Rise of Rurik - Chapter 638

[Chapter 639 Bread is Life]

The preparation time given to the army for the expedition was very short, and the soldiers took the money and bought it at the market in Roseburg.

They flocked to the blacksmiths’ stalls to buy new mass-produced hatchets and spearheads to arm themselves, and made the women of the family do whatever they could to make dry food.

In the market in the morning, a magical stall attracted hundreds of people to salivate and watch.

It was a stand composed of more than a dozen simple patchwork wooden tables, all of which were covered with gray coarse cloth.

There are a large number of disc-shaped objects placed in Wushang. Its yellow and white color and the pervasive aroma of wheat fully prove the essence of its sesame seed cakes!

Several women in coarse turbans yelled, “Four pounds of wheat cake for a silver coin.”

They kept yelling, but the pancakes were really expensive.

The men poked their heads to watch, chattering and whispering.

Finally, someone who really coveted came forward, took out silver coins and shouted cheerfully: “Five silver coins, I want twenty pounds!”

“Okay!” The woman happily took the money, and ordered the waiter to take the balance to weigh the cake immediately.

The young warrior didn’t worry about the accuracy of the balance at the booth. He had a big appetite and naturally wanted to eat more. It was not appropriate to rely on the food provided by the Duke for future expeditions, so he had to store some ready-to-eat food Tuck it into your backpack for emergencies.

Compared with the pasta made of pure oatmeal, it can’t be made bigger than a slap.

Oatmeal cakes lack stickiness, and the cakes that are ground into flour and kneaded are very crumbly.

But this wheat cake is obviously as big as three palms side by side, so it is quite tough to hold such a big cake in your hand?

Under the watchful eyes of everyone, the soldier took a quick bite.

Is that gnawing?

It was clearly a bite, like tearing the meat off the bone of a venison leg.

The soldier ate it in public, his eyes were as big as copper bells, he was eager to say something, after swallowing desperately, he hurriedly yelled: “Sweet! These pancakes are so sweet!”

sweet?

People looked at each other, and driven by curiosity, they took out money one after another.

This wheat cake stand belongs to Aslaqi’s mill, and the slightly crude mill was completed 20 days ago.

Since it was completed, it has started to process grain. As for how to grind flour, it is really a secret.

Asuraki herself was not here, but fortunately, she was very clever and showed her husband Arik’s banner at a very suitable time.

She was Arik’s concubine, a Gotland woman.

The men onlookers all knew this, presumably it was the flag captain’s wife’s mill, and there was something to be done to cheer them on. Now that the brothers had tasted a delicacy, how could they happily buy the pancakes without taking money?

The oatmeal cakes prepared by Asuraki are selling out quickly, and all of this is within her expectations.

Now she herself is at her mill, inspected by Rurik.

The three granite slabs are polished very flat, and they look very thick standing on the stone pier.

Big holes were drilled out of the stone slabs, and a hard iron rod was inserted inside.

Rurik saw two stone wheels made of granite on the stone slab and pillar in front of him, and the hole carved out of metal in the center was also inserted with an oak shaft.

The oak shaft has obviously been reworked, that is, it is covered with a layer of bronze skin, and the center hole of the stone wheel is also the same, thus forming a hard-contact bearing, which is lubricated by seal grease.

This axle system is like a wheel standing on a stone slab. The specially treated oak shaft is the shaft. Great.

Rurik saw it strangely, and Asuraki’s explanations filled his ears with great interest.

She told Rurik in quite detail about how she selected stone materials, hired workers to process parts, hired workers, how much wheat she used from the Duke’s granary, and even how much she bought with her own money after receiving the Duke’s task.

“You… really finished it! It’s better than I imagined! These are stone mills, and the effect is no worse than that of a rotating millstone. It seems that I should remove the bronze millstone and give it to you now.”

Asuraki was waiting for this praise, and said, “Since you promised, give me the golden millstone.”

“Well! You’ll make three stone mills soon, and more soon. I’ll give you four bronze millstones.”

“Actually, all I need is one set.” Asuraki said softly, “I plan to keep it as a souvenir, and the remaining three can obviously be made into more weapons or daily necessities. My lord, We must securely win new wars, and in my opinion you can melt them down and cast them into arrow clusters.”

“You…” Rurik stared into her eyes, first he was calm and embarrassed for a while, and then he slowly smiled.

“Well, it’s up to you. Haha, you have broken your heart for the revival of your family! You just said some inspiring words to me. I like to hear them very much. I am also moved by your actual deeds.”

“I used to serve Ross.” Asuraki complimented immediately.

Rurik looked at these stone mills again. Asuraki completed them according to the structure of the wheel and shaft. In terms of structure, it is a little different from the oriental stone mills, and the efficiency of use is obviously acceptable.

In addition to a few captive Northumbrian women working in her mill, there are also hired local women.

She also bought reindeer as animal power to pull the wooden pole.

Human and animal power alternately push wooden poles to crush wheat with stone wheels, especially the working women, who were ordered to perform how to work in front of the Duke.

Rurik saw that the oats and wheat were mixed together and were crushed over and over again by two stone wheels until they were crushed into fine powder.

As a miller, Asraki would not waste even a pinch of wheat bran in the whole wheat flour made by mixing these two types of wheat.

Rurik touched the whole wheat flour that had just been rolled, and asked again: “You have processed a lot, so you should have made a lot of scones! I know, you have set up a market and are selling them, since you personally I don’t ask too much about the cakes that are processed and baked from the purchased wheat. I just want to know what has become of the wheat that I authorized you to get from my warehouse. Is it a large amount of wheat cakes?”

“It’s bread, a lot of bread.” Asuraki’s emotion was so urgent that her eyebrows were going to fly up, clearly she was trying to show off some interesting baby.

“Is it in your warehouse? Take me there!”

In a short time, a newly-built woodcarving tree standing on dozens of wooden stakes was what Asuraki called a bread warehouse.

Rurik noticed that the waterproofing of this building was superior to other buildings. Look at its gabled roof, which was laid with stone tiles and terracotta tiles.

“This woman is really willing to spend money on these things, Arik, you must give your beautiful little wife a lot of money.”

Rurik’s conjecture is completely correct. Asraqi is a woman who combines beauty, wisdom and skills, and she is much better than the simple Novgorod village girl Peravina.

He loves his little wife, and feels deeply guilty when he thinks that her children will not be able to inherit his family property. Giving her a huge sum of money now is Arik’s compensation, and he also hopes that his little wife can start a career of her own.

Of course, Arik knew better that by helping his little wife Aslaqi, he was actually helping his younger brother Rurik.

More importantly, if the mill is a big success, it will be a great thing for all Ross brothers.

The locked door of the warehouse was opened, and Asraki personally lit the oil lamp placed at the door.

Rurik straightened his nose, and what first came to his face was a refreshing scent of turpentine, hidden in this breath was a thick aroma of wheat.

Through the dim light, he saw a lot of wooden shelves in the long room of the warehouse, on which were placed…

“It’s all big bread?! So big!”

He stepped forward to caress it casually, and subconsciously yelled the word “hleba” in Slavic.

Asraki was taken aback: “You… actually said the same words as my sister (Peravina).”

Rurik ignored her for the time being, and continued to stroke the dry and hard bread in front of him with both hands.

Coincidentally, the pronunciation of bread among the Slavic tribes is basically hleba.

The Viking forces basically pronounce the word “life” as libe.

Although the two ethnic groups have the same origin but have been separated for thousands of years, they have become incommunicable in language, but they reunited here in the Principality of Ross.

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Bread is life.

Two words, almost one way of thinking.

This is the real Daliba, or the traditional medieval European bread is such a baking style.

Its size is very large, and it was baked like this on purpose!

From Rurik’s point of view, it was almost half a meter long, and when he was about to hug him, his weight was astonishing.

In the dim light, Asraqi smiled and watched Rurik fiddling with the bread. She knew that her mission had been successfully completed, and her plan to capture the Duke of Ross for a better future was more than half successful.

“My lord, are you satisfied?”

Rurik still didn’t answer directly, and asked again: “Tell me, the ingredients you use to bake bread, how to bake it and how often you bake it, tell me all the work you have done during this time! Damn, the smell of these breads is really Comfortable, but hard as a rock.”

The duke was asking, and Asuragi just spoke up.

It turns out that the stone mill, the mill building, the great clay oven and the storehouse longhouse were built at the same time.

She took the huge sum of money that Arik took out, and easily recruited a group of relatively idle people in Fort Rose to work for it.

Many local women in Rose would drive people crazy just to take care of the new children in their families, but there are many children in the family, so they must find ways to make money to buy food and meat to make ends meet.

Practical reasons force them to work in far away places, but even if they stay at home and work as tailors, the work in this area is already saturated.

Hearing that Arik’s concubine was ordered by the Duke to build a mill, and that she paid well, the sisters naturally came in droves.

Men and women have created all this for Asuraki, and the struggle of Ross women has highlighted great value.

It is unrealistic to expect women to do heavy physical labor. They are arranged to first use traditional stone mills to grind dough to make flour, and then knead the flour mixed with wheat and oats with a little water to form a large dough, which is finally weighed by a balance. Five pounds of dough, waiting for collective baking, in fact, this job is not easy at all, and it is too comfortable to be felled and transported.

The two large clay ovens placed in the wooden shed were successfully completed. The interior of the oven constitutes a low-temperature and stuffy baking environment. Each oven can bake 20 dough at the same time. Since the oven was built, the baking work has begun .

At the beginning of the period, because the amount of flour processed by the traditional stone mill was too small, the stove did not bake much bread at one time.

With the completion of the three stone mills, flour production has soared, and the ovens have had to be in operation around the clock for some time now.

They are like clay ovens for baking pancakes. The big bread is naturally bigger than the biscuits, and because it needs to be fermented for a period of time before being baked, it takes some time to bake the bread, but as long as the oven is running all the time, the baked The efficiency is still amazing.

Basically, a batch of coarse flour has just been rolled, then it is sent to the other side to be kneaded into dough and then weighed, placed in a wooden basin and waited for natural fermentation before being sent to the stove.

Nearly 50 servants and helpers are serving this one-stop service. Asuraki can proudly say that her current task is to monitor everyone’s work.

The two ovens can produce a total of nearly 200 pounds of bread at one time. In theory, it can be baked around the clock, and 25 ovens can be produced in one day.

Asuraki’s mills and baking ovens are still working at full capacity, and the inventory of this warehouse, Asuraki said clearly – is close to 30,000 pounds of bread.

Isn’t 30,000 Roman pounds equivalent to a little over a ton?

It sounds like this is a huge number, but if it is shared among 1,000 soldiers, each person gets only one kilogram of bread.

what is this?

Thousands of years later, the wartime rations on paper of the Soviet Army and the German Army had to eat nearly one kilogram of bread, biscuits and other grain products every day.

Those are the most brutal war conditions, and it is still largely unknown whether the food rations on paper can be implemented.

Now it is only the ninth century, and Rurik doesn’t think that his fighters really have the chance to consume 4,000 calories a day, and because of the special factors of this space-time war, the outcome of a real war will be determined within a few days by one or two battles.

Even so, the bread reserves are still too small. Thinking about it again, this is only the result of the Asuraki Mill, which has just been opened for a month. It is just two ovens and three stone mills. If time passes, she can do better .

One of the big downsides of whole wheat bread is that it tends to dry out much more easily than fine bread, making it hard as wood.

In other words, this is a good thing, because such bread has become an emergency food that is extremely durable due to natural dehydration.

Looking at the dark and dry environment again, Rurik guessed that all of this was done on purpose by Asuraki.

It is just that before eating these dry and hard breads, they obviously need to be sawed into thin slices with a saw.

It is even possible to beat it into crumbs. After all, when bread and wheat cakes enter the stomach, they will inevitably turn into a mess and be absorbed by the body.

In this dark warehouse, Rurik directly announced: “All the ingredients for bread are my wheat, and what you pay is labor. Asraki, I will pay you according to the previous agreement. Shang, I will give you money immediately.”

“Thank you.” Asuraki said happily.

“You’re welcome, I have great confidence in you now. It seems that you should build another mill in New Roseburg. How about this trip, let’s go to Roseburg together?”

“Okay, I’ve had this intention for a long time. Especially the construction of a new mill in New Roseburg, where my father lives, is my desire. I just brought little Gustav there again.”

Rurik nodded: “Then hurry up and make preparations. You will arrange capable people to continue the operation of the mill. An excellent mill must not stop production. I will also sell you extra grain, and the bread that will be ready in the future, The army has priority in acquisitions.”

“Obey!”

“Then go ahead. That’s right.” Rurik thought about the wheat cakes in the market: “I just learned that you paid a very expensive price for those cakes. Even if it is the wheat you bought yourself Baked, why is it so expensive?”

“It’s just right! I still have urgent sales here.” Asraqi laughed, and arranged for someone to bring warm pancakes to Rurik’s hand.

This cake is baked on an iron plate, and there is a slightly charcoal meringue under it.

Compared with the hard-as-stone bread, this pancake is indeed very soft, smelling the smell, he opened his mouth…

Rurik closed his eyes and chewed silently, then trembled all over.

“Sweet! Did you put honey?”

“It was discovered by you. It’s honey, and only a little bit is put in each cake.” Asraki covered her face and smiled, “In this way, you won’t be surprised if I raise the price.”

“No surprise! It’s really good. I accepted this pancake, and it seems that I will order you to make more honey scones in the future. The brothers are fighting outside, and eating delicious food is also the key to victory.”

“Honey is hard to come by,” she said.

“It’s okay, the people of Novgorod always pay tribute to honey, and everything will be fine when we develop the beekeeping industry there. I should leave.” Rurik patted his clothes and still held the honey cake in his hand, “I’ll do it again Go see how the carpenters are doing with their new slingshots and trebuchets. Those guys will be worth my money!”

[End of this Chapter]