August 1699,” it is written that the Russians ate mainly rye bread. Actually, the word “bread” meant “rye”. Wheat flour was used for bread, and in home life - for rolls, which for the common people were generally only a delicacy on holidays. This is the reason for the saying “You can’t lure someone with a roll”, that is, with the rarest piece.
However, not all rye bread was cheap. So, to bake “boyar” bread, they used specially ground rye flour, fresh butter, not peroxidized, but moderately fermented milk, and added spices to the dough. Even a wealthy person could not always find a price for such bread, so it was baked only to special order for special occasions.
Sieve bread was baked from flour sifted through a sieve. It was much more tender than sieve bread, baked from flour sifted through a sieve. The so-called “fur” types of bread were considered low quality. They were baked from wholemeal flour and called “chaff.” The best bread, which was served in rich houses, was “coarse” white bread made from well-processed wheat flour.
Khitrov market. Early 20th century
During the period of poor harvests, when there were not enough supplies of rye and wheat, all kinds of additives were mixed into the flour: carrots, beets, and later potatoes, as well as growing vegetables: acorns, oak bark, nettles, quinoa, etc. (according to one of the people named Prokhor from Smolensk, during a lean year of hunger, he showed people a way to prepare surrogate bread from quinoa, by this he saved himself and his fellow countrymen, which is why he received the nickname “Lebednik”).
In the south and southeast of Russia, over time (in the 19th century), wheat crops gradually replaced rye. As a result, the local population began to consume rye-wheat (“gray”) or wheat (“white”) bread. This tradition has survived to this day.
At the end of the 19th century, the urban population usually bought bread from bakers who baked it in large quantities and in various types. In bakeries and from trays they sold hearth bread (tall thick flat cakes) and molded bread (shaped like a cylinder or brick).
Bakery products were also varied: rolls, bagels, bagels. pretzels and gingerbread. Many of them were prepared from butter dough, which was unknown to other cooking. Rural residents, as a rule, rarely feasted on them. They usually bought them in the city as gifts for children and did not count them as food. Urban commoners used all these baked goods quite widely.
Rolls have always been especially loved in Rus'. They appeared very early and already played an important role in ancient Russian life. Kalach was appropriate at the everyday table of an ordinary citizen and at the magnificent feasts of kings. The king, for example, sent rolls as a sign of special favor to the patriarch and other persons who had a high spiritual rank.
According to historians, on the birthday of Peter 1, 240 crushed rolls of bread were given to the guests of the living room of a hundred Chernoslobodians, among other dishes. Rolls of bread were given to the poor and prisoners on major holidays (of course, these were no longer royal rolls).
When releasing a servant “on leave,” the master, as a rule, gave him a small coin “for the roll.”
The shape of the rolls was very different. Let's say, rolls and bread like a collar were served at the table of Grand Duke Vasily. According to the assumption of A.V. Tereshchenko, the Russians probably borrowed such rolls from the Tatars.
“Sukharevka” Beginning of the twentieth century.
Moscow bakers were famous for their excellent bread. I. Filippov enjoyed wide popularity among them.
…Filippovsky bakeries were always full of customers. V. A. Gilyarovsky left interesting memories about them and about Filippov himself in the book “Moscow and Muscovites.” Let’s take a look with him into one of these bakeries: “In the far corner there was a constant crowd around the hot iron boxes. chewing Filippov's famous fried pies with meat, eggs, rice, mushrooms, cottage cheese, raisins and jam. The audience ranges from students to old officials in frieze overcoats and from well-dressed ladies to poorly dressed working women. With good butter and fresh minced meat, the piglet pie was so good that a couple could have a hearty breakfast.”
In addition to pies, Filippov's bakeries became famous for their excellent rolls, saiki, and most importantly, black bread, as contemporaries testify of its excellent quality. “The counters and shelves on the left side of the bakery, which had a separate entrance,” continues Gilyarovsky, “were always surrounded by crowds buying pound brown bread and sieve bread.” Filippov himself liked to repeat: “The little black bread is the first food for the worker.”
Even today, older Muscovites remember Filippov's bread with great respect. Of course, there are almost no people left who once bought this bread. Time has counted down many years since then, but the stories of their grandparents are alive in the memory of Muscovites.
And what’s offensive is that we didn’t save these pies, saikas, rolls, and black pound cake. They left our lives along with those distant times. Today, on the bakery shelves, their place is taken by dull loaves that literally become stale on the way from the store to the house, tasteless, “bloody” loaves of black bread, gingerbread cookies and crackers, which are dangerous to bite, since they are as hard as granite. Yes, the quality of bread today does not stand up to criticism. And no matter how much we talk about the important role of bread, about the respect it deserves, as long as its quality is low, a piece will not escape the trash can.
When Filippov was asked why the “black bread” was only good for him, he answered: “Because the little bread loves care. Baking is just baking, but all the power is in the flour. I don’t have any purchased flour, it’s all my own, I buy selected rye locally, I have my own people at the mills, so that there’s not a speck or a speck of dust... But still, there are different types of rye, you have to choose. I increasingly get the best flour from Tambov, from near Kozlov, from the Rominsk mill. And it’s very simple!” Indeed, there is nothing complicated, the man simply treated his work with love and knew its value. This is, perhaps, what is missing today for many of those who feed us the most important product - bread.
Filippov's baked goods were famous and in great demand not only in Moscow. Kalachis and saikas were sent daily to St. Petersburg to the royal court. In St. Petersburg they tried to bake them on site, but nothing worked. And Filippov argued that the rolls and saikas that were needed would not work: “Neva water is not good!”
Carts with “Filippov products” even went to Siberia. Gilyarovsky recalled: “They were somehow heated in a special way, frozen straight from the oven, transported a thousand miles, and just before eating they were thawed - also in a special way, in damp towels - and fragrant, hot rolls somewhere in Barnaul or Irkutsk served on the table piping hot.”
We cannot resist making another extract from the wonderful book of V. A. Gilyarovsky. We are talking about an incident that almost cost the famous baker the loss of his entire business and at the same time led to the appearance of a new “Filippov product” - cod with raisins.
...In those days, the sovereign dictator of Moscow was Governor-General Zakrevsky, “before whom everyone was in awe.” So every morning this general was served hot cakes from Filippov for breakfast.
“What an abomination this is! Bring the baker Filippov here! - the ruler once shouted over morning tea.
The servants, not understanding what was happening, dragged the frightened Filippov to the authorities.
- W-what? Cockroach?! - and puts in a cod with a baked cockroach. - W-what?! A?
And it’s very simple, Your Excellency,” the old man turns the cod in front of him.
What?.. What?.. Just?!
This is the highlight!
And he ate a piece with a cockroach.
You're lying, you bastard! Are there ice cream with raisins? Go away!
Filippov ran into the bakery, grabbed a sieve of raisins into the dough, to the great horror of the bakers, and dumped them out.
An hour later, Filippov treated Zakrevsky to sautés with raisins, and a day later there was no end to buyers.
And very simple! “Everything comes out on its own, you can catch it,” Filippov said when mentioning the fish with raisins.”
This was such an interesting person - baker Ivan Filippov.
Bread is an extremely valuable food product. Scientists claim that it contains more than 200 different substances beneficial to humans. Among them are 5-8 percent plant proteins and 40-50 percent carbohydrates. This means that people who actively include bread in their diet cover a significant part of the body’s need for energy and vegetable proteins with its help.
Bread is also rich in so-called ballast substances (coarse fibers) - fiber and semi-fiber, the benefits of which we described above. The coarser the flour is ground, the more coarse fibers there are in the bread made from it. The poorest segments of the population used to eat this kind of bread, while the rich preferred sieve bread made from finely ground wheat flour. And they had no idea that coarse bread was healthier.
The fact is that when refining flour, parts of the grain such as the germ and the top layer go into the bran. But it is in them that vitamins and minerals, components that stimulate metabolism, are concentrated in the greatest quantities.
One of the first to use bread baked from flour with bran to feed his patients was the Swiss hygienist M. Platen. This bread was created at the end of the 19th century by Professor S. Graham. To this day, in many European countries such bread is called “graham”.
We recommend remembering all this to those readers who, in an effort to get rid of excess weight, have completely excluded bread from their menu. However, this coin has, as they say, a flip side.
The nutritional and energy value of bread depends on the type of grain, grade of flour, recipe and cooking technology. It is worth adding fats, milk, sugar, eggs to bread, and its calorie content will increase by leaps and bounds. Needless to say, these additives give bread products a pleasant taste, but they are also hazardous to health if they exceed scientifically proven standards.
Abuse of baked goods containing excess fats and sugars is an inevitable path to obesity, diabetes and other diseases. Therefore, scientists and practitioners in the field of baking are striving to improve the composition of bread. It is enriched with protein, ballast substances, and fortified. Special dietary sugar-free bread is also produced, bread that does not go stale or mold for a long time.
The external attractiveness of bread and its aroma have always been of great importance. According to I. II. Pavlova, bread is a product that “one begins to eat with the eyes.” Its aromatic “bouquet” consists of approximately 200 volatile organic compounds. Sometimes, to improve the aroma, some types of bread are baked with the addition of vanillin, cumin, coriander and other substances. Perhaps there is nothing wrong with this. But aromatic additives should not completely kill the natural grain spirit. Sometimes you buy such an over-flavored loaf, and those who baked it feel offended - it can smell like anything, but not bread.
For those who want to try the bread that was eaten in Russia at the end of the 19th century, here are several recipes taken from the book “Home and Household” by Maria Redeli, published in 1900.
Black bread
11/2 buckets rye flour. 1/2 bucket of water, 4 tablespoons of salt.
The dough is kneaded in the evening. Very dry rye flour is poured into a kneading bowl, and enough water is poured in so that a fairly thick dough can be kneaded. After salting, knead the dough vigorously and, sprinkling flour on top, place in a warm place so that it rises. The next day, knead the dough for half an hour, adding as much flour as needed for the bread, and, covering the dough, leave to rise again for 2-2 1/2 hours. Then, having made the loaves, they put them on the table, let them rise again and, lightly coated with warm water, put them in the oven (the oven is not suitable for this purpose). Pour flour onto a shovel and place one piece of bread. The oven should be very hot, and the loaves will bake for 1-2 1/2 hours, depending on the size.
(There is always some dough left in the kneading bowl, which
suitable for fermenting new things. Who loves sour bread, let him use this leaven.)
When the bread is baked, it is lightly moistened with water. You can take it to a cold place only when it has completely cooled down.
To prepare such bread it usually takes
15-20 hours.
Plain white bread
6 spools of yeast (25 g), 1 1/2 cups milk, teaspoon salt, 1 spoon butter or ghee, 1 lb (400 g) flour.
b spools of yeast are stirred in 1 1/2 cups of milk with a small amount of salt, pour in 1 pound of flour at once, add 1 spoon of melted butter and, having knocked out the dough properly, place it in the prepared form, filling it only to 1/3; the dough is allowed to rise so that the shape is
filled to 3/4. The bread is baked for about an hour, first at moderate, then at higher heat. If you want the bread to be sweet, then add 18 spools (about 80 g) of sugar and 4 spools (17 g) of cardamom to the dough.
Sitny
bread
6 spools of yeast (25 g), 1 1/2 cups milk or water, teaspoon salt, 1 1/2 lbs (600 g) wheat flour.
6 spools of yeast are stirred together with salt in 11/2 cups of warm milk or warm water, add 1 pound of wheat flour and allow to rise. Then they add enough flour to get a very stiff dough, and, having made oblong breads, coat them with warm water, allowing them to rise again, and bake them first in moderate, then more intense heat for about 3-4 hours.
How many people have really thought that well-baked wheat bread is one of the greatest inventions of the human mind?
What Russian people consider bread, and what - kalach, what - pie, and what - loaf, what - pancakes, and what - pancakes has changed over time. By the end of the 20th century, and especially in our time, the understanding of the word kovriga has changed greatly. In this regard, it is difficult for us to read old recipes or just books that mention all kinds of bread and pies; we don’t know exactly what it was and what it looked like. If you look at the pictures in books of fairy tales, supposedly illustrating ancient, epic Rus', then you can see from them that the artists allow anachronisms in the illustrations.
For example, in the fairy tale “How the Chicken Baked Bread,” outstanding Russian illustrators Erik Bulatov and Oleg Vasiliev show ancient Russian utensils and clothes, but modern round wheat bread. During the period to which the utensils and clothes in the illustrations refer, such bread was simply not baked in Rus', because it was called rye bread and because wheat bread was baked in the form of a collar - “kalach”, they did not bake it with a round loaf.
Another anachronism is the illustration of a windmill - a windmill in a fairy tale. 
In the pre-Petrine period, mills were water-powered. It is known for sure that windmills in the north-west of Russia, where the fairy tale comes from, were recorded in our country at the very end of the 17th century, almost already under Peter the Great. So the old Russian hen, who found a grain of wheat, could not take it to wind a mill to grind flour for bread. She would take it to water mill to bake kala h.
At present, in general, there are no specialists on the history of Russian bread (otherwise we would read them!), although there are already several museums of bread, so we just have to turn to the documents. I dug as far as I could into the depths of centuries, trying to separate facts from interpretations, and discovered a lot of interesting things. For those who are interested in primary sources, so to speak, and some interesting interpretations of primary sources, I will post the collected materials in a series of articles on bread, pastries and interesting facts from Russian cooking from the period 800x-1600s, pre-Petrine Rus' of the ninth to seventeenth centuries. Russian dishes and Russian bread of the 18th century are already reflected in books describing recipes, starting from Tatishchev’s opus of the 1740s “Brief economic notes to the village following”, to a whole string of books of the 1790s. By the 19th century, realism in painting had reached such a level that many images of Russian bread, rolls, pancakes and pies can be seen in realistic paintings.
I myself have little interest in history, because I prefer fantasies about the future to fantasies about the past, but as a housewife whose family and guests need to be greeted with bread and treated to pies, all this is interesting to me from the point of view of the assortment. So in the last three months, while I was immersed in the archives, we ate almost exclusively medieval Russian food - without the usual pasta, pilaf, potatoes and tomatoes, and even without sunflower oil. And it was very tasty, I must say. So I invite everyone who is not interested in history to view the materials purely out of curiosity about the typical originally Russian menu for various occasions - bread for the road, birthday cake, what to put on the wedding table or serve on Cheese Week, etc.
A brief overview of periods in the history of Russian food here:. There is also detail about the oldest description of Russian bread of the 11th century in the life of Theodosius of Pechersk by his contemporary, the chronicler Nestor.
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From 862 to 1480 Material culture of Russia.
We know the facts about bread and Russian food in the period from 862 to 1480 from excavations. Below I present a summary of the work of the great Soviet archaeologist A.V. Artsikhovsky with a few of my additions.
The history of Russia begins in 862, when Rurik became the prince of Novgorod. Following this, the territory of Russia expanded to the south and in 882 Kievan Rus was formed.
Kievan Rus collapsed during three years of the Tatar-Mongol invasion in 1237-1240, when half of the population of Rus' was killed, urban culture was destroyed and Moscow, Tver and Nizhny Novgorod became cultural centers.
The Tatar Golden Horde was defeated by Dmitry Donskoy in 1380 on the Kulikovo Field and city life began to revive. “The Russian land boiled during the years of his (Dmitry Donskoy) reign.” “After the Tatars and after many frequent pestilences, people began to multiply in the Russian land” (1410). The Tatar yoke bled Ancient Rus' and did not allow it to develop economically for another hundred years, until 1480.
In the fifteenth century, Ivan the Third (Ivan Vasilyevich, 1440-1505) annexed Novgorod and Tver to the Moscow Principality, stopped payments to the Tatars, and in 1480 the Tatar yoke came to an end. But for another 200 years after that, Russia repelled the attacks of the Turks and Tatars. The exhausting struggle with backward conquerors from the East throughout the Russian Middle Ages slowed down the development of Russian culture for half a millennium, including the technology and range of Russian food, flour and cereals, bread and other baked goods.
The largest landowners of the 14-15th century were church feudal lords - monasteries with feudal estates with extensive farming: Trinity-Sergiev, Kirillo-Belozersky, Solovetsky, Volokolamsky and others. Their menu, scheduled for the whole year, allows us to imagine what Russian bread and pastries were like. Mongol period in the history of Rus' (early Middle Ages).
The dining menu of Joseph Volotsky (1439-1515) for the oldest in the Moscow region and the richest Russian monastery of the 1400s-1500s - Volokolamsk, dates back to the 15-16th century. It is located 110 km northwest of Moscow. Its simple and austere sixteenth-century menu differs little from the menu in Domostroi of the 1550s, written for the young Ivan the Terrible, and stands in stark contrast to the more varied monastic menus of the heyday of medieval Rus' in the seventeenth century under the patriarchs Filaret (1619-1633) and Nikon (1652). -1666) and Adrian (1690-1700).
In the development of the Russian table, in the history of Russian bread and pastries, several periods can be noted:
ANCIENT AND MIDDLE AGES
Pre-Mongol (862-1237), Mongol (1237-1480), medieval sixteenth century (1500s), late medieval seventeenth century (1600s);
ENLIGHTENMENT AND NEW TIMES
The beginning of European influence on Russian cuisine in the 18th century (Peter the Great), the widespread spread of Dutch, French and German methods and forms of wheat pastries and breads in the 19th century;
NEWEST TIMES
Standards for Russian and Soviet bread and pastries in the 20th century, with a sharp reduction in the amount of homemade bread and homemade baked goods on the everyday Russian table.
Material Russian culture 1200x-1400x (Mongolian period)
“Bread became the main food of Russians in pre-Mongol times and then acquired its modern form,” writes archaeologist A.V. Artsikhovsky. Chronicles and excavations tell us about four cereal grains of the pre-Mongol and Mongol periods: rye, wheat (including spelt), barley (barley porridge and pearl barley) and millet (millet).
They made cereals from the grains and called them “ fall asleep", because it was poured into stew or porridge. Buckwheat was first mentioned in a charter in 1430, but in excavations in Peryaslavl-Ryazan it was discovered already in layers of the 12-13th centuries. Buckwheat porridge is mentioned several times in the Trinity Daily Book.
Most of all, rye was grown for bread. For baking prosfir - then everyday bread on every Orthodox table according to Domostroi - wheat was used, but sometimes rye as well.
In the Moscow region and in the Novgorod region, spring wheat was grown, in the Pskov region - both spring and winter wheat.
Wheat grains were first crushed in a mortar, then finely ground on hand millstones into flour of varying degrees of fineness and purity. In the 14th and 15th centuries, hand mills were widespread. In the 14th century, water mills spread and milling began. In the 15th and 16th centuries, windmills began to be intensively built both in rural areas and in cities. The first roller mill, which made it possible to produce large quantities of pure white flour, was invented by the Russian court adviser Mark Miller in 1822.
First mention of white wheat flour ( granular) dates back to 1282, the first mention of grinding such flour for monastery bread and pies was in the 16th century, white granular balls- in “Domostroy” in the 1550s and “crumb pies with cheese” - in 1637.
The shape of the bread was always round (oblong-loaf-shaped appeared later, in illustrations of the mid-17th century). The bread was baked on the hearth of the oven, the color of the crust was yellow for wheat bread and brown for rye bread, the dough was always fermented - kvass.
The size or weight of bread during the Mongol period was a fairly constant value, so people paid with bread pieces or carpets- by count, not by weight, although at the same time they understood that the cost of bread varied: “to give them [the orphans]... four sowings of flour, ten loaves of bread” (1411), “it’s expensive there bread, because for one piece give half-altyn"(1422). "For Christmas there are 10 loaves of bread, for a piece of cake By dayze" (1455).
Later, this tradition was replaced by the grain decree of 1628, when a piece of bread was ordered to be baked of such weight that its monetary value remained constant - a penny, an altyn, etc. Depending on variations in the cost of flour and the labor of flour farmers and bakers, a piece of bread varied greatly in weight. In the 1700s-1800s, a new trend began: a constant decrease in the weight of a piece of bread. A piece of bread began to weigh less and less for the same price.
Modern Russian bread, like in ancient times (in the early and middle Middle Ages), is baked of a standard weight, size and shape, but its monetary value varies depending on the price of grain, the exchange rate and consumer demand for bread.
Word kalach It was first mentioned in the charter of the twelfth century of the Church of Ivan on Opoki: “the duties from him are 40 kolaches and 40 loaves.”
During excavations of ancient Novgorod, they encountered gingerbread boards from the 12th and 13th centuries (pre-Mongol period), decorated with patterns: in-depth images of lined rhombuses, floral patterns and crosses.
Word kolobok - kolobya- first mentioned in a birch bark letter of the 14th century, in which the father-in-law instructs his daughter-in-law to take “rye malt and how much flour is needed” and bake it with “kolobya”.
The pies were filled with peas, no different from modern ones, lentils (sochivo), fresh and salted cabbage, turnips, carrots, onions, including green and leeks, apples, cherries and plums, raspberries and black currants, rowan berries and cranberries. , lingonberries and blackberries. “In the 13th-15th centuries, mushroom picking was also widespread” (Artsikhovsky). Walnuts were common in the pre-Mongol period and very rare in the Mongol period. We ate a lot of hazelnuts and very few almonds. Poppy seeds were already traded in the 14th century at the Belozersk market; pies were stuffed with poppy seeds and honey.
The spicy herb was dill, the precious spice was pepper.
Cow butter pots are mentioned in a birch bark charter from the 13th century. Among the cooperage items of the 14th-15th centuries, butter churns and churning churns were found. In the mid-1400s, Princess Elena Vereiskaya sent “thirty cheeses and two pounds of butter” to the Kirillov Monastery annually. Since the cheeses were taken by the count, they were hard.
Of the vegetable oils, hemp and flaxseed predominated. Both oils dry perfectly and polymerize on the surface of the pans, creating a shiny non-stick surface that is not inferior to Teflon. Related to this is the opportunity to bake Russian pancakes and pancakes on iron frying pans and baking sheets in the Middle Ages before the advent of cast iron frying pans in the 1600s.
There was no sugar at that time; there was even very little imported sugar. Natural comb honey was called "hundred", "full". Molasses called pure liquid honey separated from the honeycomb. Residual honey, squeezed from honeycombs, but not completely cleared of wax, was called raw. Honey hardened in honeycombs was called granular. The best top layer of settled honey was called glass honey.
Animal food prevailed over fish food. Meat called beef, it dominated the menu. In second place is pork, in third place is sheep and lamb. We ate a lot of chicken and eggs. The food value of hunting in urban nutrition was small; only elk bones were well represented in excavations in Novgorod and Moscow.
Of the fish, pike perch was in first place in the diet of Novgorodians, followed by bream, pike, perch, catfish, sturgeon, whitefish, and very rarely - crucian carp and ruffe.
HYPOTHESIS: perhaps karasiki pies (old Russian chebureks) were called that
1) because of the golden color of fried products, like that of a goldfish (the sides are brownish-yellow to copper, with a golden sheen, the belly is yellowish-white)
2) due to the shape - flat (“chebureks”) like the body of a crucian carp and 10-20 cm long, like a crucian carp.
Dishes
Iron utensils were widespread in ancient Russian households. Cast iron first appeared in the early 1600s (17th century). These cast-iron frying pans - with a wooden handle for placing in the oven, which we consider the best utensils for pancakes - are no longer ancient Rus', but the 18th century (popular print, a woman bakes pancakes, for which she needs a kneading kneading bowl and a whorl, a spoon or an oar for mixing the dough). 
In pre-Petrine Rus', frying pans were more like modern iron French ones made of thin metal for baking French pancakes - crepes. Even the 1835 painting “The Cook” depicts not a cast iron, but a thin iron frying pan and French-type wheat pancakes.
Cook.1835 Author Grigory Karpovich Mikhailov.
Canvas, oil. Size 20 x 15.7 cm. Novgorod Historical and Architectural Museum-Reserve. City of Novgorod.
The stove pots were made of clay - cast iron - this is already the 17th and especially the 18th century. Deep baking trays and flat baking sheets ( accessory boards) were called “frying pans” and “vekoshniks”; they were made of iron. Molds for molded (patterned, shaped) baking of pies, casseroles and puddings were called cowsheds, they could be round or multifaceted, copper or ceramic.
The products were served on wooden plates and dishes and in wooden Meshach- bowls.
"Essays on Russian culture of the XIII-XV centuries. Part one. Material culture" \\Ed. A. V. Artsikhovsky - Moscow: Moscow State University Publishing House, 1969 - pp. 480