The Conquest of Bread

  'Bread' is one of the great classic staple foods. Technically, any seed-cake is bread, but it usually refers to a leavened bread of starchy grains... although unleavened breads, like tortillas and lefse, are still breads.



  Locally, while a loaf of plain bread is between five and ten dollars, making your own loaf of bread is about five cents, if you buy all the ingredients. Of course, starches and such can be foraged or gardened as well, at which point it's free.

  While one can add anything to spice it up, a leavened bread of ground flour has three ingredients :

 • Flour.

 • Water.

 • Yeast.

  This last is important for a simple reason; yeast makes a nutritionally-complete protien and a fairly complete b-vitamin complex (minus b12, but otherwise complete) out of whatever it eats.



  This stuff will save your life in a famine.

  If the leavened dough cannot get any air, such as in a pressure-tolerant vessel or waxcloth bag, it forms a basic white bread, while with airflow - such as a jar with a loose lid or a bowl with a bit of cloth covering it and keeping flies out - it forms a rich sourdough.

  It's worth noting at this point that an soda bottle is designed to be very tolerant of carbonation pressure, and that an empty 1L or 2L bottle provides a magic 'forever bread' which will poop out a loaf or two a day if you just add a sprinkle of flour and water for it to rise again. Give a little, get a lot. When starting such a bottle, however, you have to be veeeery careful to only add a little at the start. That thing is going to expand, and if you fill it up halfway and let it rise it is going to explode when you try to unscrew the lid. Once it's under operation, then you can just add a handful of flour and some water, shake to mix, and let it rise again without problems - the first time is a slightly more drastic expansion.

Making Leavening

  You could buy a yeast packet from the store - but any time between late spring and early autum, just adding a little sugar or starch or flour to a bowl full of water and leaving it outside will get bubbly (called "proofing" the yeast) in a few hours - or, late autumn to early spring in the southern hemisphere.

  Also, if you're biologically female (afab), yeast and acidophilus (which makes yogurt) is most of what you've got down there, and baking makes bread, at least, sterile. Swishing a finger around until it's gooey and stirring a mixture of flour and water will, actually, leaven your starter. Very hard to eat with your friends without giggling, though.



  Once you've got yeast - store-bought envelope, loaner starter, proofing the leaven, or... umm, something else... simply adding a little bit of yeast to a mixture of flour and water, and leaving it overnight, will create a starter. It will rise, often a lot.

  If you do not take 100% of your starter, and then feed the remainder a mix of flour and water when you're done cooking a loaf of bread, it will last forever.

  To bake a nice loaf in an oven, simply grease a baking dish and pour it in. To make several loaves, simply mix a slightly-thicker mix of flour and water, and mix in a small drop of starter to each, giving it several hours to let it rise. If you have a busy day planned, you can start a few or a dozen or a hundred loaves in the morning, then bake them all in about a half-hour to an hour when you get back, assuming you can pack them all in there.

  If you don't have an oven, you can cook a flatbread in a frying pan. Just grease it up and pour a little starter in... flip it halfway through, and don't forget to feed and water your starter again.

  You can spice it up by buttering the crust halfway through, or adding spices, or burning cheese on the crust, or adding sundried tomatoes, or whatever you like, or you can make a stiffer dough than your starter and wrap it around food of your choice for a stuffed bread, such as a calazone; pizza is an example of a flatbread with toppings on its crust. Creativity is endless.

  ...but if you've got your starter started, a loaf of bread is a few cents at most, and free if you can find your starch and water somewhere else, such as your garden.

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