How to make 2,000-year-old-bread
So, it didn't turn out to be as easy as wethought to
reproduce this bread.
But here we are.
We got some flour - we got some buckwheatflour,
which is the flour that they used all thetime.
It was more readily available.
So, we've got a kilo of that, so like 2lbs.
We prepare a fountain.
Here we've got a little bit of the,
as we call in Italy,
'maga' or 'biga'
because obviously they didn't have yeast assuch,
but they would use like a sourdough as wecall it now.
It's a lovely smell of acidity.
Then here I've got a little bit of water,which has got
a bit of salt in it.
I'm going to gently with my hand.
Apparently there were using as well, somekind of
different animals to move around differentmachines
that mixed the bread,
but obviously being in wood, nothing was leftover from it.
Slowly I put it all in.
There we go, in the middle.
Then with your hands, bring it back in.
Ok, I'm going to work it really gently andallow it to
take always a little bit of air,
so it gets trapped in there so it makes itnice and lighter.
As you can see it's a very straightforwarddough.
Then it will stratify really, really nice.
So, I'm going to shape it down like that.
I'm ready to go.
Then you're going to press it out.
Ok, so here I got the right shape, size andthe only
thing I like to let it raise for a minute.
I think one hour and a half to two hours willbe more
than enough - in a temperate room.
There we are.
Got one hour and a half to two hours and itgets much softer.
You know, this is where I start to have aproblem
because in a normal situation I would bakethis one
and it would become a beautiful...I couldmake little
cuts to make it a little bit more...
But here on the picture I've got here, thebread is
divided like if it was a token.
It's almost like somebody gets paid one pieceof that.
So, and there is this sort of like line around,which I
cannot justify myself.
At the start I thought it was baked upsidedown or
something like that.
But obviously it's not because otherwise theywould
have found the tin in the oven.
The only thing I sort of thought about it,in order to make
it easy to carry they would have tied a pieceof string
around it.
I'll show you what I thought.
As I'm going, I'll fix it in.
This also will guarantee the fact that eachof the
pieces of bread will be roughly the same sizebecause
the string will be the same size.
Ok, here we are.
I'm going to pull it.
That's it - I'm happy with that.
Ok, now the shaping is perfect.
I'm going to make the cuts.
I'm going to divide it in eight.
One
Eight of these lovely little cut will allowthe heat to
come out, will allow the thing to raise.
But then, as we can see in the picture eachof the
slaves had his own little mark.
So, we made a little Locanda Locotelli sortof double L,
which I'm going to place here.
Like that, like in our logo.
And then,
a little weight on top of that.
Now, I will double this up like that.
When the bread is ready, I can actually carry
with this string.
So, I am ready to bake it now.
Ok, I'm going to take away our 'LL'.
This is making for a fantastic loaf of bread
from Pompeii.
In AD 79, a baker put his loaf of bread into the oven. Nearly 2,000 years later it was found during excavations in Herculaneum. The British Museum asked Giorgio Locatelli to recreate the recipe as part of his culinary investigations for the cinema production 'Pompeii Live from the British Museum'. In response to the many interesting, thoughtful and sometimes amusing comments we've received for this video, we've asked Paul Roberts, the curator of our Pompeii exhibition 'Life and Death in Herculaneum', to give us the academic background: It was one of the Romans’ great boasts at table that they could serve white flour bread at fine banquets (at normal tables they might well have eaten poorer grades of wheat or other grains, such as spelt or barley, and even beans, lentils or chestnuts.) You will see that Giorgio scores the loaf: I’ve examined lots of the loaves and I am convinced that they are scored. It's important to remember that the loaves survived because they were carbonised. They have, in effect, shrunk somewhat from their original form, because of the loss of liquid on exposure to the sudden blast of heat form Vesuvius – conservatively estimated at 400 degrees centigrade. All other foodstuffs – figs, beans, grain etc are noticeably smaller than they ought to be – and there is no reason the same shouldn’t be true of bread. This could explain why the scoring and the stamp seem implausibly clear – in effect they may have contracted to a smaller (and in the case of the stamp, more legible) form. This carbonisation must, I think, be taken into account and means the loaves when complete and fresh from the oven may have looked very different from how we see them now – not just in colour. Get the full recipe and find out more: http://www.britishmuseum.org/pompeiilive