By Professor Vreni Hochstrasser, Chair of Home Economics, Provincial College of Porterville; Proprietress, The Stone Hearth Bakery, Porterville, Amphoe of the Western Reaches
Foreword
I have been baking unleavened bread since before I could see over a countertop.
My mother, Elsbeth Hochstrasser, kept what I would now call a Level 3 kitchen for the entirety of the Days of Unleavened Bread, and I do not use that term lightly or in jest. She was a serious woman with serious convictions, a woman who had thought carefully about what the Scripture required and who would no sooner have beaten egg whites into stiff peaks during the Feast than she would have left a crust of last year’s bread on the shelf. As a child I found this frustrating. As a woman who has spent forty years studying, teaching, and practicing the art of unleavened baking, I find it instructive — not because I think every household in Bravia is obligated to keep a Level 3 kitchen during the Days of Unleavened Bread, but because understanding what my mother’s kitchen was, and why, taught me more about flour and water and heat and fat than any formal curriculum I have ever encountered or designed.
She never knew she was teaching me food science. She thought she was teaching me obedience to God. I suspect, in the end, she was doing both.
This book is the fruit of those two educations.
The question of what constitutes leaven has been a matter of serious discussion among Bravian households, congregations, and scholars since before the ink was dry on the first covenant our fathers made when they came to this land. The commandment is clear enough: Seven days shall ye eat unleavened bread; even the first day ye shall put away leaven out of your houses. But the application of that commandment to a kitchen full of ingredients, techniques, and traditions that did not exist when those words were first spoken is a matter that has occupied our people’s practical theologians, our housewives, our professional bakers, and, more recently, our home economists for generations. We are, as anyone who has spent time among us will tell you, a nation that likes to think carefully about things, and we have thought carefully about this.
The framework of three levels that organizes this book did not originate with me. It emerged gradually from the accumulated practice and conversation of Bravian households across all of our provinces, from the port towns and their cosmopolitan ingredient markets to the hill country with its more austere pantries, from the Delta settlements where spelt and barley grow abundantly in the river-enriched soil to the interior Amphoe communities where wheat is the backbone of every kitchen and the grange hall serves as the clearing house for every culinary question worth asking. What I have done in this book is give that accumulated wisdom a structure, a vocabulary, and a practical home on the page, because I have found after decades of teaching that people learn better when they understand not only what to do but why the categories exist in the first place.
Level 1 is the most widely observed standard across Bravia during the Days of Unleavened Bread and is the level to which the great majority of Bravian households, bakeries, and institutional kitchens hold themselves. At this level, the baker removes all biological leavening agents from the kitchen: sourdough starters are set aside or fed out and not refreshed, commercial or cultivated yeast is put away, and no fermented grain starter of any kind is used to raise dough. Most Bravian bakers and biblical scholars hold, and I agree with them, that biological leavening agents are the direct inheritors of what Scripture means by se’or — the old leavened dough or starter culture that was to be removed from the house. Chemical and mechanical leavening methods, being inventions of a later age, fall outside this primary definition, and Level 1 bakers make full use of them with a clear conscience and excellent results.
Level 2 goes further, removing chemical leavening agents as well. Baking soda, baking powder, cream of tartar used as a lift, hartshorn, and their relatives are put aside. This standard is kept by a meaningful minority of Bravian households, particularly in the hill country and in some of the more traditionally minded interior communities, as well as by a number of bakeries — including, I will confess, my own Stone Hearth Bakery — that choose to offer a fully chemically unleavened product line during the festival season as a service to customers who observe this standard. The theological argument for Level 2, which I find persuasive though I do not insist upon it, is that any agent whose sole purpose is to cause dough or batter to rise and expand partakes of the character of leaven even if it does not involve biological fermentation. I hold this view myself, though I hold it with an open hand and would not presume to bind the conscience of my neighbor.
Level 3 is the most austere standard, and the one least commonly observed outside of ceremonial contexts, though it has a long and honorable history in Bravian religious life and in the kitchens of those households — like my mother’s — whose conviction leads them there. At this level, the baker removes not only biological and chemical leavening but also the deliberate incorporation of air through mechanical means: egg whites are not beaten to stiff peaks, butter is not creamed to a pale and airy mass, batters are not whisked to incorporate lift. What remains is flour — or another base ingredient — combined with fat and liquid and salt, mixed with a gentle hand and baked with high heat. The result is a product of extraordinary honesty. It has no tricks to hide behind. It must be what it is: a flat, simple, and often deeply beautiful bread whose character comes entirely from the quality of its ingredients, the skill of its shaping, and the attention of its baker to heat and time. There is a reason that the bread our fathers ate on the night they left their old life behind was this kind of bread, and the more years I spend in the kitchen the more I understand why.
A word about the scope of this book. The three-level framework was developed specifically in the context of the Days of Unleavened Bread and the Passover season, and the theological reasoning behind each level is rooted in that context. However, unleavened baking is not confined to the festival calendar in Bravia. We bake flatbreads for the everyday table throughout the year. We prepare unleavened crackers and hard tack for travel, for the militia’s ration packs, for the long sea voyages of our merchant marine. We bake Level 3 preparations for those among us who cannot tolerate fermented products for health reasons. We bake unleavened goods for the simple and ancient reason that they are good — that the honest texture of a properly made flatbread, warm from the stone, is one of the genuinely great pleasures of a Bravian table regardless of the season or the occasion. This book is useful year-round for all of those purposes, even as it was organized with the festival season primarily in mind.
I also want to say, to the home baker who has perhaps never thought carefully about any of this and who picked up this book simply because she wanted to bake something good for her family during the Feast without fussing over complicated preparations: you are exactly the reader I most hoped to reach. The theological framework matters, and I have tried to explain it honestly, but at the end of the day this is a cookery book. The recipes work. I have tested every one of them in a working bakery kitchen and in my own home kitchen, and I have taught many of them to first-year Home Economics students who arrived in my classroom not knowing the difference between a flat dough and a slack one. If my mother’s ghost is watching as you roll out your first batch of festival flatbread, I believe she will be pleased, whatever level you have chosen to observe.
May your hearth be warm and your bread be well-baked.
Vreni Hochstrasser Porterville, Western Reaches The Eve of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, Year 3015
How to Use This Guide
The three levels described in the Foreword are not a hierarchy of holiness. I want to be plain about that before anything else. Level 3 is not more righteous than Level 1, and a household that keeps Level 1 is not spiritually inferior to one that keeps Level 3. These are levels of practice, not of sanctity, and the reader should feel entirely free to choose the level appropriate to her household’s conviction, the occasion for which she is baking, or simply the degree of challenge she is looking for in the kitchen on a given day. Throughout this book, each recipe is clearly labeled with the level or levels at which it can be prepared, and where a recipe can be adapted across levels — a flatbread that works at Level 1 but can be stripped down to Level 3 with simple adjustments, for instance — those adaptations are noted clearly at the end of the recipe.
On navigating the book: The five parts move from foundational concepts to practical recipes to complementary preparations. If you are an experienced Bravian baker who simply needs a reference, the Quick Reference Chart at the back will serve you well as a starting point. If you are new to unleavened baking, or new to thinking about it in these terms, I recommend reading Part One before attempting the recipes, as understanding why you are doing what you are doing will make you a better baker at every level.
On Bravian pantry staples: The recipes in this book were developed with the Bravian kitchen in mind, which is to say a kitchen that keeps good quality grain flours milled either at the local grange mill or, for those in the port towns, sourced from the grain merchants of the Free Port. The following staples appear throughout the book and are worth keeping well-stocked in any Bravian home kitchen that bakes regularly:
Hard wheat flour and soft wheat flour, both widely available throughout Bravia’s agricultural regions, are the backbone of most preparations in this book. Hard wheat provides structure and chew; soft wheat provides tenderness. Understanding when to use each — and in what combination — is one of the most important skills an unleavened baker can develop, because without yeast or chemical agents to compensate for structural errors, the ratio of flours becomes far more consequential than it might otherwise be.
Barley flour, more common in the hill country and in the Eastern settlements, produces a distinctive nutty flatbread that is beloved in those regions and somewhat underappreciated in the port towns, where wheat has historically dominated. It is worth seeking out.
Spelt, grown in increasing quantities in the Delta settlements, is an older grain with a good flavor and somewhat more forgiving gluten behavior than modern hard wheat. It is particularly useful in Level 2 and Level 3 preparations where there is no chemical or mechanical lift to compensate for overworked dough.
Olive oil is the fat of preference in the southern and coastal regions and in the port towns where imported oil is easily obtained. In the interior Amphoe communities and the hill country, rendered lamb fat and beef tallow are the traditional fats and produce a distinctly different and equally good character in the finished product. Both traditions are honored in this book, and where the choice of fat makes a significant difference to the outcome of a recipe, I have noted it.
Good salt, clean water, and fresh eggs are assumed throughout. If your water is hard — as it tends to be in the limestone regions of the hill country — you may find that your flat doughs are slightly tighter than the recipes expect, and a small addition of water will correct this.
On regional variations: Bravia is a large nation with a diverse agricultural base, and the recipes in this book reflect that diversity. Port-town kitchens have access to a wider range of imported ingredients, including olive oil, sesame, various spice imports, and fine-milled specialty flours that are less easily obtained in the interior. Interior Amphoe kitchens tend to work with a narrower but very high-quality pantry. Hill country kitchens are the most austere in their ingredients and also, I have found, produce the most honest and characterful unleavened breads. Delta settlement kitchens are still developing their own traditions, blending Bravian practice with the growing abundance of that remarkable new agricultural region. Where a recipe has a strong regional association, I have noted it, and where regional substitutions are straightforward, I have provided them.
A Note on Bravian Grain Culture
Bravia is, at its foundations, a grain culture. Our people came to this land from across the sea with very little, and among the first things they planted when they broke the ground of their new home were grains: wheat, barley, and spelt, the same grains that appear in the pages of the Scripture that governs our lives. In this sense, unleavened bread is not merely a festival preparation for us. It is a living connection to the agricultural and spiritual history of our people, stretching back past our arrival on these shores and further still, past our exile, to the ancient covenant whose terms we carry with us wherever we go.
The grain culture of Bravia today is organized primarily through the Amphoe grange system, which serves as the practical center of agricultural life in each district. The grange mills process grain for household and commercial use, maintain standards for flour quality, and serve as the place where a home baker can bring her grain to be custom-milled to her specification — a service that is well worth using when preparing for the festival season, when the quality of one’s flour will be unmistakably present in every flatbread that comes off the stone. The better the grain and the milling, the better the unleavened bread, and this is especially true at Levels 2 and 3 where there is nothing to mask a poor-quality flour.
The grain harvest itself holds deep significance in the Bravian religious calendar. Barley is the first grain of the year, its harvest beginning in the early spring just at the time of the Passover and the Days of Unleavened Bread. The waving of the first barley sheaf before God, the omer offering, begins the count of seven weeks that leads to the Feast of Weeks — Pentecost — at which point the wheat harvest is celebrated with the waving of two leavened loaves, an act that is sometimes called the only commanded leavened offering of the entire festival calendar, and which therefore serves as an interesting bookend to the unleavened season. Our people have not forgotten this rhythm, and if you bake through this book with any regularity, you will find yourself instinctively aware of it: the barley preparations of early spring, the wheat preparations of late spring and summer, and the grain-rich abundance of the autumn Feast of Tabernacles, when the harvest is complete and the storehouses are full and the temporary dwellings are lined with the smell of good bread baking in the evening air.
It is worth noting for the non-Bravian reader, should this book find its way into foreign hands as Bravian goods sometimes do, that our grain culture is inseparable from our religious calendar in a way that may be unfamiliar to those from other nations. We do not merely happen to bake unleavened bread at this time of year. We bake it because we were commanded to, because our fathers ate it in haste on the night of their deliverance, and because in baking it we participate in a memory that is not merely historical but living. The bread we bake during the Days of Unleavened Bread is not a curiosity or a dietary restriction. It is a declaration, made with our hands in flour and water, that we are the people of that covenant, still keeping faith with the God who brought our fathers out with a strong hand and an outstretched arm, and still looking forward to the fullness of what that deliverance promises — the complete reign of the Messiah, Jesus Christ, whose death and resurrection we also commemorate at this season, and in whose sinlessness the removal of leaven finds its deepest meaning.
My mother knew this. She knew it every time she cleared her kitchen.
I hope you will know it too, every time you roll out your dough.
The recipes begin on the following page.
