The Poor Man's Bread 

Newest comment is also pinned😂 Good vid

As old as the song. Patty cake patty cake ...bakers man! 🤣

Horse bread had a lot of bran.

Well, Ship's biscuit was really more designed to last a long time and not for nutritional value.

That's not at all ironic.

But it is so bitter that I would not be able to eat it.

I laughed when you mentioned horse bread. My old man was born in the Netherlands in the early 1900s and he mentioned he and the other kids in the family would nibble on the horse bread when they tagged along with my grandfather in their delivery wagon. My grandfather would keep loaves of horse bread in the back of the wagon to feed the team in the event the delivery route was a long one. My dad mentioned that there were beans in the bread. It wasn't tasty, but they would eat it anyway just because they were kids and didn't care it tasted terrible.

vitamin C doesn't survive heat, it has to be eaten raw

I was wondering this. I think you’re right, considering. Though I do imagine that it might have been easy to get it wrong and end up with something a little bitter, or something that upsets the stomach too. All in all, though, the people making this knew what they were doing and wouldn’t make the same mistakes I probably would have made!

Antinutrients like phytic acid in the beans would inhibit nutrient absorption unless the bean paste was thoroughly fermented. Subsisting on it as most of caloric intake like many would have had to do in times of scarcity would not be advisable for this reason.

@@user-zv3uz2nk6v​By how much would this antinutrients actually inhibit, 100% or like, 0.005%? I keep seeing this anti-nutrients show up but nobody can tell any factual statements or give me some reliable sources as to what it actually means.

​@@user-zv3uz2nk6vwhich is why I now want to try cooking up a mix of legumes (I'm thinking Pintos, Garbanzos and Lentils) and mashing (okay, I'm lazy and will probably use the blender) the cooked beans then adding the dry equivalent of that paste to an equal mass of wheat flour. If that works well, maybe I'll try replacing a portion of the wheat with corn. Sounds like a fun experiment and would be a very inexpensive yet nutritious meal for hard times.

Just like how lobster went from the food of the poor to expensive fancy food.

@@stormshamanI never knew lobster was for poor people, it is probably expensive now because of something called *overfishing* and bycatch

⁠@@CoolTreeHouseMan112it was cheap because everyone lived near the east coast but now it’s expensive on everything besides the east coast

@@stormshamanor how oxtails went from being given away to being charged 4-6$ a pound

HAHA bettt

How did it taste?

@@elrondsoukup29 really good,I miss it

Wow you ate it every day, 3 times a day, while you were in the army - that must have been some amazing bread !!

@@cnam1258no choice. This is a third world army

@@Mossad901 Yes so even though you were forced to eat it, you loved it...!

Settled civilization didn't come around until our ancestors first started cultivating crops ~12-13,000 years ago. Everything about the modern world is built on the back of agriculture and farming.

@@kylegonewild These city Kids Nowadays with their chocky-milk, candy and cookies know nothing of the struggles of the past. People from farms and the country side seem more aware.

The globalists will soon remind us what happens when farmers fail

@@kylegonewild True about most of the modern world, but there's evidence of settlements before farming. Much more recently, the Pacifc Northwest had settled cultures without farming, living on the ecological richness of the region, especially the salmon runs. Jane Jacobs even speculated that it was early "cities" that invented farming.

@@lexbrightraven8049 Translation: EVIL FARMERS WON'T LET ME EAT MY WEF-APPROVED RATION OF SOLDIER FLY LARVAE PASTE REEEEEE

Yes, it's very close to the mexican tamalitos or venezuelian hallaquitas, boiled wrapped in the husks.

Not sure which tribe it was, but oddly native and Americans used acorns a ton. A Korean lady who lives here in Ohio made some for friends a few years back, it was pretty impressive.

Any nation that had oak trees in its area ate acorns. Highly nutritious, keeps all winter, and can be cooked in a variety of ways. I'm a little Lakota(Sioux) and a little Cherokee. Was taught that on both sides of the family.

Ikr

18th Century paint video? I would watch that lol.

@@peggedyourdad9560 you win RU-vid award for best name lol

I dont even like to eat bread, and i cant help but watch.

😂 me too

It sounds more like asking for help or sympathy when you need none. "Crying poor with a loaf of bread under your arm" translates to "feed me, but I secretly have food"

I read an excerpt of a story where some missionaries went to some horribly impoverished area and they would give a slice of bread for the orphans to sleep with. The idea was that no matter what happened to them the next day, they’d still have a slice of bread to eat in the morning. I could see needing some stability that badly.

I wanna see a Townsend video about this

Apparently, it's named Seminole Bread and comes from the Seminole tribe of Florida.

Floridian here, Tampa area. I never knew anything about this. I learned something new today

In Finland in times of strife people would replace some or even all grain flour with wood flour making "pettulepä". Wood flour was made of the phloem layer of pinetree, the soft layer under the bark that contains some sugars. It was dried up and ground as flour. It doesn't contain much nutrients and is hard to digest. Large amounts are also pretty harmful for kidneys. I wonder of Seminole bread might be made in a similar way. Coontie may be more nutritious than plain pine tree.

The kumeyaay of california would do something similar for to make flour from acorns

Here in Estonia there are actually different words for rye bread ("leib") and wheat bread ("sai"), and the distinction is pretty much the same as what you describe. Rye bread is the staple food that you would actually eat for nutrition, whereas wheat bread is more like a luxury item, almost. Something that's good for a snack but isn't really proper bread. Good rye bread is great, though. I'm not well-travelled but as much as I have been in other countries, I've never seen a good slice of rye bread. I think people in other countries are really missing out.

​@wurfyy did you know leib is cognate to the English word loaf?

@@seronymus I did not. That's interesting, thank you. Never even occurred to me that there's a similarity there, let alone that they might be related.

In Sweden it's called "barkbröd", bark bread

I want to make acorn bread this year.

While in Boy Scouts an eon past, I accepted a merit badge challenge from the leader, to make some acorn bread. He'd found an ancient recipe somewhere, and gave me that to work with. I gathered up several gallons of acorns, knocking off the caps by hand. Then I put them in a large pot, and boiled them for a long time, changing out the water a number of times. The cooked acorns became more like a mush, but I managed to scrape enough out, and spread it over several cooking sheets to dry out in the sun. It took a number of days to dry out that mess, and a good bit of stirring and turning. Even dry, the acorn mess was fairly soft, unfit to go through the hand mill that was available to me, so it all got placed into a mortar and pestle rig, and pounded as close to flour as I was able, At that point, I was two weeks into the project, and still had no bread! Finally, I mixed up the dough, adding in some wheat flour to bind it all together, along with some salt, and several dissolved packets of yeast. I set it aside to rise. Hours later, there was no visible increase in that dough, but it had darkened considerably. I kneaded it up some more, put it into a different pot, and took it inside my warm house, and placed it right next to the furnace vent. After several hours, it had dried out some, but had also raised up a bit. I took it, formed it into small loaves, and let them rise in the same warm location. The following day, the loaves had smoothed out a bit, dried some, and grown a bit as well, but nothing like I'd expect from wheat. Back outside, I loaded these loaves into a dutch over to bake under/over the coals. When finally I decided both batches were done, I let them cool, and couldn't wait to see how they tasted. I had a large amount of softened butter, some jam, and a big glass of milk to wash 'em all down. I buttered up several tough slices, and bit into them. They were so bitter, it was like I'd taken a spoon full of alum! The texture was more rock like than bread, and the bitterness spread quickly in the mouth, assuring anyone that swallowing this crap would be a major health violation. This was a massive failure on my part, and I'd invested so damned much time and effort into the project. The Troop leader saw to it that I got the merit badge anyhow, it was about the process not the results. Several of the loaves were archived on a shelf at the local Scout meeting house, and for all I know, they're still there, nearly fifty years later!

Ooh I made coffee once out of acorns

​@@GlassArtist07super baked bread? Sounds like you made hard tack by accident. They can last for a really long time.

A Korean lady made dorotrimuk which is a acorn gelatin like tofu. Was pretty great, and looking at the calorie density, pretty amazing

And the only monk that remained adhesive to those teachings was Philip. Bc he was a nonce. 😂

except for the olive oil they all where pretty standart a nut oil or poppy oil or lard would have made WAY more sence (speaking from a historical point)

I make a garbanzo bean banana bread that's really good, and black bean brownies. Neither has flour.

Lots of Thai desserts use bean paste

Makes sense 👍

While this certainly isn’t impossible, it’s entirely likely that they were referring to an actual white cultivar of pisum sativum, of which many varieties exist. It could also refer to what we call today navy peas or navy beans, which are sometimes confused with chickpeas. I’m sure if there was a clear answer, John and his team would have found it, so we’re not likely to ever know for sure what precise crop was being referred to.

Which diskworld book?

​@@joanhuffman2166 Monsterous Regiment.

@@covishen Is that the one where the joke is the whole crew are women but they all have been trying to keep it secret from everyone including each other?

@@kylegonewild yes

Omg. I was thinking the same thing! “ I know I just read a book that mentioned horse bread.”🤔 and I never looked up what it was. I just assumed it was some other European thing that didn’t translate to American English☺️ And then John spring this on us🥰

Yeah now the cheap stuff is processed white bread and whole wheat bread or bread made from other things is More expensive even if it is less processed than white.

@@harrysatchel Modern breads are vitamin fortified though

@@harrysatchel Foods can be fortified above their natural levels + they can be fortified with things the food doesn't naturally have. For example, folic acid and iodine in bread.

@@Mandragarasynthetic vitamins are of very little value, it just looks good on the package

@@wtglb Citation needed

In Poland and Eastern Europe Rye Bread was and is still consumed.

Commented on your post while eating bread. 🍞🥐🥖

Dave’s good seed bread. Well toasted with a good spread of butter and a little bagel seasoning. Mmm!

That is intriguing and I'll be curious to hear too. Guess I know what baking experiments to try this winter! I'd think using squash and their seeds would make the bread far more nutritious than wheat alone too.

You mean like zucchini bread n pumpkin bread?

Du hast Recht, ciao aus Amerika.

Rye bread was voted as the national food of Finland in 2016. We have two very separate rye bread cultures: In the east the bread is like a thick and heavy loaf and in the west it's like a disc or vinyl record and it was also traditionally dried up against the ceiling. Several discs with a pole attached through them. And a very pequliar Finnish dish is made of rye malt: mämmi.

That's really interesting, thank you! How do people eat the disks of rye? Do they soak them in sour milk first? @@66hss

@@itsshrimpinabag9544 No need for moistening. It's not totally dry like crispbread is. Just swipe some butter on top and nowadays all slice of cheese/meat products and lettuce and voila!

Thanks, it's super cool to learn about your food! @@66hss

almond bread is my favorite w/ celiac, tons of proteinm good texture, and easy to grow assuming you have mature trees i agree bean and quiona bread are good too though

Im gonna have to try this, not because of digeative issues but because it actually sounds good

​@@NyasahiOxalic acid.....

@@dwwolf4636 I'll look that up.

Sounds like fun

What's your crude bread recipe, I''d love to try that. I saw a video where someone made fireloaves by just placing the flour straight on campfire coals and now I'm intrigued by camping breads

This combining for "complete protein" thing is an old myth. All plant foods have complete protein. You would have zero issues if all your protein came from grain or legumes alone. There is no need to combine them.

@@peterscott2662 This is correct in a modern context. The issue would be that, on a diet that was low in caloric intake (aka, poor people in ye’ olden rays), the amount of “complete” protein in any one given food may not be enough to sustain you. These days we have such a caloric surplus that it would be very difficult for someone in a westernized country to experience protein starvation even if they really did eat almost exclusively one food item. When folks were eating a single meal, though, there was a true need to get an efficient distribution of amino acids from the foods they ate. If you have 1000 calories worth of food and it won’t give you sufficient concentrations of a given nutrient essential to survival until you’ve had 2000 calories worth of said food: you will experience symptoms of malnutrition.

@@Doct0rLekter If you only have a 1000 calories, that's just starvation.

@@peterscott2662 I mean, yes, that’s half of my point. Namely that, in the context of poverty in the 1800s, people would not have many calories available to them in the first place. Therefore, efficient consumption of essential nutrients was critical at that time, but in today’s world would be completely meaningless thanks to a surplus of available calories. My selection of 1000 calories for my statement was mostly arbitrary, but was loosely based on a statement claiming a UCLA study showed 1,000 calories per day (plus or minus) was essentially the absolute floor of calories without literally starving to death. The veracity of that statement means nothing to my point, though, as I was merely picking 2 numbers to illustrate a point. If you have to eat at least x amount of a food to get the minimum nutrients for survival but you only have access to y amount, where y is less than x, then you would need to eat a food or combination of foods that could provide the necessary minimum nutrients while only eating y amount.

@@Doct0rLekterThere are still places in the world that don't have the abundance of food available in the US and there are low income people in the US and other countries who don't have the resources to buy much food, particularly meat, to get their needed nutrients. That's where using the most economical and convenient method of getting all the needed amino acids in adequate quantities is still important. Plus, a lot of those combinations are traditional because they work to keep people in at least moderately good health and they taste great. With the way food prices have, and still are, skyrocketing, more people are winding up needing to use foods other than meat to maximize nutrition while having less and less ability to buy food. It's not just back in the 18th and 19th that poorer people struggled to buy food, it's happening now right in the US, the UK, and other countries. The news about food price inflation outpacing people's ability to pay for food is disheartening to say the least.

I'm guess that would be gluten free.

Freeze it and enjoy a slice at a time. Let the family have what they like. 💖🌞🌵😷

​@@Lazydaisy646, if it has a little wheat, it's not gluten free. 💖🌞🌵😷

Is it a flatbread? Yeast or soda risen?

@@adajanetta1 it's a regular loaf of dark sourdough bread with seeds i think, grocery stores in central europe always have a variety of those. Although I'm not sure what exactly the difference between regular yeast and that dry sourdough thing they use in modern breads is. It's being sold as a protein bread though, not as a pea bread. It mostly tastes like regular bread, they just use the peas for their higher protein content.

...and if you read further, you will note that he was to only eat that "bread" while laying on his side for 390 days and it had to be baked using human poop as fuel.

That's not much different from from other cultures that use dried animal poop for fuel.

Not the flour, but you have to soak the grains and beans. It's a sprouted bread. I have it on my list of new things to attempt this winter.

​@@sharondesfor5151Interested to know how it'll go.

Buckwheat pancakes are wonderful.

Chestnuts were the staple of the Cevennes in southern France and chestnut flour was the peasant standard. Today it is very expensive.

I'm sure a lot of those recipes are really good, but that reminds me of the time many years ago while visiting Toronto we bought a tin of cookies in Chinatown. The main ingredient was bean flour. They looked good (sort of resembled a shortbread or Lorna Doone) but were the most disgusting things ever. All these years later we still talk about them. 😂

and a veggie

Hey they need it.

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

The bark part is doable with one tree I know of; the pine tree(certain species)is entirely edible, everything from the needles to the seeds and bark can be used for some medicinal purposes and for food.

@@kindelderson9838 alot of common coniferous trees (like pine) are edible. They are usually grounded to a fine saw dust and added to meals such as granola bars and bread for extra fiber and vitamins. Thats also how some companies make "fiber enriched" products

@@trulyidkman thanks for the additional info, didn’t know about the enrichment process they do with them.

@@kindelderson9838The edable part is called phloem. It is edable, but it has the following health risks: - Dangerous expansion of the stomach - Salt/water ratio is easily disrupted. It has considerably high quantities of Al, Fe, Zn, and Co. It also has about 25% of the energy consetration of rye.

@@Tommuli_Haudankaivaja true there are some risk, but it’s still worth staving in a SHTF scenario.

I wish you a great life full of wealth and health

Do you have a favorite recipe/ratio? Sounds great!

In Poland and Eastern Europe Rye Bread was and is still consumed.

@@kamilpotato3764 In Nordics too!

He mentioned that, saying you'd have to let the beans dry out again before grinding.

It seems you haven't read my comment. I said make a meal, not grind.

When you're hungry there usually aren't any leftovers.

@@robertgt1858 You make an excellent point, however, I was considering that the person would be grinding and soaking the bean flour anyway, so why not just cook them with your bean dinner?

Well, he was a bit vague with "hundreds of years even in the 18th century" but if you go back ~500 years from the 18th century you're right in the middle of the Dark Age (Medieval refers to the Middle Ages which is when the Dark Age occurred) and the renaissance would pop off by the 15th century so it's pretty safe to assume this horse bread, even if not in the same form by this time, had been around for a while in cultures who used equines for travel.

@@kylegonewild thanks for your great response!

It could also be dried yellow peas, these have a whitish look - and would have grown well in the English climate.

Or what we grow for the southern market- crowder/cow peas or blackeye peas

It's not. White peas refers to the Navy bean/navy pea (because the US Navy started using it as a staple in the mid 19th century).

​@@mara235Ah! You are correct , I forgot that white/yellow dried peas have flour as well used for crackers and flat bread.

There's also white pea that would have been eaten in Europe at the time, it's incredibly drought and pest resistant but is also poisonous if you eat too much of it. Poor people still did obviously but it hasn't been regularly eaten in most of Europe in probably a hundred plus years. You still see it growing wild in places like rural Italy and Spain but it's been relegated to the kind of thing old people set in their ways eat.

Many companies add tiny amounts of grinded tree bark filler (sawdust) to processed foods as well ,such as granola bars andwhole wheat breads and cereals, for extra fiber.

Ha, I was just wondering that myself...using leftover cooked beans mashed.

Hmm. Once, I was served brownies made from chickpea flour. The usual issue with beans, and all the worse for being a surprise.

Nowadays, beans/peas are replaced with nuts. You do not need to soak them, they are not bitter and they do not cause bloating.

@@tatianaes3354 beans and others high fiber vegetables only cause bloating in people that don't eat enough fiber. i'm a vegetarian and i've literally never had gas or such issues from beans no matter how many i eat.

@@stellarfox5869 you are a lucky one. Most people do not produce ferments to process beans/peas, so gut bacteria end up eating them, what causes bloating. It is similar to intolerance to dairy products, which happens because people lose ferments to process lactose, thus leaving it to be eaten by bacteria that release gases as byproduct.

Yep! Were gonna come to need basic skills again.

It is amazing how quickly things can revert. Modern "physical" technology (steel, machines powered by coal or diesel, cars) is durable but electricity, digital anything goes away fast. I find this channel comforting because it helps to see some of these things as just different ways of doing stuff we need to do, rather than as depressing privation.

@@michaelwarenycia7588"but electricity, digital anything goes away fast." Not true. We improve upon 'digital anything' and replace it with better shit a lot of the time, but the modern banking system still runs on mainframes that are old enough to have great grandkids programmed in languages not even taught anymore in your average university. The Lunar Lander is still as capable of touching down on celestial bodies now as it was in the 60s, would probably just need a little maintenance. Like any machine powered by coal or diesel.

Why do you believe we're currently not good at making bread?

​@adios1799 what losses nutritional value rapidly once it's ground into flour. Flour sits for long periods of time before being used and the nutritional value diminishes. There are less minerals and nutrients in the soil now as well due to chemical fertilizers, over farming and lack of crop rotation. It would take a century of letting land lay fallow and going back to forest to regain the nutrient content.

I would think that small haricots would be white peas, after all black eyed peas are beans. You have to get it right my friend, Barley cakes or barley bannocks are pretty much a Scottish thing. Most UK area grains are to do with what grows well where you live. Wheat grows badly in low temperature wet areas. barley and oats do well, In southern Britain wheat grows very well, barley and oats do too but are lower value crops. As for bean flours I honestly don’t know. I suspect they do better in the south. I know of no recent historical taste for barley here in the south, but chickens and cows seem to like it.

@@CrimeVid haha I'm not sure where in my convent you got barley from (barley is most definitely NOT gluten-free xD), but interesting perspective! I was talking about lupins: they're a member of the pea family and their seeds have been used in European, North African, and South American cooking for centuries (they have a widespread range). The seeds are sometimes called lupini, other times "white peas" or "white beans," and sometimes just "pea protein" in modern flours and recipes. They aren't huge in USA cooking at the moment, which is why they may have slid under John's radar as a possibility in for the ingredient mentioned n.n

I wonder if you could soak them for a day, then boil them and add them to bread as a mash, the same way that they would use potatoes as substitutes

The bigger issue is that beans do not provide the elastic protein structure that gluten provides. Theres no "net" to catch the gases with. This holds true with all quick breads even wheat ones. If you don't develop the gluten you don't get the rise. Thats what xanthen gum tries to replicate but really theres no substitute for the amount of rise gluten allows baked goods to achieve.