Archaeology Gastronomy: Viking Bread

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1. From making scottish and other scandinavian breads that don't use yeast, your dough when you put into the oven is too thick. Think Tortilla or pita. At its thickest, think cookie. But, often with some recipes, something is often withheld by the baker unless it's being passed along hereditary lines. Toast the barley, and the flaxseed, and toast a spice like star anise or add cardamom. You also probably added too much salt. Even the recipes I have from my Icelandic great grandmothers, none of their familiar recipes have too much salt. And even my grandmother and my mother, they add so little compared to say french or even english breads. There should be just enough salt to enhance the flavor, but you don't want to taste it.
2. You mentioned that the Norse sometimes cooked on hot rocks. Did this even occur in conjunction with sauna or bastu or banya? I believe the Finns have a tradition of cooking a sausage in sauna, and there is this Ugric Udmurt bread called tabani which is cook before open heat. I am including a link to a picture in a 15th century manuscript showing women lined up to take some sort of ball or patty or cake from a heap. Any thoughts on what these might be? http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-V7kZD2t4-XU/VlDBPy4TccI/AAAAAAAAGVw/7T63UFrqcYI/s1600/tabani.jpg
3. Interesting attempt. My suggestion would to make a bit thinner, wetter, dough. Then, flatten it much more. The cooking of the sugars in the grains against the heat, browning it. This fond is delicious, and make many modern breads taste as they do. Baking or griddle baking would be easier and with less fuel needed as well. Also, eaten with some kind of meat stew, I am sure would be better then just eating dry. Cheese and butter always help as well. Thanks for making this kind of cool video!
4. Adding some eggs would counter the lack of glutem, and so you could try thiner breads and cooking in iron flat hot plate would make the outer part more crsipy while the inner part less stiff.
5. Needs to be thinner
6. omg you two are too cute .... perfect couple
7. this as I have found is pretty good with a beef stew and you use it to dip in the stew. kinda softens it up and get some more flavor in it.
8. Increase oven temp to 215 or 220 Celsius. if done so low temp texture will suffer
9. THIS looks like dried pewp.
10. Also it would be eaten with stew/soup so dipped or soaked it would soften up and absorb flavour.
11. Scandinavians of the Viking era drinking beer as opposed to water is a myth repeated by scholars today. In Norway during Viking, pre Viking, Medieval, and even up to today it's very easy to get clean water from all the springs, ice melt, and rain water as it rains allot in Norway all seasons of the year. Clean water can even be found leaking from all the rocky cliffs around here which is filtered by the rock and sediment. I live in Bergen which is one of the biggest cities in Norway and I can simply walk outside and find such clean water filtered from the cliff rocks in my neighborhood and it's 2016 where it's heavily populated compared to Viking era.
12. Fantastic video! Thanks
13. If they drank beer as it was safer than some water I think they may have made the mixture with beer. I have done this and find we like the malty flavour over the barley. I make a similar mix but wetter and the resulting bread is more like a chapati or pancake, good hot with butter and or honey. Great video.l
14. This reminds me of lefse - no yeast and very thin and flat. We eat it today as a sweet, with sugar and cinnamon and butter... or sometimes we wrap up or meat and rice and use it that way. It's much thinner than the bread in this video though..
15. where did they get the yeast to make wine and beer?
16. Source for bread recipe?
17. Since they had honey at the time, would they not have added some to the dough?
18. Wonderful well put together thank you
19. i did about vikings years and years ago
20. So the Vikings ate food.....very interesting indeed....