In an earlier post I mentioned that the English translator of one of the earliest cookbooks known made a fairly big deal on her blog about the fact that the cookbook contains Arabic recipes for sandwiches from the 9th and 10th century. It is a neat connection showing how few things in food are really unique to one place or time but to me there is a bigger surprise in al-Warraqs tenth-century cookbook; a possible source of leavening.

There are two broad forms of leavening in baked goods. You can use yeast to biologically produce carbon dioxide gas or you can use chemical leavening to produce gas through an acid base reaction. Note that I didn’t specify carbon dioxide gas when dealing with chemical leavening. Practically all of the acid base reactions used do produce carbon dioxide but there are some reactions that produce ammonia gas also though the use of baker’s ammonia (ammonium carbonate). While they have been important in the past particularly in Northern Europe and Scandinavia (and still have some use) I’m going to ignore them for now and concentrate on reactions that produce only carbon dioxide.

Chemical leavening of the carbon dioxide kind relies on reacting a base containing carbon and oxygen (carbonate or bicarbonate) with an acid. If you remember high school chemistry that means you also have a random hydrogen (from the acid) and something that forms the positive ion on the base. Hydrogen isn’t a problem and goes into forming water but you need to find a water soluble cation that is safe to have in the body. For cooking that pretty much means sodium, potassium, and calcium.

Calcium carbonate might well be the oldest of these chemicals used in food. However most of it’s use is for counteracting acidity. While it can produce carbon dioxide people don’t tend to think of it as leavening. Yet one of the known uses of chalk, calcium carbonate, in cooking is as an additive to poor wheat because it will help a yeast bread rise even with poor wheat in it. The problem is that chalk is cheaper and heavier than bread flour. Chalk isn’t harmful to the body in small quantities but it isn’t nutritious either but the economics of the situation push towards increasing using cheap, poor quality flour and “improving” it with cheaper chalk. However calcium carbonate is the active ingredient in antacids. If you add more than a little amount to the flour you will have unreacted base reacting with the stomach acids which is not a good thing. So it comes down to sodium carbonate, sodium bicarbonate, potassium carbonate, and potassium bicarbonate. Most of the time people state that these chemical leavening agents weren’t used as leavening until the 18th century but that is a simplification.

Humans have been using potassium carbonate for thousands of years in the form of lye. Soaking ashes from a hardwood fire in water generates a very alkaline solution of potassium carbonate. If you don’t use it up making soap or other more industrial uses such as fertilizer, glass making, or dyeing you can let it evaporate to get potash – potassium carbonate plus other impurities. I haven’t tried using it but mostly people claim that it has a smokey taste. In English pearlash refers to a refined or purified potash that removed the smokey taste. It is often described as the first leavening agent and it was the first commercially sold one in the 19th century.

It might have an even longer history. There are sources that point to potash as a guild secret ingredient used by bakers in the Netherlands to make a fluffy gingerbread in the 14th century. Potash has also been used in Chinese noodles especially in the northwestern regions near the Gobi desert. In noodles it isn’t a leavening agent really as there is no acid to lead to the production of carbon dioxide. Instead it provides an elasticity and yellow color (also seen in Japanese ramen). Yet if you did combine it with an acid including the lactic acid in sourdough you would gain a leavening effect. While the Dutch can lay the first recorded claim to leavening it is tempting to think that it has been used to at least some extent as a helper to make sourdough rise better for even longer.

#cooking #leavening

This is a continuation of my initial post on medieval Baghdadi thin bread but also a digression into the idea of authenticity.

I picked the title of this (and the last) post for the alliteration. It sounds good. In the context of the US 2023 I can assume that most people know what a tortilla should look and feel like. Ruqaq (which I can’t even reasonably type as I do not have the proper accent mark over the a) is not so well known especially as the 10th century Baghdadi version is baked in a dome shaped oven as found all over Asia while the modern Arabic bread is more of a crispy crepe cooked over a hot griddle. Perhaps naan is a better term but it doesn’t alliterate and, from the translation I am working from, the ruqaq sounds like it should be thinner than a naan. Lavash? Dosa except that they are made with completely different flours? For all I know the ruqaq is the ancestor of the tortilla by way of al-Andalus.

So I’ve started out inauthentically. Some might even say that I’m engaged in a clear case of cultural appropriation as I take the idea of an Arabic or Iraqi food and remake verbally into a completely different food. The teacher in me thinks that I am engaged in scaffolding, building new understanding and knowledge by relating it back to already existing knowledge. The experimentalist in me says that no matter what you call it we are just mixing flour, water, salt, leavening, and heat.

The experimentalist is also still interested in the sourdough and borax questions. I need to start saving some sourdough discards to play around with. If I use discards they will have little to no leavening and mostly serve to change the digestibility of the flour and the taste. There are many recipes for such flatbreads with and without leavening. Again, I don’t claim authenticity but it would be a viable product of a medieval Middle Eastern kitchen. Perhaps more research on sourdough in the Middle East is needed! If I use a fresh, active sourdough it will provide some leavening especially as the dough is to be left for a short period of time. Again not authentic but a viable product. In one sense I feel that my playing around with the recipe I am moving beyond museum authenticity. Certainly I have moved from mere copying into evaluating or creating so Bloom would be proud.

One odd tangent that I haven’t investigated is that I have seem references to hard or dry sourdough. Mostly this has been in the context of desem bread based on covering a small lump of dough in a flour. It works by maintaining a culture of wild yeast in the old dough fed by the flour around it with everything going much slower than a traditional sourdough because there is little to no liquid and stirring to allow for more contact of culture and new flour. 2g of dry starter per 100g of new flour sounds like a small amount but the Baghdadi recipe is clearly not made for working with 100g units so it might well be a viable route.

Finally, I have picked up but not tried the potassium carbonate. I knew it was hydrophilic but I underestimated how much. Storage feels like it might be a problem. As mentioned earlier the cookbook refers to baker’s borax but I don’t think the translation means literally borax. Really the entire family of pot ash, pearl ash, soda ash, natron, baking soda, and baking powder needs it’s own post so I’ll keep this shorter and make it part three.

#SCA #cooking

I like to cook. I like to read, research, and compare. So recently I’ve been playing with food in the form of a 10th century recipe for a thin bread as part of recreating a Baghdadi rolled up chicken salad pinwheel.

The recipe is found in the Kitāb al-Ṭabīkh, a 10th century cookbook written in the Abbasid Caliphate. The English translator has made a big deal that the Arabs ate sandwiches and thus we should stop saying that the Earl of Sandwich invented the sandwich. I think that is going a little too far. Many things are invented in multiple places and I certainly never got the idea that John Montagu was being put forth as The First Person to Put Food in Bread but only as the guy who popularized it in a specific social setting and ended up giving us the word for it. But I do think it is a neat connection that over a thousand years ago people had the same idea of cutting up cooked chicken, adding salady things, rolling it up in thin bread, and cutting it so that it looks pretty on a plate.

Chop [cooked chicken] and spread it on ruq§q (thin sheet of bread). Let there be underneath the chicken some skinned walnut, citron pulp (Èumm§' al-utruj), nabnab (cultivated mint), tarragon, baï9aråj (basil), and salt. Roll up the bread [with the filling inside].

No mayo or cream cheese but I think that might be an improvement!

Really, my main interest now is in trying to make the thin bread. The recipe given has the proportions of 100g of flour, 2g salt, 2g of yeast, and 2g of baker’s borax plus enough water to make a dough. Roll thin and bake in a domed oven like a tandor. If you make it and ignore the borax it is a perfectly normal bread dough recipe. So far I haven’t mastered getting the rounds thin enough but there is nothing odd it is simply a matter of playing with hydration. Instead of using a domed oven some more modern flat breads with similar names are formed by spreading the dough thinly by hand on a very hot pan or by using a spatula to spread the dough into a thin layer as you put it on. This means that only one side gets the heat at a time but it is simpler to do.

More interesting to me are questions about the borax and the yeast. First off; what is baker’s borax? I don’t think anyone really knows! Right now I’m thinking that perhaps it is something that might act as leavening. Potassium carbonate (pot ash / pearl ash) is what I think I’ll try first although I suspect that the word borax might be a clue to something that was also used as a flux and that natron would be a better match. The thing is I don’t know where to get natron or soda ash.

The yeast question is also odd to me. Of course this is unlikely to be yeast in a pure sense. Yet by having a specific ingredient identified as yeast it implies that this wasn’t simply a sourdough with a continuing culture but more of an additive. The foam that rises to the top in brewing, barm, can be used in making bread and has yeast in it so perhaps this is a dried barm? For now I am going with sourdough from a starter and mostly skipping the addition of yeast.

I’ll update this and add to it when I have some results.

#cooking #SCA

Are you a fan of sous vide cooking, smoking, sourdough or all three? This is a silly question of course. It is easy to see that all of these techniques can turn out good food. Yet I find that they take a different mindset.

Let’s talk about the first two since they are often used to cook meat. Sous vide is all about repeatability, accuracy, and control. The aim is to make the food cook uniformly so that every bit is at the same perfect temperature without the danger of over cooking. It is a conceptually simple means of cooking with very little in the way of skill that owes its consumer success to cheap PID controller technology. Smoking is in many ways the opposite. Even if you ignore the flavoring aspect of the smoke and consider it purely as a low and slow oven cooking there is much more attention required in dealing with the individual conditions involved. Overcooking, uneven cooking, and the uncertain time needed to finish cooking are all risks accepted by the person running the smoker.

These thoughts came about while I was smoking some ribs. Not really profound but interesting connections to muse on

• Smoking seems to have a connection to the philosophy of wabi-sabi in its embrace of imperfection.
• Sous vide is something that you do in your kitchen. As long as you have a kitchen you can do it and it doesn’t connect with others. On the other hand smoking requires more space, almost certainly outside, and because of the aroma tends to at least titillate others and inform them of your actions. Individuality versus community.
• While the Weber kettle type of grills that can be used for smoking blur the distinction there is also a difference in size and mass which means a sous vide set up would seem to be more suited to a situation where you plan on moving. I doubt there are digital nomads who carry one around but you could. While a small grill on a balcony could be used to smoke in some cases the idea of a smoker is less of an apartment thing and more of a house; less of a mobile life and more of a settled one.
• Technocratic control versus personal craftsmanship. I wouldn’t want to carry this thought too far especially as I use an electric smoker but the thought still arises. Could a preference for using one method or the other be correlated with thoughts on technocratic planning in politics? Modernism versus romanticism?

In the end there is also sourdough. Not a cooking method for meat but another older, inherently less controlled cooking method. I mostly included it for the sibilant sound of the s words but perhaps there is another axis to the discussion that would be interesting in how sourdough starts with the idea of wild yeast but then becomes over time a controlled situation as you keep a starter alive

#cooking