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

[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!