I've been doing a little research on communion breads, and I have a couple
of questions for Ngozi Osuji: First of all, for which church is the
communion bread to be made? The reason I ask is that different churches
have different standards for that bread. The Roman Catholic Church makes
its communion bread of wheat flour only, some protestant churches use
regular old wheat bread, and some even get adventurous--I recall making a
batch of unleavened barley bread for the Presbyterian Church I attended
when I was in college. The reason we decided on barley bread was that we
felt that barley flour would be appropriate was that wheat was not the
grain used by common people in biblical times. I got two recipes from the
web, the first for a Moravian recipe which quoted the recipe found in the
book of Ezekiel, Chapter 4, verse 9, which stated that "The Lord told
Ezekiel to "take wheat and barley, beans and lentils, millet and spelt, put
them in a storage jar and use them to make bread for yourself." The
website further stated that "the ingredients in the Ezekiel bread we share
at East Hills (Moravian Church) contains whole wheat flour, white flour,
pinto beans, millet, barley, and spelt. All are ground together to make
this mixture. In this passage in Ezekiel, God promised to provide at least
a bare, but not complete ration of food for the people of Jerusalem each
day. " If you made such a mixture yourself, you would then add oil and
water to make a dough and roll it into cracker -like breads. Most people
feel that, since Jesus first created the idea of communion during the
Passover feast, the communion bread should be unleavened. The other recipe
I downloaded from www.freerecipe.org/Bread/CommunionB_hhee.htm And can be
referred to there. In brief, it says that it feels one should NOT use
white flour for it, because "in the strict sense of the word, white bread
is not a true symbol of the body of the Lord. He is the life-giver, but
white bread, if depended upon exclusively for food, leads to disease and
premature bread"--a statement with a certain justice to it! The recipe is
as follows:
Communion Bread
2 cups entire (whole) wheat flour, finely ground
1/2 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons pure vegetable oil (to be authentic, I suggest olive
oil--note mine, not the author's)
9 tablespoons cold water
Add the salt to the oil in a bowl, and pour in the water in a very slow
stream, beating constantly with a silver fork until thick and white (a
temporary emulsion). Pour over the flour all at once, and mix lightly into
a dough. Turn out on a floured board and knead, folding it over and over
to enclose air, and pounding it with a wooden mallet (a wooden potato
masher is excellent) until quite elastic, which takes about 5-6
minutes. Roll out to the thickness of pie crust, mark with a dull knife
into 3/4-inch squares, lay in a baking pan, and bake in a medium-slow oven
(about 300-325F). Avoid browning it, except a slight tinge, as browning it
gives it a strong flavor.
Now, it occurs to me that you could achieve your temporary emulsion by
blending the oil and water in a food processor, and work the flour into
that in the same way.
As for the kind of communion bread with which most Catholics and
Episcopalians are familiar, this is usually made by monastics, and I'd
guess they have some fairly specialized equipment with which to do
it. Just guessing, but I think they use something along the lines of a
pizelle iron in order to get that embossed, thin, crisp bread we know so well.
Susannah