TG wrote:
> atty wrote:
> ...>
> > indeed the no-knead method seems to fit very well with the setup at
> > ancient egyptian bakeries discovered around the pyramids - and famously
> > recreated by Ed Wood
> >
> > http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/AR/93-94/93-94_Giza.html
> >
> > laters
> > andy forbes
>
> Except there's paintings and statues of Egyptians kneading bread.

I think you are probably right

in particular http://www.insecula.com/us/oeuvre/ph...000027177.html

the two women kneeling at the back do indeed look to be kneading though
alternately can be interpreted as grinding as indeed is attributed at

http://www.insecula.com/us/oeuvre/O0004972.html

"In the bakkery, men crush the grain with pestles, after which it is
ground to flour by two women. Men mix dough in tall tubs, and it is
shaped into loaves and cakes by others. The four black ovens are each
tended by a man with a poker."

certainly clearly a man is making up into small loaves whcih probably
NYT dough is too wet for. (interesting that brewery and bakery are
portrayed as neighbours so we can assume this bakery was using the same
yeast culture or barm? as the brewery)

however why imagine that anceint Egyptians only had one method of
baking? Ed Wood's Giza experiment involved recreating bakery shops
found on the plain of Giza around the Pyramids. These were both Old
Kingdom sites and much bigger than the bakery shop illustrated by the
model above. I quote from the report

" Our ancient bakeries were composed of low stone rubble and Nile clay
walls with a marl floor in rooms measuring about five and a quarter
meters (north to south) by two and a half meters (east to west). In
both rooms we found a cache of bell-shaped ceramic pots, long
recognized as bread molds in Egyptian archaeology and labeled with the
name bedja in the Old Kingdom tomb scenes. The ancient Egyptians began
to use bread molds of this type just about the time that the pharaonic
state emerged around 2900 b.c. They continued to use them until near
the end of the Old Kingdom, about 2200 b.c. While some have suggested
that pot-baked bread was for special occasions - festivals, temple
offerings, etc. - the Old Kingdom bread mold has been found as a major
component of ceramic corpora in sites of all kinds from Egypt's
traditional southern border at Elephantine to First Dynasty outposts in
southern Palestine. Egyptians in many different settings desired and
produced their pot baked bread.

Old Kingdom tomb scenes show the pots placed rim to rim as a kind of
portable oven for baking in open pits. Our bedja pots were unusually
large, as much as thirty-five centimeters in diameter and up to
thirty-five centimeters in depth. Put together in the manner of the
tomb scenes they would create an interior space seventy centimeters in
height. If the dough would swell to fill the entire space, this would
produce a huge loaf of bread. Indeed, certain tombs scenes show
offering bearers carrying huge conical bread loaves of the shape that
would be produced by our pots. As I reported previously, we seem to
have found all the essential tools required for the production
processes depicted by Old Kingdom scenes and figurines: Both bakeries
originally had three large ceramic vats in the northwestern corner,
presumably for mixing dough. We further presume that a fireplace in the
form of an open platform in the opposite southeastern corner was for
stack heating the pots, a preliminary step often illustrated in
figurines and wall art. Rows of holes at the bottom of a shallow trench
along the eastern wall must have been for holding the dough-filled pots
that were covered by another pot placed upside down. Hot coals and
embers in the trench provided the heat that baked the bread."

http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/PROJ/GIZ/N...ll92_fig8.html

most siginficantly here there deosn't appear to me to be any suitably
sized work surface to knead or rest the quantity of bread this site
obviously produced (this is just one chamber which is duplicated over a
300 metre site)

a bread mould pot
http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/PROJ/GIZ/N...ll92_fig7.html

tell me this doesn't pretty closely match the NYT no knead method? (at
least to the point where anceient egyptians bake by making a pyrmamid
of these twinned pots in a pit and setting a bonfire around this) Looks
like possibly twin pot mould arrangement was used for both proofing and
baking.

http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/PROJ/GIZ/N...ll92_fig9.html

here you can see that the dough is apparently so wet that it is being
poured from smaller pots into the moulds as a liquid, almost more of a
batter!?

what is actually more intersting to me is how much the move away from
this style of wet dough to a stiffer dough was dictated by the move
away in Europe from communal baking (as practised both in France and
England) where indivdual households make their own dough and then bake
in a communal oven to professional baking and then mechanization. Pre
mechanization in European bakeris there is much mention of dough being
made in large troughs and some indication of being mixed by a paddle,
possibly with its bottom attached to the bottom of trough again
indicating a very wet dough. Certainly a stiffer dough in troughs of
the size portrayed in various illustrations at
http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online...fova1/hfr4.htm would be
impossible to imagine one man kneading or even mixing properly in the
modern sense. However the wetter the dough probably the more difficult
to move around and divide into equal portion loaves once out of dough
trough.

Maybe simply mechanization enabled the introduction of stiffer doughs
that could at once be kneaded mecahnically (speeding up proofing) and
were then more convenient for subsquent handling in a bakeshop . Of
course one also has to factor in the introduction, particularly in the
UK of harder wheats from the US, Canada and Australia.

laters
andy forbes