the Romans did it, and you can too!

[bedlamsbard]

There is nothing that irritates me more, when it comes to recipes, than people asking if it's possible to make bread or pasta or something of the sort (cinnamon rolls, bagels, that sort of thing) if they don't have a KitchenAid, a food processor, or a bread machine. (That one shows up less often.)

How do you think we have been making bread for the thousands of years before the KitchenAid mixer was invented? YOU KNEAD IT. BY HAND. (Well, you start with a wooden spoon, and then, once all the ingredients are incorporated, you knead it by hand. I haven't made pasta from scratch, but I believe the process is similar.)

The ancient Romans did it and you can too! So did people in the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, and colonists in the Americas! If the pioneers could make bread on the Oregon Trail, then you, a modern independant human (presumably) can make bread in the comfort of your own kitchen! AND YES WITHOUT A STAND MIXER.

(And I actually prefer doing it by hand as opposed to a stand mixer (although I usually do the Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day version because I don't have the space in my dorm kitchen), because you have more control over the dough and you develop a much better feel for it. Plus, communing with the ancestors and feeling very accomplished and so on, but that's just me.)

(Western-oriented because I'm not familiar with the food traditions in other countries, but I'm pretty sure the point stands whatever your tradition is.)

Erk. This is why I try not to read the comments on food blogs. (Although I end up doing so anyway, sometimes there are good tips in there.)

Comments

[scy]

*facepalms*

That's how I learned how to make bread from my grandmother - from SCRATCH.

I have some lovely memories of her teaching me how to bake bread and it's so much more personal than throwing mix in a machine.

[bedlamsbard]

I taught myself from a book, but my general call when it comes to cooking is, "Well, the Romans/pioneers/residents of the Middle Ages were able to do it, so I can too!" Which may just be a side effect of being a history person? But it's logic.

Every time some food blogger posts a recipe that they used a mixer for, someone asks if it is possible to do it without. It may be easier to do it with a mixer (and I have a stand-mixer at home, I love that thing, but when I'm at school it's a whisk and a wooden spoon), but it's certainly not The One True Way.

[pinesandmaples]

This is me, yessing SO DAMN HARD.

I use a really basic recipe and dump everything into the yeast slurry then plunge my hands right in unless I'm sick. If I'm sick, I pull out my pastry whisk to mix and knead it with the bottom of the bowl. With practice, it's easy to do the entire mixing process with just hands and come out with clean hands on the other side. I'm almost there, actually.

[bedlamsbard]

IT IS NOT THAT HARD. Agh, people.

Like I said above, I do the Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day version, which is generally a case of "throw everything together and mix it with a wooden spoon, then let it rise in the fridge" without any kneading, but I've done rolls and cinnamon rolls and so on that does require kneading, and I'm getting pretty good at making biscuits by hand. (I bent my pastry cutter out of shape, and definitely prefer using my hands, just because I feel like I have more control. Which I don't have when I use the stand mixer, although I love my KitchenAid! I just don't have it at school.)

[pinesandmaples]

This post got me thinking about other kitchen processes that would be difficult without our modern tools, and I could only think of one thing I couldn't reduce to hand-work: pureeing. I suppose the hand-work equivalent is a fine mash.

When I say I want to sew a garment by hand, people also look at me like I have three heads and a large growth of buttocks sprouting near my mouth.

I make cat's head biscuits that don't actually require any fancy tools. They do not come out uniform or pretty, but they are damn tasty.

[bedlamsbard]

But a pretty large mortar and pestle would do about the same thing, I think? (Oooh, things I want to buy: a good stone mortar and pestle.) Also I think I misread "mash" as "mesh," whoops.

One thing that I definitely wouldn't want to be hand would be making whipped cream or whipping egg whites or, well, anything with the word "whipping" involved, just because it would be really time consuming without a hand-mixer. Although, hey, arm-strength!

[lady_songsmith]

Pasta is EVEN EASIER because the dough isn't as heavy, initially, but it's very, very, elastic, so it IS tough to get good noodles/what have you without a machine -- the kind you clamp to the table and turn with a hand-crank. *cough* And it's REALLY COOL because you start with this crater of flour and crack an egg into it right there on the board.

I made cookies from scratch for a party once. The friend I was going with stood on the other side of the kitchen barrier (it was a tiny kitchen) saying things like, "Those granule-things really turn into COOKIES?" and "Why do you put salt in something sweet?" - the answer to that one gave her the answer to why her grandmother insisted she salt pasta water, which she'd been doing for years on granny's say-so without ever understanding.

We're definitely losing cooking skills at an alarming rate.

[bedlamsbard]

I had a really, really good cooking class in high school, which is actually what got me into Actual Cooking in the first place, and I just remembered we actually did do pasta from scratch in that class! Which is really, really awesome, now that I think about it. (I need to go and see if my high school has that teacher's forwarding information; she was only there for one year, but I really want to e-mail her and tell her that that class was probably the most useful class I ever had in high school.)

One of my New Year's Resolutions is to make pasta by hand this year; probably when I go home for the summer. Have you read The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken? Super-good memoir/food book about, well, ravioli! The recipes in there look amazing, totally on my list for the summer.

The other reason you put salt in pasta water is because it makes the water boil faster, as it...disrupts the molecules, or something? We talked about it in my geology class over the summer.

[lady_songsmith]

I have not read that, but I think I may be! *adds to booklist* Thanks!

Both my parents cook, though I like it rather more, I think. Dad's the one who taught me desserts and breads; when I was in HS and he was working weird shifts we had fresh bread at dinner every night. I don't actually make it myself often, since I usually can't finish a loaf before it goes stale, but I take it to parties and potlucks.

[bedlamsbard]

My parents cook too -- mostly my mother, though my dad knows how. I didn't grow up doing any of the cooking, though. *muses*

[snacky]

Hah! I'm blinking at this since I only ever make cookies from scratch. I mean, I grasp the slice and bake concept, but I've never done it!

[lady_songsmith]

I've only done slice-n-bake when I was really pressed for time or when the cookies were not actually the point of the exercise (ice cream sandwiches!! cookie-crumb crusts!!). My cookie recipes don't actually have instuctions anymore, just proportions and bake temps. It seemed a waste of paper to repeat the same steps over and over. :P

[sporky_rat]

I do slice and bake with homemade dough. Sometimes it's just easier to make up a really big batch of dough, roll it up and freeze it. Then if I only want three or five cookies in the summer, hey presto! Toaster oven cookies!

[snacky]

My mother and I make dozens and dozens of cheoreg (which is an Armenian breakfast roll) every Easter for friends and family. Yeast dough, all of it done by hand.

We borrow baking sheets from my neighbor every year and she is always SHOCKED at us doing it without a KitchenAid.

[bedlamsbard]

Holy cow, that's incredible.

Up until pretty recently, we didn't even have a good hand mixer in my house. Although, I do need to add, I didn't actually grow up baking and cooking a lot, that came later.

Book rec! While I'm here! The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken, which is about ravioli, but is a really good read.

[snacky]

Cheoreg! Time consuming but amazingly delicious and so worth it.

Yay, that's available on Kindle! Up next on my list!

[bedlamsbard]

Oooh, that looks really interesting. What are those, sesame seeds on top?

[snacky]

Yes, black and white sesame seeds. The rolls themselves can be either braided or twisted in knot.

This is a batch we made last year:



That's as many as we could fit in the bowl (which is the bowl the dough is made in), the rest are in bags waiting to be given away on Easter. Note the time - that's PM. It takes about 12 hours on Good Friday to do the whole thing (make the dough, let it rise, punch it down, let it rise again, make the buns, let THEM rise, brush them with egg wash and sprinkle with the seeds, then bake, cool and pack).

They're traditionally made to break the Lenten fast on Easter morning. My Armenian grandmother always made them by hand, and taught my mother (not Armenian, but married to my Armenian father) to make them that way. When I was a kid, me and my mother and my aunt and cousins used to make them every year in my grandmother's kitchen. It was an assembly line!

And probably more than you wanted to know, but om nom nom, so good.

[bedlamsbard]

NOM.

That is so cool! My family, alas, has no awesome food traditions.

[kayloulee]

Oh my god, I hear that ALL THE TIME. It really pisses me off when recipes just assume you have/want to use a KitchenAid or a food processor or a stand mixer or whatever. I mean, I can generally figure out how to reverse-engineer them, but I shouldn't have to.

That said, I wouldn't mind owning a stand mixer, because then I might stand a better chance of baking successfully when tired or stressed, but that doesn't mean I need one. I just like shiny things.

[bedlamsbard]

Most of the time I don't mind when the recipe writer doesn't make allowances for doing something by hand, but I kind of wish they would add multiple options, sometimes -- especially for using a hand-mixer versus a stand mixer, because some things you can do with a stand mixer that you can't with a hand-mixer. (I do have a KitchenAid stand mixer (at home, not at school), and it is lovely and useful, but I don't need it, and sometimes I prefer using a hand-mixer or a wooden spoon just because I have control issues and I don't feel like a stand mixer necessarily offers as much control because it's not as flexible. I don't have a food processor large enough to do anything except make, eh, maybe a half-batch of streusel, that sort of thing. (I think I have a two-cup food processor? Small enough that it doesn't take up much space, and I don't use it often.)

I will admit, I am happiest with the recipe writers that offer options, though. It's just the idiot people in the comments! Agh. Perhaps I am due for another bout of not reading comments.

[(Anonymous)]

Well personnally except for whipping eggs white, we don't use a mixer at home. Cookies are made from scratch (I wouldn't even have the idea to do it another way, that and my sister would probably kill me if I tried, she's really particular on cookies^^). Same thing with pizza dough and in summer when we are at my italian grandmother home we make pasta by hand too. Pretty time-consuming but it tastes better. And recently my mother has decided to mash puree by hand too. Also much tastier than the industrial stuff (even if that is much quicker).

[bedlamsbard]

I have to admit the idea of whipping egg whites or whipped cream by hand kind of freaks me out, although I may try it some time, as I don't have a mixer (hand or stand) at school. I'm not a huge fan of pre-made cookie dough, unless it's for straight eating as is rather than actual cookies -- my high school band used to sell cookie dough as a fund-raiser, and I would just eat it out of the tub. /fond memories