Ha! A picture in that same article shows the oldest known piece of hardtack clocking in at a “mere” 1-2/3 centuries. This Youtuber who specializes in military rations bravely samples a piece from 1863.
There is no such thing as a “Holy Saturday morning Mass”. The services held on Holy Saturday do not include Consecration, therefore they’re not Masses. The ones in the afternoon count as Resurrection Sunday for liturgical purposes so they include Consecration and are Masses.
There are breweries making beer commercially (sours, farmhouse ales, etc) using feral yeast. At a certain point in production, panels in the ceiling are opened, allowing wild yeasts to settle onto the surface of the beer. Mmmmmmmmmm!
Another possibility is that most modern bread is made with powerful mixers that essentially whip air into the dough. Yeast is added for flavor more than leavening. Maybe they just left it out for that variety.
To be complete, many breads without any yeast, chemical leavening, or mechanically-added air do get a fair amount of rising just from expanding steam as they’re cooked. Popovers/Yorkshire pudding and Indian Poori are the most spectacular examples, but wheat tortillas and others do puff up a bit.
It’d be really odd for a bread labeled as “sourdough” to leave out “yeast used for flavoring”, though.
Ah. I haven’t got the dates, but perhaps that partly explains what happened to the other mechanical raising process I mentioned above (injected gas). It was replaced by imported high-protein wheat and / or the Chorleywood process.
Since this has been revived, I came across this YouTube video for no-knead bread. It has a smaller than usual amount of yeast but no sugar, just water, flour, salt, and the yeast.
Color me confused. I thought at least a small amount of sugar – a tablespoon or two – was necessary to give something the yeast to eat. The first proof is for 18 - 24 hours and it doubles in size so the yeast is eating something. Could it be the starch in the flour is converted to sugar?
It’d have to be-- With those ingredients, there’s nothing else they could be eating.
You definitely do not need any sugar for bread. I almost never use sugar for my breads, unless I’m doing sweet styles that are supposed to have noticeable amounts of sugar. This is not atypical at all. The yeast does just fine with the starches.
Here’s the science of it. Basically, a number of enzymes move the process along.
I used to use sugar to start the yeast when I was baking bread. I mixed dried yeast, a bit of flower, a bit of sugar, a bit of water or milk, for half an hour or so, to get the yeast started. When you have a lot of active yeast, you mix it through the flour. If you are buying active yeast you don’t have to do this.
And by the way, sourdough starter contains more than just yeast. It’s a yeast/bacteria co-operation, like in vinegar mother, or when you have dandruff.
Huh. I can’t say I’m an expert bread-maker, since I use a machine, but I did notice the recipes that came with it seemed to divide white bread into two types, French and regular. The French had water, flour, salt, yeast, and a dab of sugar. The regular had two or three times the sugar, plus fat (butter or oil) in addition to the first four ingredients. In either case, the yeast was about double what the video recipe called for, with a similar amount of flour. Now, overnight for the first rising would test the patience of any bread machine aficionado so I’m guessing the extra yeast and added sugar is to kick the first rising into high gear.
The no-knead recipe purposefully uses a small amount of yeast, due to the long rise times. The yeast eventually makes enough of itself over time.
And, yes, the sugar does help speed up the process. It is not necessary. You can do a same-day bread without using any sugar. But bread always tastes better given longer ferment times, in my opinion. The no-knead recipe isn’t particularly flavorful as far as that goes, but let it rise for half the time at room temperature, and then give it a couple days in the fridge, and it’s much better. Same with pizza doughs. At least overnight it for better flavor.
That matches my experience of working in a pizza place. We had a dough-maker who was working part time. He’d show up about noon after getting off his “day” job at the local bread bakery, weigh out what was predicted for the next day, mix it knead it, and portion it out into pans. It then went into the refrigerator over night where it ever so slowly doubled in size – he’d go home after working about two or three hours. The next day from time to time we’d take what we figured would be needed over the next few hours, punch it down and let it rise at room temp before flattening and stretching it onto a pizza pan for someone’s order. Unless we had an unexpected rush the evening before, the dough would be in the refrigerator at least 24-hours.
I now I see that the Sourdough rye I used to buy no longer contains “starter”. They used to put “sourdough” in the ingredients to conceal the use of wheat flour in their rye bread. Now that they are no longer doing that, they have evidently decided not use starter at all, because they now list the important enzyme (created by the starter) as an ingredient.