How did bread come to be? It seems like a lot of steps each of which one normally wouldn't think of doing.
Convenience I assume
>man this grain is really hard
>oh, if you mash it up it's easier to eat
>but now my mouth is dry like a desert
>I'll add some water
>probably should heat it up to avoid sickness
>hmm, if I heat it up in an oven it turns into these tasty blobs
>>1124615
What about yeast?
And I know there are variety of types of bread based on cultures and time in history. How did the culture and time periods shape the kind of bread they produced.
Or conversely how did the type of bread eaten at the time reflect the time and people?
>>1124610
Eating hard grains is shit so folks would naturally try to grind them.
From there on it's easy to make a porridge like substance or flatbread.
>>1124618
yeast is just fermented food
>>1124618
Doesn't it make flat bread without yeast?
Or wine. Who was the first guy to forget some grapes in a jar, comes across it much later on, and actually drank the shit that was in there?
>>1124664
Fermented drinks have been known for thousands of years. Even animals get drunk on fermented fruit.
>>1124664
Cheese too. It's milk gone bad and moldy.
And then we combine wine, bread and cheese together for the ultimate meal in advanced culinary techniques.
Yeah, crushing and boiling the grains to soften them is an idea that is easy to get. People already used these techniques for other things.
So they made porridge.
Then someone let it too long on the fire and discovered that the crusty bits at the bottom were good.
So he made flatbread.
Then some other guy forgot his flatbread dough for a few days, then used it and the bread grew.
So he made sourdough bread.
http://www.breadworld.com/education/History-of-Yeast
>>1124618
I imagine it went something like;
>Chewing grain requires a lot of energy.
>Grinding it up and mixing it with water makes an easily edible, digestible substance.
>Cooking eat yields flat bread, which tastes better and is even easier to eat/digest.
>Dough probably made in batches at the advent of agriculture.
>Enough dough that it gets left out for a while.
>Cooking this dough makes the bread rise, which is the easiest to eat of all, and some regard to taste even better.
>Dough is then left out, and trial/error ultimately identifies the cause as yeast.
>>1124664
Alcohol in general was probably the result of someone without much of a choice drinking a plant-based beverage that had been sitting out for way too long, and discovering that it made them feel good. Ultimately they also found out that it killed the things living in water, which gave them even more of a precedence to brew more.
>>1124670
Cheese probably came out of necessity, when you have limited access to parasite free water and milk is one of your main drink staples, you're not just going to throw away all that milk. I'm sure someone transferred the concept that salt makes meat last longer to milk, and wa la!
>>1124670
I read that cheese was actually discovered from eating young goats that still drank milk. They opened the stomach and there was cheese.
Also read that we developed lactose tolerance by eating cheese, and only after millennia of that did we become able to digest milk.
>>1124662
This, flat bread doesn't use yeast. I remember when we had "live like a viking" days in school, we'd stick dough without yeast to sticks and grill em over a fire like a hotdog.
>>1124694
pinnbröd is GOAT
>>1124681
>tastes better
another big advantage of leavened bread is that it cooks much faster and you can make heavier loaves.
grain near the lid of their containers would start rotting, grain a little lower would start fermenting and grain at the bottom would get wet and start germinating
they still used the grain to be economical and found that it had different properties, germinating grain forms malt which might then ferment into a beer like froth at the bottom, fermented grain makes the bread rise
if you grind grain and make bread every day for years and years you eventually notice these things
What people thought of cake and pastries?
>>1124618
You can have bread without yeast. It just sucks dick. Eventually someone figured it out.
>someone discovers that grains are nicer to eat if you soak them in water first so they're soft
>someone discovers that you can also put the soaked grains with water in a pot over a fire so it will all thicken up and you can fill your stomach using less grains
>porridge invented
>someone discovers you can make a very thick porridge and cook that on a hot surface
>flatbread invented
>someone discovers you can also grind your grains while dry and then add the water and bake, leading to a nicer texture
>dough invented
>someone has leftover dough and saves it for the next day
>the wild yeasts and lactic acid bacteria naturally present in the environment and on the surface of the grains ferment the dough
>sourdough discovered
>someone figures out that you can mix fresh dough with the sourdough to make bread with an airy texture and a nicer taste
>leavened bread invented
>someone discovers that you can take flour and pass it through a sieve to remove some of the bran and germ and make much lighter bread
>white flour invented
>someone decides to add the yeast left over from brewing beer to the dough instead of the sourdough starter
>yeasted bread invented
>someone tries baking bread inside a box so it doesn't develop a crust
Behold, the sandwich loaf.
>>1124688
If you dry a suckling goat's stomach in the sun, the enzymes from the residual milk will dry out too and make a sort of powder. The dry stomach also makes an excellent container for liquids. It's not hard to see how the leap was made from milk storage to cheese-making.
Trial and error
It was the Jews
>>1124657
Yeast causes fermentation, it's not a product of it. Yeast is cool it's like some kind of weird fungus but it's own thing too.
>>1127593
This, actually.
>>1124615
I would think acorns and other nuts would have been made into the first “bread”, as grains like wheat and barely and such weren't anything like what we’ve got today, after generations of selective breeding.
>>1124662
If you don't let it ferment and bake it straight away. you can literally leave wet flour in a bowl on your counter and it will collect wild yeast.
It's called sourdough and it's how all bread was before the modern era.
>>1126782
Wait where did the flour come from? And why put it in bread?
>>1127682
I think something along the same line happened in Asia with them using rice and led to rice crackers.
Not sure why but I find this interesting as shit.
Tell me everything you can about the history of bread and baking.
>>1127682
crazy how nature make dat
>>1124662
you can only make a few types of unleavened flatbread...shit like matzo or tortilla. pan fried type shit.
if you were to try to make something thicker like pita or naan without yeast, you end up with a hard on the outside, rubbery on the inside sort of bread that's not really too good.
if you leave wet dough out in the open though, you'll end up with a primitive sourdough, which doesn't seem like much of a development when compared to something like the development of alcohol, etc.
>>1128449
I don't know any specific history of the development of bread, but if you really want to learn about the history of bread, go to cooking sites and learn how to make basic breads.
shit like a basic unleavened, pan fried flat bread, natural sourdough, etc. if you're really into it, maybe play /k/ and go innawoods with some flour and try to make bread over a fire/in a dug out primitive oven.
try working with more ancient grains -- try emmer, einkorn, spelt, etc.
once you've got it down playing experimental archaeologist, try fucking off with things like Roman bread recipes, recreate Norse breads from the Viking age, etc. maybe even go caveman by going innawoods again and trying to cook with no modern equipment. see what you can come up with from flour and water alone.
study historical oven and cookware design and try to figure out how those dead bastards used it.
>>1128482
I see. And has bread ever been important to historical events?
>>1124664
Monkeys make wine.
They leave fruit out to ferment in a big pile, then get dunk as fuck on it.
So we probably more or less worked that one out before we got down from the trees.
>>1128518
well, bread (or really, grain) was a fairly important commodity in ancient Rome. their welfare state revolved around grain, and some even say that untenable grain farming + absurd subsidising made the empire fall.
the story of the Passover, and Jewish laws about chametz + how Jesus talks about how "leaven" works can tell us a bit about ancient bread (basically, that they were sourdoughs that people kept a starter lump maintained for, and that the yearly Passover ritual forces them to keep their starters relatively fresh).
also, there's the perspective one can get about warfare from the sawdust/rye flatbreads that were fried up in machine oil during the battle at Stalingrad in WWII.
I can't think of any particular stories where bread is decisive, though. of course bread is historically relevant though.
>>1124618
if you put flour and water in a jar and leave it for a while it gets yeasty and you can make bread with it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sourdough
idk how people started thinking fermentation was a good idea though
>>1124686
>wa la
>>1128518
some historical events like dancing plague or probably witch hunts are attibuted to epidemics of ergotism
