how do I prepare and cook leavened bread?

[Toddy]

Best home made oven I've used was made of mud coated over a wicker frame. As it heated and cooked the willow charred inside the mud, but the mud turned to brick.

A campfire will reach 600 C, and clay soft fires below that. Repeated firings drive off the smoke water and the carbon and the oven becomes very, very, stable.
It does need protection from the rain and wet ground though....if you try to cook in a wet oven it can spall and it ends up cracked to bits.

Loads of patterns and instructions on the net for these.

M

 

[Robson Valley]

Good plan, Toddy. Thank you. My region is rock, water and trees.
Rock from fine sand to 9,000' mountains.
We do have many slate outcrops, some much harder than others.
Maybe some back yard experiments next summer.

 

[petrochemicals]

The Aussie camp ovens I've been using for years now bake as good as the gas oven once I'm in practice. I tend to make baking powder stuff from laziness but its easy enough to use one for rising near the fire while the other preheats.

http://southernmetalspinners.com.au/product/aussie-camp-oven-small-10-2/

I do like their windshield, almost an oven in itself, clever design.

 

[Toddy]

Slate's useful, if it's dry and not full of air spaces or really shale.

Rock is not just rock, iimmc....it matters 'what' rock if you're going to heat it up much.

I think bushcraft really underestimates the identification and uses of rocks, I really do.
Pre metal and plastic, folks only had antler, horn, shell, wood, bone and stone, and it's astonishing just how diverse and useful the stones are.

Best of luck with the experiments

Toddy

 

[tombear]

To drag up a old thread I ran into a wall trying to get a proper odd school bakestone from the local measures. There's. place nearby where they were supposed to be quarried, Baxenden ( which is supposed to be a corruption of bake stone dene ( dene being valley in the local dialect) but apart from one reference in a old history book there's no other info on this and some local history buffs I've consulted are rather dismissive of the idea.

The smooth flat stone would be heated from below and the bread would be cooked inside a inverted iron or pottery pan/pot with embers placed on top and perhaps around the side although u suspect just on top.

atb

tom

 

[Robson Valley]

Don't give up searching. Sounds interesting.
Some years back, it was trendy over here to buy some sort of stone plate
for baking pizza. After a couple of embarassing failures, mine had an accident
outside on the concrete.

One large piece of slate gets heated by the fire. Possibly the bread sits on a
smaller piece on top?

Most other stones here are rounded off and polished to varying degrees by water action
in the mountain rivers. Musing the construction of some sort of a sheltered hearth.

 

[santaman2000]

No scales. I do the bag trick. Bushcraft is about the same as visiting some of my friends!
Years ago, I did go to the trouble of figuring out the weights of volume measures.
Six eggs. Turns out that 8 small eggs = 6 Large = 350g........

So can we extrapolate that's 7 medium eggs? 5 extra large eggs? 4 jumbo eggs?

 

[Toddy]

I use one of those bakestones (not to be confused with the Welsh bakestone made nowadays of cast iron) quite often. It makes good pizza and flatbreads in the oven.

I use a girdle (not to be confused with a belt, nor the corrugated griddle thingie for meat, but with the flat cast iron griddle that the Welsh call a bakestone) to bake with on top of the cooker or on a fire when camping.

I'd be thoroughly dischuffed if someone had an accident with my ironstone (high temperature fired pottery) bakestone on concrete.

Cheers,
Toddy

 

[tombear]

Stumbled on this looking for info on shale bakestones

https://brunyfirepower.wordpress.com/page/18/

doubly interesting to me a I'm Darbysh' born and bred me sen.

Its times like this I wish I was better at geology but its one of my numerous blind spots, unless they are stunningly different a rock looks like a rock to me!

ATB

Tom

 

[Robson Valley]

santaman: not much choice for egg sizes in our village grocery store!
If you have the complete selection of sizes, it might be useful to figure out
the equivalents.
I've made up my own digital cookbook, it was my gift to my kids when they went
away to university. Annual iterations of hand written notes, I've changed many
of the quantities (such as eggs) to add sizes and total weight.

As I have no plans nor capacity to scale up my bread formula, measuring 800g
flour is fast and simple. I have to scale the dough anyway for loaves, buns
stars, fougasse, etc., anyway.

 

[Danny1962]

Definitely +1 to the unleavened chappati or the soda bread method if working outdoors and/or at lower temperatures. I make a lot of bread at home, I tend to use only enough yeast to permit a slow, overnight rise followed by a 1 or 2 hour prove in a warm room. Too much yeast (meaning enough to get a faster rise) can make the bread more dry in texture.

I'll post my usual bread recipe in a different thread, since I doubt it would work so well being prepared from scratch outdoors.

 

[Alreetmiowdmuka]

To drag up a old thread I ran into a wall trying to get a proper odd school bakestone from the local measures. There's. place nearby where they were supposed to be quarried, Baxenden ( which is supposed to be a corruption of bake stone dene ( dene being valley in the local dialect) but apart from one reference in a old history book there's no other info on this and some local history buffs I've consulted are rather dismissive of the idea.

The smooth flat stone would be heated from below and the bread would be cooked inside a inverted iron or pottery pan/pot with embers placed on top and perhaps around the side although u suspect just on top.

atb

tom

Please dismiss me if this is a stupid question but what would be wrong with say an Indian stone flag from a local builders?


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[British Red]

Any smooth stone, dry, crack free (and not reconstituted muck) stone works fine. I use an old marble pastry board, others I know do use large, smooth, paving stones. Offcuts from granite worktops are excellent.

I believe Tom wanted to try the local stuff - nothing wrong with that - nice to use local, historically accurate stuff.

 

[tombear]

Yeah, I've a strong bias to the historically accurate bit. I have a nasty tendency towards borderline experimental archeology in my messing about.

i do have a slight worry that some stone has air gaps or cracks that can explode when heated up but I'm sure if I waved a piece about on here folk would be able to say yea or nay to it.

We are on gritstone here so that's highly suitable . Getting a say 18 inch dia slab shouldn't be too hard, getting it thin enough (less than a half, more than a quarter inch) is more of a problem. You can use thicker but back in th day they went to quite a bit of trouble to get them thin. Somewhere up Saddleworth there wa quite a elaborate process of shaping and baking the local mudstone. They have dug fragments of 16th C mudstone bakestones from a site in Bury they think may have come from Saddleworth, quite a distance in th day to shift what's basically a small paving slab so they must have thought them superior.

ATB

Tom

 

[Alreetmiowdmuka]

Yeah, I've a strong bias to the historically accurate bit. I have a nasty tendency towards borderline experimental archeology in my messing about.

i do have a slight worry that some stone has air gaps or cracks that can explode when heated up but I'm sure if I waved a piece about on here folk would be able to say yea or nay to it.

We are on gritstone here so that's highly suitable . Getting a say 18 inch dia slab shouldn't be too hard, getting it thin enough (less than a half, more than a quarter inch) is more of a problem. You can use thicker but back in th day they went to quite a bit of trouble to get them thin. Somewhere up Saddleworth there wa quite a elaborate process of shaping and baking the local mudstone. They have dug fragments of 16th C mudstone bakestones from a site in Bury they think may have come from Saddleworth, quite a distance in th day to shift what's basically a small paving slab so they must have thought them superior.

ATB

Tom

Oh yeah I totally understand were your coming from it was just a thought.living quite close too you it's great hearing a bit of local history too good post


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[tombear]

On the off chance they know something useful I just sent a e to the Museum at Saddleworth. The quarries at Delft , Oldham way, were where they dug them up so I'm hoping the local history buffs know something useful like if I can go over and snag some slabs of mudstone, depending on who owns them now, whether they are played out or what.

atb

tom

 

[Alreetmiowdmuka]

On the off chance they know something useful I just sent a e to the Museum at Saddleworth. The quarries at Delft , Oldham way, were where they dug them up so I'm hoping the local history buffs know something useful like if I can go over and snag some slabs of mudstone, depending on who owns them now, whether they are played out or what.

atb

tom

Theirs a quarry near me I can literally se it from my bedroom window.its on brook fold lane in Harwood.bolton.dont know if it helps Tom but just thought I mention it


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[Robson Valley]

Valuable goods, even bake stones, should have and would have been traded far and wide.
I'd be wondering what I had or made to barter in trade for a really good stone!
From Saddleworth to Bury might have taken several generations, not one stiff hike.
No way of knowing, I suppose.

Nodules of copper metal exist naturally in the Pacific Northwest coastal mountains.
Each deposit with it's own unique chemical signature of impurities. There was a copper
knife recovered from a native midden in central Saskatchewan which must have come from
copper on Haida Gwaii, off the British Columbia coast. That's about 2,000 miles of
open ocean, 2 mountain ranges and untold big rivers to cross.
Apparently, obsidian, volcanic glass, is even easier to trace. Abolute spider web
of pre-columbian native trade routes all over North America.

The copper nodules. I've examined them in the University of British Columbia's Museum of Anthropology.
Knobby things from peas to grapes in size.

 

[tombear]

Oh, theres pack horse trials all over the South Penines, wool was being taken to Halfax from early on and loads of bakestones or other goods would have been a way of making use of the spare capacity on the way out.

I've been able to find th odd bit on the trade including, somewhere, a contempory description of how the mudstone was processed. The trade died out when the price of iron bakestones dropped to the point everyone cold afford them.

Theres several made from stone items I'd like to replicate despite my almost complete lack of experience working it, a bakestone or two, a rotary quern and a pestle for the huge gritstone mortar we dug out of the back garden

ATB

tom

 

[santaman2000]

....Nodules of copper metal exist naturally in the Pacific Northwest coastal mountains.
Each deposit with it's own unique chemical signature of impurities. There was a copper
knife recovered from a native midden in central Saskatchewan which must have come from
copper on Haida Gwaii, off the British Columbia coast. That's about 2,000 miles of
open ocean, 2 mountain ranges and untold big rivers to cross......

Or it might have come from the south. There are still active copper mines in Montana, Utah, and Nevada. Several mountains and rivers to cross, but no open ocean.