Baking Bread

Over the past couple of weeks I have been working on redeveloping my bread site.  The website was originally put together as a simple design to illustrate how a website should be structured for my web design courses some years ago.  It is about time it was resurrected into a proper useful site.

To this end I have been baking breads of all types to produce pictures with which to illustrate the pages.  My latest is a Roman Slipper Bread made of Spelt flour and olive oil.  It is a messy dough to use and it is not dusted with flour or kneaded, just mixed, left and baked.

Roman Slipper Loaves - panis calceus

This is very reminiscent of ciabatta, which I also baked, using modern flour.  It has a different taste and texture, but is essentially a similar method of baking.

Italian ciabatta - slipper bread

Another adventure was to bake some Tudor loaves.  Manchet is a bread made from clubwheat flour, sifted with a muslin bag and re-sifted through a double muslin bag to make a fine white bread.  I also made a meslin loaf which is a mixture of common wheat and rye flour.  This is a very heavy bread with a rough texture.  In tudor times, the base of the meslin loaf was cut into a trencher plate in wealthy households.  After the meal the bread trenchers and food residue would be given to the worthy poor as a food handout - saves on washing up!

Meslin bread trencher

Tudor meals did not differentiate between savoury and sweat.  Meat, berries and flowers would be seen in the same remove (each course was called a remove).

Take a look at the website on http://bread.pursglove-ons.co.uk/ and see what you think.  It is not finished yet as I have the flour-producing mills to add.  I have spotted a couple of minor typo's - let me know if you spot anything that needs adjusting.