Tuesday, February 6, 2018

A Reenactor Take on Viking Flatbread

Alert readers may have noticed that I have edited my post about using Chef John's add-the-water-gradually-to-the-flour technique for making flatbread to mention a Facebook video showing a similar technique by a Canadian group called Ðrottin.

I couldn't figure out how to post the Ðrottin video here, but recently I found a YouTube video by a different Viking reenactment group called Marobud; that video appears to the right.  Like the Ðrottin video, it also shows a reenactor making flatbread in a similar way to Chef John's suggested method. Marobud appears to be a Czech group, and they have made several other videos showing the group's attempts to cook, Viking style, while camping in the wild.

This Marobud video shows a reenactor dumping flour into a large, mostly flat-bottomed wooden bowl, adding water, and then working the water-laden flour into dough and shaping that dough by hand into flat disks before cooking on a portable griddle (of a type also found in Viking archaeological sites) over an open fire.  As Chef John suggested, the breads were cooked until they developed at least a few black char marks, and no oil was used on the griddle.  It is true that the reenactor pretty much added his water all at once, instead of adding it gradually as Chef John suggests, and he hand-shaped his dough and did not "roll" it out, but that's because he was making the flatbread in the woods in winter and it was snowing.  :-)

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