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Tag: baking bread

  • Lóránt Farkas – baker

    The owner baking bread

    Place: Csíkjenőfalva or Ineu

    Having gone to the village of Csíkjenőfalva or Ineu, we entered a gate to the garden of Lóránt Farkas where we passed his house, various trees, a well, free-ranging hens, and lots of firewood for his oven. Next, we entered his workshop where he was busy baking bread. In fact, he starts making bread early in the morning, and he had already completed kneading pieces of dough and put them in baskets for leavening.
    He’s a baker and a cook, but he also does other types of work. During our visit, he was making sourdough breads for friends and family, about 15 in all. In fact, he‘s using the same sourdough as his grandmother started 80 years ago.

    2 millers, one 14 years old and one 85 years old in the village, are providing him with flour, while local farms provide the cereals.

    He told my guide that he makes spice mixes from herbs in the mountains. In addition, he had hung up bundles of herbs on the wall of his workshop.

    Bundles of dried herbs hanging on the walls

    He’s using 7 types of flour:
    ⦁ wheat
    ⦁ rye
    ⦁ millet
    ⦁ semolina
    ⦁ buckwheat
    ⦁ walnut
    ⦁ Graham

    In addition, he’s using salt from the town of Corund.

    He thinks factory bread is not good.

    Kneading the dough

    Having entered his workshop, we could watch him making bread manually, kneading the dough, applying flour to the dough, weighing the correct amount of dough and putting it in baskets.

    Finished bread

    He was using a wood-fired oven made of clay. Upon arrival, he had heated the oven, and he was busy kneading pieces of dough, weighing them with an old-school weight, cutting off excess dough and putting the required amount of dough in each basket. Interestingly, he was using a mortar and pestle with stones as a counterweight to the dough, using an old-school weight.

    Extracting a bread from the oven

    When he baked all the bread, he emptied the oven of ash, next he put some boards in the oven and fired them up.

    He bakes bread 3 times a week, and he ferments vegetables and fruits.

    He delivers the bread to friends and family, and payment is done by bartering like palinka, cold cuts, etc., with no money exchange.

    He was raising ostriches in the past: he got 4 horses, 2 goats and 2 pigs for one ostrich chicken.

    The wooden handle to put breads in and out of the oven. Lots of bottles on a shelf.

    Near one of the walls of his workshop, there was a wooden handle leaning on a shelf filled with lots of glass jars. He used the handle to put pieces of dough in the oven and take them out when they were ready.

    He laid the bread on a table and put it in baskets when they had cooled down.

    When we were ready to leave, he kindly gave us two breads.

  • Breadmaking in Vânători village

    Map reference

    Photo gallery

    Although most Transylvanians buy bread baked in electrically powered ovens, a few hardy souls are still baking bread manually in wood-fired ovens.

    Just a few kilometres from Saschiz, we could watch Magda, a woman in her sixties making bread manually. When we arrived, she had already filled a large trough with dough. While her sister Elisabeta poured water on the dough occasionally, she was kneading it. Having to knead such a large amount of dough must have been heavy work. Eventually, she was satisfied with the result, covered the dough with a towel and let it rest for leavening.

    Instead of resting, she went straight into her courtyard, firing up her oven with lots of paper, then putting various pieces of wood on the burning paper. After having let it burn for nearly an hour, the oven was hot enough. In the meantime, she applied vegetable oil to some metal containers and put the dough into them.

    Having put out the fire in the oven and moved the embers aside, she used a long wooden paddle to place the breads in the oven. The woman next door had obviously heard about our visit since she also brought some breads to be baked. When all the breads had been placed inside the oven, a wooden plate was placed across the opening, then we just had to wait for about 2 hours.

    Having nothing else to do, I went for a long walk. In the beginning the houses made of brick looked solid while further away they looked much more run-down and having been built more carelessly. A woman was collecting water in a well before carrying it back home in a bucket, while a family was collecting water from a tiny creek which looked cleaner the further upstream I went. All sorts of poultry was walking around freely, while it seemed like everyone was growing vegetables in their gardens.

    Returning just in time to see the breads being taken out of the oven, we could see that they were brought out using the same paddle and placing them on a nearby table. As expected, the tops of the breads were completely burned and almost shining black. In order to make the breads edible, Magda’s son hit the breads continuously with two sticks until most of the burnt stuff had fallen off. Then, he and the woman next door used graters to make the finishing touches. After the bread had cooled, we got some delicious slices of their home-made breads tasting much better than the machine-made bread we usually got.

    In fact, Magda is making bread weekly for her family, but before she made bread for selling. Now, she’s feeling too old for such hard work.