Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread:
What Is “Leaven”?
Leaven …
... is the ingredient that makes
baked goods “puff up.”
... today is most often yeast (in
packets or cubes), baking soda, or baking powder.
... in ancient times was almost
exclusively “sourdough.”
Flour mixed
with water will create a lump of dough, somewhat like “Play-Doh.”
If you don’t add anything else to the mixture, and try to just
put a big ball of that dough in a bread pan and bake it, you
will end up with a hard, round, very chewy ball, smaller than
the one you put in the bread pan. It will shrink as it bakes. If
you want for it to expand, instead, into the kind of big, fluffy
loaf of bread full of little air pockets shown here, you have to
add a “leavening ingredient.”
If that
leavening ingredient is baking soda or baking powder, you can
make what is often called “quick breads,” such as biscuits and
muffins. When you mix in the soda or powder with water and
flour, a chemical reaction will take place in your dough that
will give off bubbles of gas. You can bake the dough right away,
and the gas will get trapped in little “pockets” in the dough
and make it puff up as it bakes.
If you put
yeast (a type of live fungus) into the dough as a leavening
agent, you can’t bake the bread right away. It needs to “rest”
for a while, so that a process of fermentation can occur.
The yeast causes carbohydrates in the bread to ferment, giving
off carbon dioxide in the process.
Over a period
of hours, this carbon dioxide also gets caught in pockets in the
dough, but usually larger than than those formed if just baking soda or
baking powder are used. After the loaf is as big as the baker
wants it, it is popped into the oven for baking.
Standardized
yeast, now sold in packets and cubes in grocery stores, was only
developed in the past two hundred years or so. Up until that
time, all bread was made by a process that used a “starter”
mixture:
http://www.wikipedia.com
article: Bread
Sourdough breads are
most often made with a sourdough starter … A sourdough
starter is a culture of yeast and lactobacillus. It is
essentially a dough-like or pancake-like flour/water mixture in
which the yeast and lactobacilli live. A starter can be
maintained indefinitely by periodically discarding a part of it
and refreshing it by adding fresh flour and water. (When
refrigerated, a starter can go weeks without needing to be
fed.) There are starters owned by bakeries and families that
are several human generations old, much revered for creating a
special taste or texture. Starters can be obtained by taking a
piece of another starter and growing it, or they can be made
from scratch. There are hobbyist groups on the web who will send
their starter for a stamped, self-addressed envelope, and there
are even mailorder companies that sell different starters from
all over the world. An acquired starter has the advantage to be
more proven and established (stable and reliable,
resisting spoiling and behaving predictably) than from-scratch
starters.
There are other ways
of sourdough baking and culture maintenance. A more traditional
one is the process that was followed by peasant families
throughout Europe in past centuries. The family (usually the
woman was in charge of breadmaking) would bake on a fixed
schedule, perhaps once a week. The starter was saved from the
previous week's dough. The starter was mixed with the new
ingredients, the dough was left to rise, then a piece of it was
saved (to be the starter for next week's bread). The rest was
formed into loaves which were marked with the family sign (this
is where today's decorative slashing of bread loaves
originates from), and taken to the communal oven to bake. These
communal ovens over time evolved into what we know today as
bakeries, when certain people specialized in bread baking, and
with time enhanced the process so far as to be able to mass
produce cheap bread for everyone in the village. (Wikipedia.com
article: Bread)
Which all
brings us to the notion of “unleavened bread.” Bread that is
baked without any of these leavening ingredients and
procedures is called unleavened bread. Since very thick
loaves with no leavening can be very difficult to chew,
unleavened bread is most often formed into fairly thin loaves …
in some cases, such as “hardtack,” as thin as saltine crackers.
http://www.wikipedia.com
article:
Hardtack
Hardtack or (in
British
English more usually:) hard tack – also called
ship's biscuit, sea biscuit, or sea bread –
is a simple type of
cracker
or
biscuit,
made from
flour,
water,
and
salt.
Antique hardtack
cutter from Civil War period
Cheap and long-lasting, it was used during long
sea voyages and military campaigns as a primary foodstuff
usually dunked in
water,
brine,
coffee,
or some other
liquid
or
cooked
into a skillet meal. This cracker was little more than
flour
and
water
which had been
baked
hard and would keep for months as long as it was kept dry. The
name derives from the British seamen's slang for food, "tack",
and the fact it is so hard and dry.
Hardtack is so durable that many specimens from the Civil War
period, such as this one, still exist.
Hard tack resembles a large soda cracker in
appearance. It is about four inches square and approximately 1/8
inch to 1/4 inch thick with 16 1/8 inch holes in the center. It
is made of flour, water and salt thickened to a paste then
placed in a press to create its shape and perforate the 16
holes. Once dried, it becomes very hard and could last for years
if kept dry. … Hardtack was also known as "Tooth dullers,"
"sheet iron," or "molar breakers". For long voyages, hardtack,
or sea-biscuit, was baked four times, rather than the more
common two, and prepared six months before embarkment.
Exodus 12:34
explains the origin of the custom of eating “unleavened bread”
as part of the memorial of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, to
remind the Israelites and their descendants of the exodus of the
Israelites from Egypt:
So the
people took their dough before the yeast [leaven] was added,
and carried it on their shoulders in kneading troughs
wrapped in clothing.
This emphasizes
in particular the miraculous way that God caused the Egyptians
to rush the Israelites out to freedom in haste, because of the
plague of death of the firstborn.
To this day,
Jewish people, who are descendants of those ancient Israelites,
eat unleavened bread during the seven days of the Feast of
Unleavened Bread. Rather than a baked item like the thick,
unchewable hardtack, they typically use a much thinner type of
unleavened “crackers” called matzos. Because the Jewish religion
prescribes a scrupulously rigid way this type of unleavened
bread must be made in order to be ritually acceptable for use by
Jews, many modern Jews prefer to purchase it from specialty
bakeries equipped to follow the rules to the letter.
Many Christians who observe the Days of Unleavened Bread also
eat commercially-produced matzos. But they usually do not feel
constrained to follow the traditional customs of the Jews (these
are not based on anything substantive in the Bible) on just how
unleavened bread must be produced. So many also experiment with
a wide variety of recipes for making bread--and other baked
goods such as unleavened pancakes and brownies--for use during
this time.
But one custom
both Jews and Christians follow is “putting out the leaven” from
their homes prior to the seven day Feast of Unleavened Bread. As
Exodus 12 explains regarding the establishment of this Feast,
“On the first day remove the yeast from your houses, for whoever
eats anything with yeast in it from the first day through the
seventh must be cut off from Israel.”
In other words,
families go through their kitchen cupboards and pantry and
remove all items of leaven which they would normally use to make
baked products, and any leftover baked items that were prepared
with these ingredients, such as doughnuts, cookies, and cake.
They may also go throughout their homes and check for such
things as spilled crumbs from snacking. Some limit this custom
to just removing yeast (and related items such as sourdough
starter) and baked goods made with yeast. Others choose to also
include chemical leavening agents such as baking soda and baking
powder and baked goods made with them.
For many, this practice of removing the leaven is not
viewed as just a meaningless ritual. It is highly symbolic, and
includes spiritual lessons. For more details on this, see the
article The Symbol of Leaven
elsewhere on this Times of Refreshing website.
Jesus: The Reason for These Seasons
Many people who accept Jesus
Christ as Savior and Lord, whether they refer to themselves as "Christian" or
"Messianic," observe the Feast of Unleavened Bread as a time of worship,
fellowship, and celebration. They believe that this Feast, along with the other
Feasts described in the Bible in Leviticus 23 and Deuteronomy 16, are shadows pointing to the
reality of Jesus. And they believe that there are valuable spiritual lessons to
be learned year by year through actually physically setting aside these Times
of Refreshing as
"appointments with God."
For an explanation of the Christian
observance of the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread, see the article
Let My People Go! elsewhere on this
Times of Refreshing website.
For more about the biblical Feasts
in general, see the article Theme Times elsewhere on
this website.
For an
explanation of the Christian observance of each of the Feasts as
they come in their seasons, explore the links on the navigation
bar above.
For sources of the Hebrew, Greek,
and English definitions in this and other articles on this website, see the
Information page.
For sources
of the Biblical quotations in this and other articles on this
website, see the Information page.
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of Refreshing website were written by Pam Dewey, with
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Ministries. For more of Pam's inspirational and educational
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www.youall.com/oasis
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© 2006, Pam
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