Leavened bread, leaven and grapes; what’s the biblical difference (2017)?
Dear children,
I’ve been in the kitchen playing around with different versions of recipes for unleavened barley bread. As I’ve been doing this, I’ve also been using up the last of my barley sourdough starter. I’ve been trying to time the starters use so that there will be a very little product to toss when the time comes to say goodbye to all things leavened just before the start of the week of Unleavened Bread.
I’ve been making wheat sourdough for over a year now on almost a weekly basis. I’ve had to be mindful with my sourdough starter. It needs to be fed every day or so, depending on the temperature. If I don’t want to feed it then it needs to hibernate in the refrigerator. Also when I do feed the starter I need to be careful to not add more one-to-one quantities of the new ingredients into the old starter. For example: to one cup of sourdough starter I would only add a half a cup of flour and a half a cup of water. Not so with barley! Barley sours very quickly at a cooler temperature. I have added more than doubled the amount of new ingredients and added it to the old starter in the morning and by the early evening, the whole batch is bubbly.
Non-roasted barley makes an almost bitter-sour taste that lingers on your tongue. If you roast it the barley picks up a nutty flavor. I’ve not tried playing with the amount of time that I allow the starter to sour in an attempt to temper the flavor, this might come in the future. But, I have to say that I actually like the non-roasted barley sourdough taste.
We are told in the Bible that there must not be any leavened bread in our houses Ex 12.9 even unto our borders Ex 13.7 The same thing for leaven, nothing in the houses even unto the borders. Does this mean we throw grapes out of the country? I believe it is the yeast on the grapes that were used to raise bread (link) For that matter, I’ve read that you can catch yeast spores that float in the air and make the dough rise with those. I’ve never been successful, but I know someone who has been successful in this. The elements of air can supply the leaven. How would you rid it from the land of Israel when it is everywhere? Even in the air? Remember the Nazarite vow? All portions of the grape plant were prohibited during the course of the vow. This told me that all parts of the grapevine can produce leaven.
The small portion of the sourdough starter I hold back when I make bread, m y remnant sourdough starter I care for and cultivate for the next loaf of bread, that’s the yeast we clean out of our houses. That’s the leaven we get rid of. That’s the product I use to make loaf after loaf of leavened bread.
- leaven .ש.א.ר pronounced s’or
- Barley .ש.ע.ר pronounced s’or or s’ora
Frequently when a words are built from the same root they will share similar pronounciations. My belief is that most leaven was a combination of a grapevine component and barley flour. I have come to believe this because of my experience with barley flour and the amazing rate at which the flour will ferment, meaning to leaven by fermentation, and how easily the yeast or leaven from the grapevine and its fruit passes into the barley flour. I have taken barley sourdough and leavened wheat flour dough with the barley sourdough starter. There was zero issue in this process of leavening the wheat dough.
- leavened .ח.מ.ץ fermenting, souring
Ex 12.17 Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread (matzah), but on the first day you shall remove leaven (s’or) from your houses; for whoever eats anything leavened (chamatz) from the first day until the seventh day, that person shall be cut off from Israel.
We aren’t commanded pull up grapes vines from the land; throw grapes, olives, plums etc. out of the country since they carry that gray yeast on their skin, too. In fact, most fruits have some sort of yeast on their skin. One of my favorite things to make with fruit peelings is making homemade vinegar. Water, fruit peelings and a little sugar are all you need to make a ferment that then it goes to liquor and then to vinegar.
I do believe there is a tie to the use of grapes for leaven. We are commanded to through out the source of our yeast within our households. We are commanded that leavened barley products are not to be found in our household. Yes, we can eat leavened wheat products during the week of Unleavned. The scriputer clearly says that it was unleavened barley cakes that the Israelites walked out of Egypt with. The scripture clearly says that the firstfruits offerning during the week of unleavened was of barley and not wheat.
What we could NOT do was to eat wheat products of any kind until AFTER shavuot and the firstfruits of wheat offering in the temple. This is just as was commanded about the new barley crops each year. The firstfruits belong to Elohim and after they had been offered then the yearly harvest could be eaten by the people.
So to recap. Leavened barley cakes are forbidden to be eaten during the week of unleaven. Included in those forbidden elements are all barley products from the new harvest until after the wave sheaf date. After the wave sheaf date you still cannot eat leavened barley products until the week of unleavened is over.
The sourdough starter made from barley four was the leaven that was to be purged from the houses as well as any leavened barley cakes or loaves.
The following is a recipe I’ve come up with that makes a decent barley cracker for the Week of Unleavened Bread.
Matzah like Barley Cracker
- 1 cup of barley flour
- 1/4 teaspoon of salt
- 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil
- 3 tablespoons of water
(optional: drys seasoning like oregano, garlic, thyme, etc)
350 degrees for fifteen minutes.
Add the salt and the olive oil to the flour. I mixed it with my finger until it looked like sand. Add the three tablespoons of water; I mixed with my fingers again. The dough should pull away from the sides of the bowl. It will be a lot like wet pie dough. I suggest you roll it out on a piece of parchment paper because you can’t move the dough once it is rolled out without it breaking. Roll the dough out to about 1/8 inch thickness, prick it with a fork or not. Transfer it to a baking sheet. Another option would be to cut the dough in smaller cracker like portions and use a spatula to transfer it to a baking sheet. However, it will stick to the pan so you will still need parchment paper or a Silpat. Bake for 15 minutes or until lightly brown.
I baked mine in a large sheet and mine cracked when I lifted it with the corners of the parchment paper off the cookie sheet. It does have a crumb like a cookie a cracker.
On to barley cakes:
Cake, the first place we see the word עגה; it’s a fun word, I’ll transliterate ‘oog-GAW’ is in Gen 18.6. Today the word for cake is still the same in Modern Hebrew. The root of cake is .ע.ו.ג pound into cakes. The words that are built from the root are: a) cake b) round pastry
Ex 12.34 And the people took their dough before it was leavened, their kneadingtroughs being bound up in their clothes upon their shoulders.
Ex 12.39 And they baked unleavened cakes of the dough which they brought forth out of Egypt, for it was not leavened; because they were thrust out of Egypt, and could not tarry, neither had they prepared for themselves victual.
We read that they made unleavened cakes they took with them out of Egypt.
I honestly couldn’t see the Israelites surviving on the dry barley crackers I had been able to make. For one thing the crackers are very fragile and would not transport well without modern packaging and maybe not even then. And in looking at the scripture I just felt that I hadn’t arrived at a similar cake product.
When making barley sourdough cakes a transformation happened in the barley flour while in dough form. It goes from being dry and grainy to being rubbery, chewy and cohesive. It’s no longer a cracker with a cookie crumb. With only cold water, barley flour, a little salt and olive oil there was nothing that could be produced other than a hardtack crumbly biscuit. I decided to try rehydrating the flour with hot water and seeing if the starches would make a moist cohesive dough. The end result sent my mind racing back to Central America. What I was holding in my hand was a ‘masa’. Which it the Spanish word for the dough that makes tortillas. And that’s exactly what I made; a little barley cake in the form of a Panamanian tortilla.
We’ve all watched in Central America as the women have made two bushel-tub sized masa (dough) into tortillas. All day long they sit with the dough partial covered as the reach into the tubs, pull off nuggets and pat out tortillas laying the raw tortilla on a comal. If the dough happened to dry out a quick water sprinkle and a knead revived the dough to it’s original state. This works as well with the recipe I’ve come up with. Below is a scene of tortillas being made in Guatemala. This is where my mind raced to when the hot water and had merged with the barley flour. Suddenly I felt I knew how they had pounded or patted the dough into a cake.
