Roman Sourdough Bread

http://www.coquinaria.nl/english/recipes/Rombread.htm

Used for the May Cooks Guild Meeting and the May Newcomers Event

Roman Sourdough Bread

The Romans knew several kinds of bread. Mostly these breads were made with sourdough. The bread
could be made of wheat, spelt, barley, millet or rice. Even ground pulses were used. In the second
century before Christ bread started to displace pottages with pulses as basic food. Bread was eaten
every day, at every meal. This explains the "bread and circuses": both were considered essential to the
well-being of the plebs.
The bread in this recipe I have composed from the description; by Faas of several Roman kinds of
bread (P.C.P. Faas, Around the table of the Romans: Food and feasting in ancient Rome (Palgrave
McMillan 2002). This is not a historical recipe, but an 'impressionistic' recipe.
Faas mentions bread shaped like a ring with a laurel wreath, a flat bread like pizza, a long breadroll, a
mushroom shape, a square bread shaped like a dice, and a bread shaped like the breast of a young
woman.

Ingredients:
500 gram (4 1/4 cup) spelt flour
1/4 litre (1 cup) white grape juice
200 gram (7 fl.oz) sourdough on room temperature
75 gram (1/3 cup) fresh goat cheese (chevre) at room temperature
2 Tbsp. olive oil
1 Tbsp. honey
1 tsp. each of aniseed and cumin seeds
1/2 tsp. salt
and also some yeast (15 gram/1/2 oz. fresh or 5 gram/1 tsp. dried)

Temper the sourdough with 1 deciliter of the grape juice, 100 gram spelt flour and honey (sponge). Let this stand for at least one to three hours on a warm spot until it has doubled in volume, then mix in the other ingredients. Knead well until you have an elastic dough. Let it rise on a warm spot under a damp cloth. If you use extra yeast, one or two hours will suffice, but when sourdough is the only rising-agent, you can also leave it an entire night. When the temperature goes down, rising will be slower. To prevent the dough from drying out, place it in a plastic box with lid, together with some glasses of hot water.
You can knead and let rise for a third time, but this is not mandatory. Now you can create your bread in any form you like. Use your fantasy, or create a simple loaf. When the bread is formed, let is again rise, this time for half an hour. Preheat the oven to 220 dg C/425 dg F. Bake the bread for 20 to 25 minutes.

I made two of these, one for the Cooks Guild May meeting and one for the May Newcomers Event
(that one I excluded the cheese and spices so that it could be used to sample any of the condiments
brought and to reduce the chance of allergy problems. Because I had left out some ingredients in that
one I needed to add some more of the other ingredients so that I would have enough bread to shape into a decorative loaf. I left out the suggested yeast because I was already using a wild yeast sourdough starter and there is no need to use both, even though some people do. I followed the recipe for each batch of bread, put them each on pizza pans and poking a hole through the center of the mound of dough formed them into rings. Then I covered them loosely with an oiled plastic wrap and left them in a warm place to rise over night.

The next morning I put them one at a time on a pizza peel and preheated the oven with a baking stone. I then snipped leaf shapes into them with kitchen scissors and stuck bay leaves into the wreaths so that they would have some bread leaves and some bay laurel leaves in the laurel rings. Then I sprinkled them with more spelt flour before sliding them onto the pizza stone, sprayed in some water water (to replicate baking in a stone oven) and baked them. When the first one was baked I could take it out of the oven then start the process on the second one.

The ingredients are almost identical to Mustachi or Must Rolls that I made the year before except each one of those small rolls are set on top of a bay leaf. Then I sprinkled more spelt flour on them and loosely covered them with plastic wrap and left them in a warm place over night to rise. The next
morning I baked the loaves one at a time. I liked the fact that these call for olive oil instead of the lard
the Must Rolls called for so they are better for you and are kosher for those who have that concern.
They are not a dry heavy bread and keep well in the freezer but because of the shape do need the
support of a pan under them when storing in the freezer. They went well at both things I served them at and this being the first time I tried to make decorative bread I will certainly be doing it again.