I’ve been doing some thinking this week about Viking-appropriate breakfast foods.  My favorite breakfast at events is still dark bread with cheese, fish, kraut and hard boiled eggs, but there’s only so many times you can eat that, and some people fear fish. So…

Roasted barley flour + skyr:  mix some roasted barley flour into skyr or non-fat yogurt, then top with honey (if desired, roasted barley flour is pretty sweet) and fruit, preferably berries.

Fried oatmeal: leftover steel cut oats cooled in a pan, sliced and fried in butter/lard/bacon grease/whatever.  Would be good with butter and honey, or savory with bacon/sausage or fish (kippers maybe).

Scrambled eggs with dill and smoked salmon + some dark bread

In my ongoing quest to reproduce the flat bread unearthed in grave finds at Birka and other locations, this weekend I got to try baking them in an earthen oven.  I'll post pictures soon, but until then, a brief summary.

The oven was constructed by some friends of mine last fall.  It's made from adobe, and is a dome shape about 4 feet in diameter and 2.5 - 3 feet high, with a smoke hole at the top, and an opening in the side just big enough to admit a metal baker's peel. 

We fired the oven for probably 2-3 hours before any bread went in.  For the first loaves, which were more modern sourdough loaves, we left some of the coals at the back of the oven, and put the bread in at the front.  This left the oven way too hot, and the loaves blackened pretty seriously before they were done all the way through.  For my flatbread, I scraped out the rest of the coals, and relied on the heat of the oven walls. 

I used several different recipes, but the one that worked best was 1/2 whole grain barley flour, 1/4 oat flour, and 1/4 green pea flour, plus about 1/2 tsp of salt.  I made a stiff dough using buttermilk, and left the dough unrefrigerated overnight to sour (it didn't, much).  The dough was shaped into two flat "loaves", each about 8" in diameter, and 1" high.  The surface was pricked with a knife before baking, to increase the surface area of the top crust and encourage drying.

The loaves went into the oven, and backed for probably around 20 minutes.  As the oven cooled a bit, subsequent batches took slightly longer to firm up.

The result was quite good, with a crisp crust, and a nice texture.  Not light, more like a heavy scone or batter bread in consistency.  It went excellently well with some simple soft cheese and dried fruit. 

I'll have some pictures up, hopefully this evening.  I got pictures of the whole process.

For this morning's breakfast I tried the "Viking breakfast" that I put together as part of the "Viking bachelor food" experiment.  I didn't actually get to implement it over the weekend, as much of the food I'd set aside for the weekend ended up spending said weekend in the fridge in my office, not coming with me to the event.  Very sad.

Anyway, this morning I lined up

• A thick slice of the "IKEA bread", more properly "ragbrod", very coarse grained and hearty wheat and rye bread
• two slices of gjetost cheese, a sweet cheese made from caramelized whey
• a hard boiled egg (I settled for chicken, not having any puffins around)
• a pile of home made sauerkraut
• two nice fat pieces of pickled herring with onions (sooooo good)

It made an excellent breakfast, and really got the day off to a fine (and fishy) start.  Easy, portable, and very satisfying.  I'll definitely be packing this stuff along to events this summer.

I'm heading for a small event this weekend that's billed as a "Norse Rendezvous", meaning we're roughing it with as little gear as we can manage, and trying to find out how much trouble we can get into. 

In keeping with the theme, I'm trying to figure out what the Viking equivalent of traveling provisions (aka bachelor food) would be.  In a Fur Trade (Mountain Man) context, that might mean some bacon and beans or dried corn, maybe some flour and salt for biscuits, jerky, etc.

So far I think I'm going to bring

• a loaf of Swedish dark rye bread (from a mix I got at IKEA over the weekend) which looks like a very black soda bread, coarse grained
• pickled herring ('cause you have to have some, and it's the bomb)
• sauerkraut (good winter vegetable, keeps well)
• cheese (something Scandinavian appropriate, maybe gjetost)
• hard boiled eggs (also good for traveling, keep well, calorie dense)
• maybe a spot of bacon, but I might be too lazy to cook it. 
• some dried fruit, apples or prunes would be good

Hopefully by the end of the weekend I won't be too sick of eating that stuff.  I'm thinking not.

Some friends hooked us up with some culture for piima last weekend, and I've been having a great time playing with it.  Piima is a culture used in modern Scandinavia to create a buttermilk/yogurt like substance.  The best part is that it works at room temperature, so you don't have to heat the milk, or worry about trying to keep it warm with a yogurt maker, etc. 

You just stir the piima culture into milk or cream and let it stand at room temperature for 24 hours or so.  Cultured in milk, I got something that was maybe a little thicker than cultured buttermilk, but not as firm as yogurt.  I'm in the midst of culturing some cream, which is supposed to come out like thin sour cream, and is also supposed to be good for making cultured butter.  Only time will tell...

There are a number of online sources for piima culture.  Just google for "pima culture" and you'll find several sources. 

One thing to note: once you get it going, it has to be "fed" like kefir grains or sourdough starter.  The piima milk I made earlier in the week was sufficiently tasty (very mild, not sour) that I don't think it'll be a problem at my house. :-)

Another new Viking recipe I've been working on...

Saute some leeks in butter, along with diced carrots and rutabegas.  When just starting to soften, take off the heat.  When they are cool, mix with some sour cream. 

Very reminiscent of the modern Scandinavian beets in sour cream.  The rutabegas come out very sweet, and stand in well for the beets, which aren't Viking period. 

This was a big hit with pretty much everyone, including a number of avowed root-vegetable-haters.  It went well with the barley bread.

I'm going to be experimenting with dairy products as the Viking Age Scandinavians would have made/used/consumed them over the coming months.  I've been making a soft fresh cheese curdled with vinegar for years, but I think that's probably not the most accurate. 

For the first experiment, I made my first batch of skyr this week.  Skyr was once purportedly made all over the Viking world, but has only survived to the present day in Iceland, where it has remained daily fare.  We don't know how closely modern Icelandic skyr resembles Viking skyr, but it's such a simple process that I don't imagine it's changed all that much. 

To make skyr, you bring non-fat milk up to around 185 deg. and hold it there for 5-10 minutes, then let it cool down to slightly warmer than body temperature, around 108.  Take your culture (I've seen references to using sour cream or buttermilk, or yogurt of various kinds.  The Vikings would have used some skyr from the last batch.  I read a couple of references to the use of s. thermophilus and l. bulgaricus, which happen to both be in "Greek" or "Bulgarian" style yogurt, so that's what I used.  Greek Gods brand to be specific.) and mix it with a little of the warm milk, then add the result to the rest of the milk, along with some rennet.  I used Junket brand from the grocery store, but will soon be trying cheese-making-grade rennet, and I'll report on the differences.  Then let the milk sit for something between 6 and 24 hours.  I've seen various suggestions.  I let mine go about 24 hours. 

The milk-mass should start to pull away from the sides of the container, and you'll see clear-yellowish whey around the sides and over the top of the curd.  That's good.  Scoop out the curd with a ladle or spoon into a sieve or colander lined with several layers of cheesecloth, or better still, a nice clean piece of muslin fabric.  Let it sit until most of the whey has drained out, and it starts to firm up to somewhere between firm yogurt and soft-serve ice cream.

Store it in the fridge when it's done.  The result I got was not very sour, and has a very pleasant texture.  I've used it in crepes, and with granola so far with great success. 

Save the whey, which you can use in soups of porridge.  I have more whey experiments to try too.  The 16th Century Icelanders let the whey ferment until quite sour, and then used it as a refreshing drink, and also as a medium for pickling meat, eggs, and vegetables for long storage. 

Big fun...

Over the next few weeks I'll be (finally) coming back to the Viking food topic.  I just finished entering a big competition with a research paper on reconstructing Viking cooking, and I've learned a lot over the last 6 months. 

After getting feedback from the competition, the paper needs some serious editing, but once that's done I'm going to try and make it available. 

In the meantime, I've been experimenting (as part of the research for the paper) with recreating some Viking bread, like those found in cremation graves in Birka and elsewhere.  One of the finds from Birka clearly shows prick marks on the surface, which hints at them being intended to keep a long time.  The prick marks are (I assert) similar to those on modern pilot bread.  They are intended to increase the surface area so that the bread will dry out completely, thus keeping longer.

In recreating them, I looked at some chemical analysis of the bread remains that suggest that most of them were predominantly made from barley, although oats, rye, flax, green peas, and a little wheat also appear.  They contain comparatively few fats, again suggesting that they were intended to keep.

I made mine with about half barley flour, and half a mixture of oat flour, ground flax seed, rye flour, and (in some) green pea flour.

The resulting mix should be about 2 cups.  Then I added a bit of salt, and mixed in some liquid until a stiff dough comes together.  I tried different combinations of water, honey, buttermilk, and goats milk.  Personally, I liked the goats milk ones the best.  I kneeded mine for a while to make sure everything was as together as it was going to get, then divided the dough into two pieces.

The pieces were then flattened into rounds.  Most of the archeological evidence suggests 8 -12 cm. across, and 1-2 cm high.

Then I pricked the surface, and baked them at 300° for around 30 minutes.  This results in a fairly soft bread good for eating fresh.  You'd have to bake them either quite a bit longer, or at a higher temp to get the to dry out hard.

The resulting breads were very good with cheese or green pea spread.

Last night I finished up making the snacks for the party this weekend.  I've read several times that there are numerous examples of the Vikings using pea flour in their bread, and I had to try it. 

I used my hand-cranked grain mill to grind split peas into fairly fine flour, then mixed it with barley and oat flours and proceeded as I described for the other breads.  The result is quite tasty, and the pea flavor is not really evident, which is interesting. 

The last thing I made was some root vegetables in sour cream.  Beets with sour cream is a common modern Scandinavian dish, but I didn't have any evidence for beets in a Viking context, so I used diced carrots and parsnips.  I sauteed them until semi-soft, then added sour cream, salt, cumin, and mustard seed (whole).  Pretty good on the crackers.

I'll post some info on sources soon, I don't have them on my just now.

I did a stint as the Viking Chef at an SCA demo this weekend.  Pretty fun.  Lots of people wandered by asking questions and trying the snacks.  It wasn't quite as organized as I had thought it was going to be, so I skipped the "they didn't have recipes" spiel and just answered questions.  My contributions to the snacky bits were some "Viking porridge" which consisted of bacon, onions, apples, and oatmeal, and some barley cakes (just barley flour, salt, milk and eggs) with strawberry jam.  The porridge was better-received than I would have thought, although several people reflexively recoiled as soon as they hear oatmeal and onions in the same sentence. :-) 

My son, on the other hand, came back for seconds.