Viking bread typically kneaded with reindeer blood and pierced in the middle sounds a bit like a recipe that orcs in a Tolkien novel might have concocted over the glowing embers of a dying fire. To be fair not all loaves and rounds baked by Vikings were infused with such blood and even the blood-based recipes were based on flours made from oats or barley plus wheat flours such as emmer and einkorn. Viking rye bread recipes however seem to have been the most ubiquitous.
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 Valhalla Works | 2023-05-09 16:02:10 |  1,618 Views |
How Vikings Preserved and Processed Food
The combination of blood and flour made for a meal that would have fed hungry stomachs during the harsh Scandinavian winters and traveled well thanks to the Vikings’ improbable baking and storage methods. Think of crudely misshapen disks and doughnuts threaded through the middle with a piece of string or wooden dowel and you get a pretty accurate idea of what these flatbreads would have looked like hanging from a washing line or pole in Scandinavian homes.
The way Vikings preserved their home-baked bread had a couple of advantages. First it dried out the bread which allowed it to keep longer. This storage method (plus the bloody contents of the bread) preserved it so well that it was thought that the pantry staple would last through several stages of a person’s life—until they were ready to marry. And second vermin were so common that Vikings kept cats to keep them away. This method of preserving food on a stick kept both vermin and pets from cooking the bread.
Just as the ancient Egyptians provided their venerated dead with food for the afterlife it appears that "holed" Viking bread served a similar purpose. Samples of Viking bread found at an archaeological site in Birka Sweden are thought to have been baked on the funeral pyres of ancient Vikings. In comparison in Viking homes simple flat loaves of bread pierced through the center with wooden dowels were hung over the stove to dry the bread. At Viking burial sites pieces of Viking bloodbread were hung not from dowels but from bronze or iron wires to decorate urns. It is likely that the wires allowed ancient Viking undertakers to remove the discs of bread from the fire after the cremation process had ceased.
