(a method, not a recipe)
So I ran it by Lena who, after living 8 years in a cave in the Himalayas, is something of an expert on cooking with a wood fire.
She said her method in those years was first to make yogurt and then strain it to make yogurt cheese. Then she would use the whey drained from the yogurt as leavening for the bread. Then she'd have bread and cheese and said that this way, the amount of bread would be about right for the amount of cheese, no matter how much this turned out to be.
Anyway, for a basic sour dough/whey leavened whole wheat loaf, she would make a hardwood fire (oak, rhododendron, etc.) in the oven (hers was clay/mud and tin, but whatever oven) use it to cook a meal and then, afterwards, when it was burned down to coals and some ash, do the actual baking using hardwood coals.
Her advice is to make smallish loaves - no bigger than what a bread machine would make. Let the loaf rise (twice preferably) put it in a lightly oiled heavy pot that isn't a whole lot bigger than the final loaf will be (she says better to make two smaller loaves in two smaller pots than try to do one big one as they will bake more evenly that way.)
Invert the lid of the pot so it's concave. Heap coals around the pot and put a layer of coals on top on the inverted pot lid so that the pot has heat all around. Bake an hour or even two depending on temp or until the bread sounds crisp and hollow when you rap it.
She sez it's easy <g> But this is from the gal who I've watched start a fire in the rain with three wet sticks and a handful of damp straw.
shared by Joy
(1/10/05 and 1/11/05)
(What else would you need for the bread, and what proportions? a bit of salt, a bit of oil/fat, sweetener? what else? Please?)
I asked Lena about this as she was falling asleep last night and got a rather rambling and entertaining explanation.
She says that, if you have enough whey from yogurt cheese to use it as the only liquid in your bread, it doesn't need starting.
Otherwise, if you're low on whey, you can use a smaller amount of it, a spoonful or two of yogurt and make a sponge by adding some flour to the liquid and letting it
sit for half a day or more in a warmish environment.
The ingredients were mainly whey, flour and salt. She said you could add a bit of oil if you had it, but they rarely had enough to spare. If one was short of flour (they often were - these were yogis living in caves on nothing) you could stretch it by adding a handful of ehrmung flowers (a kind of peppertree bush that grows up there.) or even rhododendron flowers with the stamens removed (the leaves and stamens are poisonous but the flowers are edible - they made wine and jam from them.)
She never used any sweetener in the bread, but might sprinkled sesame seeds on the outside of the loaves for extra flavor.
She says that, locally (Himachal Pradesh in the Himalayan foothills) this was referred to as "bahm roti" (risen bread) as opposed to chapatis or flat breads.
Joy
(1/10/05 and 1/11/05)
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