I want to share with you some photos that I took a few years ago. This is how my grandmother used to make bread, and my aunts replicated it some years ago on a smaller scale. Now there were maybe just 10 smaller breads made, and not 20 big ones, as my grandma used to bake.
Back when I was a child, my grandmother, in the evening, prepared the dough in a big elongated wooden recipient. She would mix the flour from her own cultivated wheat with sourdough, brewer’s yeast, water and salt. And she would let it ferment overnight.
At 4 AM she would wake up to burn the brick oven with wood for some hours, until the oven interior would turn white from the ash. Then she would wipe it clean in preparation for the breads.
She would form up the bread loaves and lay them on a big wooden board close to the oven. It required skill and quickness. The dough was not proved in bannetons like in the modern days, so it was pretty slippery.
Then she would quickly transfer the dough into the hot oven with the help of a wood peel (like the ones used for pizza). That was really difficult. because the dough was sticky. She would bake the bread for some hours and then they will turn out like this.
Yes, it is burned, but don’t panic, this is how it is supposed to be. So all the loaves are taken out of the oven to get to the next step. They are still very very hot, and it is a skill to know how to scoop them out with the peel.
The last step is the “beating” of the bread. It sounds strange, but we would all participate in this activity. You would get a thick stick, and start smacking the bread, so that the burnt crust would removed from the bread. We would do it where the chicken did their roaming, and they would go crazy eating these bread rests.
In the picture above, you can see this bread has a “malformation”, some dough escaped from it’s roundness and started forming its own bread crust. As kids we would love these things and we would fight for them. We all had a desire of eating just the skin of the bread. If only the bread was made only of these “malformations”…
The magic of this bread, is that is used to hold for two weeks, until another batch of bread was prepared. And people used to get inventive the last days of a batch, because it got a little harder. So you would use it to dip into a soup, or toast it and scrub garlic on it. And then some lard and salt on top, and it was the most delicious breakfast. And if it was summer and the tomatoes were ripe, you would add some tomatoes to the bread magic and you were good to go.
After the bread was baked, the oven would still be warm, and other specialties were baked afterwards. But that will come in another recipe and I am looking forward to be sharing it with you.