Old School Baking was an Adventure

Modern baking with commercial cultivars of wheat, blended flours, thermostat controlled ovens, and particularly commercial yeast is predictable. Yes, it takes skill, and there is always something to learn that will make the product better, but it is predicable. 

I have been grinding my own flour for a few years now, and every time I try new kinds of grain or new blends of grain, I have increased respect for the bakers of 500 or a thousand years ago.

Our consistent grains and central heat, make sourdough maintenance and much easier and more predictable. If you were baking in a communal, wood fired oven, you needed  dough to be ready to bake at a certain time on a certain day.  Dealing with changes in sourdough growth rates as the seasons and weather changed, was a real challenge that most of us no long accept.

Even how long to fire the oven varied with the season and the weather, as the kind and moisture content of the wood varied through the year.  

The stimulus for this post is that a batch of grain that come in yesterday, has a higher moisture content than is normal for commercial grains, and thus it milled very differently from what I expected. 

On the other hand, if I had been milling with a hand powered quern, I would have noticed the high moisture content instantly and would not have been so surprised by the texture of the dough. (People that use a quern tend to have the musculature of elite athletes. Using muscle power to grind flour is HARD work.)

I am grateful at how easy it is  today to produce good bread.