Farming for self sufficiency

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If the bread-maker wishes to be scientific he might know that the dough fermentation should be at about 80° F (27° C) and the temperature of his oven should be from 200° to 240° C. At 60° C all yeast is killed. But you won't make any better bread because you know this.

If you are a North Indian you will probably prefer chapatis, or unleavened bread. These are made by mixing a very stiff dough of whole meal flour and water, with (common sense will prompt?) a pinch of salt; divide it into egg-shaped lumps, roll it out very thin (Indian cooks do it by clapping it between the palms—hence that persistent clapping noise that emanates from North Indian kitchens) and bake it on a very hot plate for not many seconds. Turn it over. (If you then throw it on the fire for a second it will inflate like a balloon.) The hub-cap of an American automobile placed over the fire makes a splendid hot plate, which is why so few American automobiles in North India have any hub-caps on them.

There are other things you can do with wheat. Soak it overnight then put it in the slow oven for three days. It jellifies and makes an ideal breakfast food, and when you eat it you don't have the feeling that you are helping to pay for somebody's vast advertising campaign.

YEAST

A word about that marvellous substance: yeast.

Yeast is a living organism, which will live and multiply at from 48° F to 95° F. It eats sugar and excretes carbon dioxide and alcohol. There are three main species: Saccharomyces cerevisiae: for beer and bread; Sacchanomyces ellipsoideus: for wine; Saccharomyces pasteurianus: for cider.

The grape wine and cider yeasts are always present on the skins of their respective fruits, so don't need to be added. Beer yeast should come from the top of the previous brew, not the bottom, for it is an aerobic yeast. Bread yeast can come from the bottom. We ferment our beer and bread with the same yeast, the beer mash tub providing enough for both—and many pounds to spare.

A recipe for making your own dried yeast:

3 ounces hops
3 1/2 pounds rye flour
7 pounds corn or barley meal
1 gallon water

Rub the hops and boil them in the water for half an hour. Strain. Stir in rye flour, then corn or barley meal. Knead and roll out very thin. Cut into circles with a tumbler and leave to dry hard in the sun. Wild yeast will infect the biscuits. To use it, crumble a biscuit and soak in warm water with sugar and salt in it and next day use as yeast. I have never done this but I have made 'sour dough' bread: Here your make your dough, make a hole in the top and put in a mixture of warm water, sugar and salt; leave in the warm for a day. If you are lucky it will ferment and you mix it up and make your dough. In South West Africa we made a lot of bread like this and it generally used to work. We also baked in a termite hill. You knocked a hole in the side of the hill, made sure that there was a chimney coming out at the top (the termites had already ensured that there was one almost all the way), built a hot fire in your new oven and kept it going for an hour or two until the termite hill was very hot indeed, drew the ashes and shoved in your bread and bunged the entrance and the chimney up. In an hour the bread was perfectly cooked, and so was anything else you liked to put in there.

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