Medieval Trenchers
A bit of history
In medieval times people didn’t just eat bread, they ate off bread. These breads were known as trenchers. If you google trencher today, you will probably be directed to wooden plates. These trenchers take their name from the bread that came before.
In a very entertaining video our resident human makes a trencher using beer yeast starter. We learned about thick beer from the book “Food and drink in Medieval Poland” by Maria Dembinska. This book tells us that thick beer is (essentially) sourdough starter made with low alcohol beer, rather than water. We’re going to make our “beer barm/beer yeast starter" method below but we’ll leave some notes if you want to make this using thick beer.
Which flour do I use? Well that depends on how “rich” we want to make the trencher. In bad times the trenchers would be made of a mixture of rye and spelt, very roughly milled and not sieved. In good times they would have contained wheat, in very good times they would have had a lot of wheat and it might even have been a bit sieved. For the recipe below we’re opting for a good time bread consisting of a 50/50 ratio of wholemeal wheat and wholemeal rye. For those wanting historical accuracy we do recommend to avoid high protein and strong flours.
Ingredients needed
500 grams of wholemeal wheat flour
500 grams of rye flour
200 millilitres of beer yeast starter (if you have actual beer yeast from a fermenter use 30 millilitres of this dissolved in 170 millilitres of water)
480 millilitres of water - since trenchers need to be sturdy we keep the hydration here but if you want a softer bread, feel free to add more water.
Good pinch of salt
Some ice cubes (day 2 only)
Helpful tools (all of them optional)
Baking steel or stone
Shallow metal tray
Scoring knife or lame
Method
Day 1 - Make the pre-ferment
As with a lot of old bread recipes, this will take two days. On day one we make the pre-ferment, you ideally want to start this in the late afternoon/evening.
Combine the total of your flour in one bowl.
Split the mixed flour into two (roughly equal) bowls. You should now have two bowls with about 500 grams of flour each.
Add the salt to one bowl and all the liquid to the other.
Stir both bowls and as you might expect, the one with the liquid will be a bit harder to work with.
Cover the wet bowl with a lid or wet towel. Cover the dry bowl with… anything really, it’s just to keep the bugs out.
Leave both bowls overnight.
Day 2 - Actual bread making
Open up the wet bowl. You should see ample signs of activity. We have often had our dough “climb out” of the bowl.
Add the dry bowl to the wet bowl. You can do this the other way around or mix both in a third bowl.
Mix everything well then tip it out of the bowl.
Knead for about ten minutes. It will get a more cohesive shape, but if you used a significant amount of rye or spelt it will not become smooth and bouncy like a modern dough.
When it gets nice and cohesive, give it a coating with flour so it forms a skin then shape it into a ball and let it rest for two hours.
Now divide it into the amount of loaves you want to make. This can easily make two plate sized loaves or a bunch of smaller rolls.
Once you have divided them you have to shape them. The presence of a low-gluten flour like rye or spelt will make this very malleable. In medieval times, they used mould blocks. We just used a deep plate or a bowl.
Now heat up your oven to 205°C. Ideally you would have a baking steel or stone. Put an empty metal tray underneath the surface you intend to bake the loaves on.
Score the bread (or make an imprint if you have the tools) and pop it in the oven. There is a bit of debate on this - some say you should already have the oven preheated before shaping, so that the bread can be popped in as soon as it is shaped. We prefer it the way we’ve gone with above.
As soon as you’ve popped them in, throw a handful of ice cubes in the tray you placed underneath your baking surface. Medieval bakers did not have ice but the wood fired oven would be wiped with wet straw, creating a steamy environment.
After fifteen minutes, reduce the heat to 190°C. After another fifteen minutes, reduce it to 175°C then leave it for another fifteen to twenty minutes. This reduction of heat mimics how the temperature slowly dropped in medieval wood fired ovens.
Get your loaves out and let them rest for a couple of hours, ideally overnight.