The Matzoh Myth

It’s all about biology and baking

Bread is the world’s most ubiquitous food and perhaps one of the oldest. I’ve been a student of bread for decades and studied its history and archeology. I incessantly bake. From knowledge and experience I can say with full authority that the notion of a flat cracker just doesn’t square with the way the ancients made bread.

Modern bakery methods employ commercial yeast, you know, those handy yellow packages which contain dehydrated single cell microbes specifically bred to deliver consistent results loaf after loaf. How else could you get the miracle of Wonder Bread? But commercial yeast didn’t appear until the early 20th century.

The bread of old relied upon natural fermentation. Wild yeast is everywhere — air, our skin, grains, produce are all are chock full of it. Mix some flour and water and leave it exposed for a few days and yeast will settle in and make a happy home. Given a bit of time they will munch on the natural sugars in the grain and produce carbon dioxide and a bit of ethanol. Add some more flour and water, knead and the result when baked would be lovely bubbly sourdough loaf.

It’s unclear exactly when humans first started cultivating yeast for bread but Egyptian hieroglyphics and analysis of their ceramic vessels provide evidence that they kept frothy crocks of fermenting flour and water as a starter for bread and wine and beer. This would be the “leaven” that the Book of Exodus gets all wound up about when describing the Passover ritual.

“Seven days shall there be no leaven found in your houses; for whosoever eateth that which is leavened, that soul shall be cut off from the congregation of Israel, whether he be a sojourner, or one that is born in the land.” — The book of Exodus

Clearly they aren’t messing around. But the idea that one can eliminate all leavening from your house exhibits a lack of comprehension of microbiology, understandable since the microscope wouldn’t appear for a few thousand years. The air would have been cloudy with natural yeast. It was part of their biome. It stuck to everything especially their grains. So no matter how hasty those Hebrews were scrambling, yeast was coming along for the ride.

And now the experiment

The ancient method of bread making would have involved keeping crocks of fermenting starter available at all times. When they were ready to make bread they would add starter to flour and water and allow that to ferment for a day or two then shaped into flatbread then baked off in a communal oven or right on hot rocks in the desert. Since bread was a daily staple, there would always be ceramic vessels of dough fermenting for the next day’s bread.

I bake sourdough bread regularly and maintain a natural yeast starter. My method is essentially the very same way it would been done eons ago. No commercial yeast is employed. The day before I intend to bake, I mix some of the starter with flour and water and let the fermentation do the work — it’s generally about 24 hours of rising and you end up with the yummy loaf shown above

But let’s say I don’t have all of that time. I flash back to the Passover story and have received word that we need to pack our bags and get going post haste. I’m not sure exactly how long it took the Hebrew slaves to gather up their families, livestock, belongings and hit the dusty trail, best case would probably have been a day. During this time tribe members would be packing food and supplies and be baking off the dough that had been fermenting for next day’s bread. The abbreviated process would have produced a different sort of bread or “Matzoh” and I set out to discover what it would be like.

I took some starter and mixed in fresh flour and water and let it sit while I ran to tell the family to pack their bags so we can vamoose. So I let it sit for just two hours for the test, approximating the “bread of haste.” Then I took the mixture which was the consistency of a thick pancake dough and put it directly on a pizza stone at 400º representative of a community oven. Within one minute the dough was showing evidence of “oven spring” or puffing up due to the heat activation of the natural yeast, sort of a last gasp before it expires from the heat. After 11 minutes the result was a puffy little roll with plenty of yeast-activated loft.

Next I took exactly one minute to work a bit more flour into the wet dough so I might shape it into a round flatbread, the most common form of bread of that era. Then into the oven for an 11 minute bake (11 minutes is magic time that the laws of kosher command to bake Matzoh). The result is very Nan-like and indeed we have a bit of rising courtesy our natural yeast. Given a few more minutes to work some more flour into the dough and a bit of kneading and we’d develop some gluten structure that would undoubtedly transform this into a pita like bread.

Finally I tried a bake in an oven at 120º to emulate baking on a hot rock. Within 11 minutes there was evidence of oven spring although slight. It took two hours to be cooked through and rendered a soft flatbread. None of the methods produced anything cracker-like. Why? Because to produce a cracker-like Matzoh you have to purposefully used sterile flour and immediately bake at high heat after mixing with water. All of this would have been a foreign concept in the Copper Age.

Ergo the square cracker just is simply not an accurate reflection of what “the bread of affliction” would have been like. Instead it was likely a softer round loaf more like Nan or pita without a pocket. The picture above is probably the most accurate representation of what a hastily prepared, let’s get out before that mofo Pharaoh has second thoughts kind of bread would have been.