This post talks about the live bake-up of a long-matured/fermented gingerbread dough. If you would like to see how to prepare the dough written down, check out other my post here.
I’ve been making a rye spice bread with sourdough discard for many years – I based my version on a recipe I found for Pain d’Epices, the historical French spice bread. After many years of baking this up, I decided to research its history. My eyes lit up when I read that traditionally the flour and honey for this bread were mixed together and laid down to ferment (or mature) for months before baking.
I love the idea of maturing something for months, and enthusiasm led me quickly down a fermented ginger/spice bread rabbit hole! Once you start digging into historical recipes, you quickly realise that honey-sweetened, spiced biscuits and cakes have been made worldwide for many centuries. There are so many recipes and traditions out there!
I’ve been most fascinated by two traditions – the Lebkuchen cookie that hails from Germany and the Pain d’Epices bread I mentioned above, from France. Both of these were traditionally made with a fermented/matured dough.
After having laid my honey/flour mix down to ferment for 2 months, I cooked up both.
You can see the whole process on the You Tube video I created. And don’t worry if you want to make these, but don’t have 2 months to wait – any time you can leave the dough to ferment/mature is good, the flavours will develop.
Thank goodness I finally I found a blog post this! I have been fascinated with BOTH German and French honey spiced cakes but all those recipes I came across are always “modern” ones with baking soda and always including at least half of the sugar in their recipes instead of all just honey.
Hi Sumi! Yes, I’ve seen those recipes. Let me know how you get on with this one.