Wulf enlisted me last year to help find (edible) viking-styled recipes that could be reproduced for moots and such.  One of the interesting searches for me was bread.  I love bread and believe that you can live on bread alone - if it's homemade!

Here is one of the more well-known breads:

Flat Brød
4 cups sour cream
6 tablespoons sugar
3 teaspoons soda
1 tablespoon salt
Whole wheat or graham flour
     Combine ingredients making a dough thick enough to roll out.  Use whole wheat flour for rolling out dough; roll as thin as possible.   Bake on rack in hot oven.  When flat brød begins to brown, turn it over and brown on other side.  This makes a large quantity. 
For an average serving, use ½ amounts specified.


Flat Brød
4 cups white flour 
1teaspoon salt
2 cups gram flour 
1 cup buttermilk, warm
½ cup butter, melted
½ sugar
1 cup water   
1 teaspoon soda
     
Heat water and buttermilk, add butter and stir into dry ingredients.   Mix well, roll out thin.


I left it at that.  Then one day while searching the internet I ran across this information.  Unfortunately, I never saved the location and have no idea where it came from:

"In the old days, people did not have access to dry, or cake yeast, and the only means of leavening bread was to set out a batch of flour and water, and literally letting it rot. And the rotten batter of flour and water is what today is called a sourdough starter. From a scientific perspective, the sourdough starter is a living froth of lactobacilli and yeast which live off the complex carbohydrates in the flour. Although the lactobacilli don't contribute much to the leavening process, they do produce lactic and acetic acids which both promote a very acidic environment for the yeast to live in. While yeast loves to hang out in very acidic places, other organisms don't, and thus, the lactobacilli provide a preserving environment for the yeast. Of course, the lactobacilli and the yeast interact in a much more complex way with each other. These symbiotic interactions are what makes it possible to keep a sourdough starter around for long periods of time. The acids in the sourdough starter are exactly what gives sourdough bread it's tangy flavor. The basics of how to make sourdough bread is straight forward once you have a starter.

Getting a starter
Before you can bake a a sourdough loaf, you need to have a starter, which you can get in one of three ways:

Make your own from scratch
Get some from a friend
Buy a starter

Guide to making your own starter from scratch
There are many ways of making your own starter. Here are a few different ways of doing it: (No offense to the sourdough purist, but by our definition, If the final product ends up to be a mixture of lactobacili and yeast, you have a starter, regardless of how you started it.)
1. The purist approach
2. The Northern European purist approach
3. The natural inoculate approach
4. the shortcut approach

2. The Northern European Purist Approach Scandinavians, Russians and Germans came to recognize that certain flours produce much faster fermentation. A case in point is Rye flour, and this flour will invariably produce a very viable starter in a very short amount of
time. The procedure is identical to the purist approach, except that Rye flour is used instead of White flour.

Mix 1 cup of water and 1 cup rye flour in a bowl, cover, and put into a warm place. After 1 day, add another 1/2 cup water, and another cup flour, and put into a warm place.  Repeat this procedure until the batter starts to smell sour, fruity and yeasty. Then, refrigerate.
Note that since Rye ferments so fast, it is possible to take the fermentation process too far and end up with a slurry of acidic acid. In that case, dump out 3/4 of the starter and add 1 cup flour and 1 cup water, let sit for 12 hours, and then refrigerate. "

Lasaan Wolfgar Freehold