Flour, Water, Salt, Leavening

Just four ingredients. So many possibilities!

Bread is Ancient, we know that the Phoenicians kept extensive records of their grain harvests, which include the first math error ever recorded. The earliest oven we've discovered so far is in Croatia, 6,500 years ago. Egypt had industrial-scale facilities for brewing and baking.

I've Never Made Bread Before. What do I do?

I usually recommend Your First Loaf over on the wonderful Fresh Loaf community.

There's my bread class, which has additional data about the ingredients.

Articles on Other Things

A conversation on SCA Cooks with Cariadoc lead me to experiment in mass loss in bread baking.

Things this page will link but (mostly) doesn't yet.

• Flour

• Water

• Salt

• Leavening

  • Leavening Equivalents

  • You might want to try Making a Sourdough Starter

Links

Stefan's Florilegium, Breads section. Stefan's is a great starting point, seeing the end products of people's research. One thing to be aware of is that the articles go back to 1989, and we've learned quite a bit more since then. Also note that you will probably disagree with some of the conclusions. That's okay. Follow the links and understand why they made the choices they did.

Reconstructing Medieval Bread from the Getty Museum, a carefully considered bit of experimental archaeology.

Assize of Bread and Ale from 1495 (text) is the earliest food regulation we have, a reconstruction of its recipes can be found here.

Cariadoc and Elizabeth's recipe page. You might also like a link to his Miscellany recipe index

A rather nice source from England is here with lots of links and discussions of bad assumptions when we moderns interpret Medieval materials.

Want to make your own sourdough starter? Start here!