Dunedain Lembas Bread Experiment

A lot of reenactment level work is about learning appropriate historical crafts and skills. This board is for all general skills that don't have their own forum.

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Fox
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Re: Dunedain Lembas Bread Experiment

Post by Fox »

Well, if you just put some barley, which you can get in any grocery store, into a coffee grinder, there you go. Barley flour. :P
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Ringulf
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Re: Dunedain Lembas Bread Experiment

Post by Ringulf »

Just don't fill a wet leather costrel with it in 90+ degree weather to expand and stretch it to shape! The resultant mess is heinus and can be a disasterous climax to a long and well planned project!....just sayin' :wink:
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Manveruon
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Re: Dunedain Lembas Bread Experiment

Post by Manveruon »

OH NO! :shock:

Anyway, yeah, good thoughts. I should seriously invest in a coffee grinder. I keep finding things I could use it for.
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wulfgar
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Re: Dunedain Lembas Bread Experiment

Post by wulfgar »

Not sure if this has made it to the list yet but it looks interesting, there also a recipe for Beorn's honey cake.
http://www.geekychef.com/2008/12/elven- ... bread.html
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Daerir
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Re: Dunedain Lembas Bread Experiment

Post by Daerir »

The best Lembas bread recipe I found was:

LEMBAS BREAD
2 1/2 cups of flour
1 tablespoon of baking powder
1/4 teaspoon of salt
8 tablespoons of cold butter (1 stick)
1/3 cup of brown sugar
1 teaspoon of cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon honey
2/3 cup of milk/heavy cream (or more, if necessary)
1/2 teaspoon of vanilla

1) Preheat oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit.
2) Mix the flour, baking powder and salt into a large bowl.
3) Add the butter and mix with a fork or a pastry cutter until the mixture resembles fine granules.
4) Add the sugar and cinnamon, and mix them thoroughly into the mixture.
5) Add the milk/cream and vanilla and stir them in with a fork until a nice, thick dough forms.
6) Roll the dough out about 1/2 in thickness.
7) Cut out 3-inch squares and transfer the dough to a cookie sheet.
8) Criss-cross (DO NOT cut all the way) each square from corner-to-corner with a knife.
9) Bake for about 12 minutes or more (depending on the thickness of the bread) until it is set and lightly golden.

I found out that if you use milk, a lot more that 2/3 cup is required, never tried heavy cream. They are rather tasty. I set one aside and it stayed alright for about a week. After that it became stale, HOWEVER, it was not in any container only sitting on a plate. I think if it was in a container of some sort it would last longer.
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Addreonynn
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Re: Dunedain Lembas Bread Experiment

Post by Addreonynn »

Eothain and I went minimalist camping over the weekend, and once we got out there, we wished we would have made some lembas to take with! unfortunately, we got excited and the thought never crossed our minds!!! Oh well, maybe next time! I want to go back out when Thanksgiving break comes around!
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brownl_91
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Re: Dunedain Lembas Bread Experiment

Post by brownl_91 »

I made some bread for camping. I used 2 cups of flour, 1 cup of walnuts that i ground with a coffee grinder, 1/4 cub brown sugar, and vanilla extract with just a little honey. I cooked at 425 which was too hot. I burnt the outside on some and most were not cooked all the way through. They tasted pretty good, kinda like a dense biscuit. I put them in just a cotton bag for my trek, they got a little harder but not much. However, my bag with my coffee in it was right next to them, they apparently absorbed some of the coffee flavor and smell...Which I thought was wonderful.
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wulfgar
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Re: Dunedain Lembas Bread Experiment

Post by wulfgar »

brownl_91 wrote:I made some bread for camping. I used 2 cups of flour, 1 cup of walnuts that i ground with a coffee grinder, 1/4 cub brown sugar, and vanilla extract with just a little honey. I cooked at 425 which was too hot. I burnt the outside on some and most were not cooked all the way through. They tasted pretty good, kinda like a dense biscuit. I put them in just a cotton bag for my trek, they got a little harder but not much. However, my bag with my coffee in it was right next to them, they apparently absorbed some of the coffee flavor and smell...Which I thought was wonderful.
Having carried many a haversack full of food, everything starts to taste like everything else within a day or two.
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Re: Dunedain Lembas Bread Experiment

Post by Alderic »

I figure I could throw a couple recipes in.

Lembas.
I'm not sure how well it would hold up on the trail, probably not well, but they are delicious. I think it comes out somewhere between shortbread, sugar cookies and thin biscuits, but it's been a couple years since I made it so I could be wrong. It's also worth noting I don't have all the instructions, only the ingredients, but judging by what's in them it should be easy to guess so I'll take a crack at it.

2 1/2 C flour
1 Tbsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
8 Tbsp cold butter
1/3 C sugar
2/3 C milk
1/2 tsp lemon extract

Preheat oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit.
Mix drys together in large bowl.
Cut in cold butter.
Mix in milk, followed by lemon extract.
Place mixture on floured surface, flatten to desired thickness.
Cut into 3" squares, crossed with a knife.
Bake for 12 minutes on a cookie sheet.

Seeing that everything in this could be eaten raw it will be edible whether or not it's fully cooked, so fine tune it to your likings.



Bucellatum/Hardtack
Bucellatum was the name or a type of hardtack used by the Roman military. While simple, I found that it doesn't taste too bad, and is actually really good when fresh out of the oven.

4C wheat flour
2 tsp sea salt
2 Tbsp olive oil
1 1/2 C water

For Civil War style hardtack, substitute white flour for wheat, use 4tsp salt.

Preheat oven to 250 degrees Fahrenheit.
Mix ingredients, should become a thick, dry dough.
Form pieces to desired size and shape. I went with 2-3" squares.
Perforate pieces, this helps the inside dry out easier. I used a fork, though a straw may work better.
Bake for roughly 3 hours on a cookie sheet. May have better results with a wire rack.

Now, I don't think I ever baked mine quite right. While the outside always seemed perfect they were still a little soft toward the center. Not like dough or even bread, but it wasn't nearly as solid as it should have been. Not necessarily a bad thing unless you want to store it for an extended period. If you find this the case with yours, you should be able to continue cooking until you're satisfied.
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Re: Dunedain Lembas Bread Experiment

Post by brownl_91 »

Honey:

I made a trail biscuit of flour and some nuts for protein. I then put a hint of cinnamon and some honey in it. It lasted three weeks and was fine. I then went to make a second batch but forgot the honey. It got moldy in a week. Moral of the story....Honey is great. The anti fungal properties of honey are the bomb
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wulfgar
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Re: Dunedain Lembas Bread Experiment

Post by wulfgar »

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl2U9Rnw ... mnfZW_LWnw

HMMM, this sounds good. Not really.
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Manveruon
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Re: Dunedain Lembas Bread Experiment

Post by Manveruon »

Wow... yeah...
I mean, a lot of the contents make sense, nutritionally. They would definitely keep for a long time, and they would certainly fill you up. But I'm pretty sure the Elves actually *baked* their lembas, instead of dehydrating it, haha. Overall though, there was some really good stuff in there. A lot of those ingredients would probably benefit a lembas recipe.
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Alderic
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Re: Dunedain Lembas Bread Experiment

Post by Alderic »

It makes sense that the honey helped preserve it. Honey is pretty antibacterial, antifungal, anti-whatever-else-there-is. I've seen talk about using it to cover wounds, especially burns, because of that. I'm pretty sure at some point I read about some foods being stored in honey, but I can't find a thing about it now.
Keep in mind though that there's more and more artificial honey on the market, and it's usually still labeled as normal honey.
Eärendur
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Re: Dunedain Lembas Bread Experiment

Post by Eärendur »

Yup, make sure you get the real stuff. I have the advantage of having someone locally I can buy it from at a pretty decent price, and I can know that there's nothing fake about it (it even has a stronger flavor that most of the stuff you get at the store).

Re the video: That's actually not terribly different from my recipe... except I ground up the seeds to make it more "flour-like" and less "seedy."

I think dehydration is a viable way to do this - remember, the title is "Dunedain Lembas Bread Experiment" not "Elven Lembas Bread." So I tend to think that what we're looking at here is the Dunedain equivalent. If the elves had lembas, the beornings had honey-cakes, and the men of dale had cram, what would the ever resourceful and intelligent Rangers come up with? Especially in an era where they still had various non-native plants around, presumably from the earlier era of Numenorean world exploration (that's my in-universe way of accounting for athelas, tobacco, and potatos).

There are a lot of "Lembas" recipes around, and a lot of them are little more than party-food novelties. What I'm interested in, and what I've tried to do with my experiments, is achieve something practical. If dehydrating preserves more nutrients then baking, why not give it a try? When you're on the trail, every little bit counts!
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Beornmann
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Re: Dunedain Lembas Bread Experiment

Post by Beornmann »

Lembas, ANZAC baking tonight!
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