First Bread Ever Baked

Bread, as we all know and love is the most widely consumed food in the world. Every culture has its own bread, whether you call it a bun, baguette, pita, roti or the sliced white bread which is most common in North America.

The sliced white bread (wonder bread) we consume today is a fairly new invention as the first bread ever made dates back to more than 22,000 years ago.

According to a 2010 study done by the National Academy of Sciences discovered traces of dried and peeled starch at an excavation site called Ohalo II (what is modern-day Israel) which were ground in pre-historic motor and pestle like rocks. This flour was then mixed with water and heated on rocks.

“Bread was not a product of settled, complex societies but a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer society," as quoted by Amaia Arranz Otaegui, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen. This brings me to a Mesolithic group of hunter-gatherers settled in the middle east about 12,500 years ago called the Natufians. According to William Rebel, a food historian and author Natufians had the infrastructure to grind barley and making it into bread, this made them transform from hunters to settlers and made them harvest their own crops.

The Egyptians, the Mesopotamians (modern day Iraq) and Indus Valley Civilisation (modern-day India and Pakistan) are the three civilizations which are considered the largest to be depended on bread. This was approximately 5,000 years after the Natufians started making bread. All these bread were flatbreads, like the Indian Naan, Pita, Tortillas or roti.

The first Leavened bread (the process of making the bread light and fluffy, mostly by the addition of yeast) can be tracked down to 1,000 B.C. in Egypt. Even though the topic is debatable, but there is evidence that shows Egyptians used yeast to brew beer and to make sour-dough bread. It is believed that a passing yeast made its home in a bowl of flour and started eating the sugar to produce carbon dioxide.

As a fun thought it might be possible that instead of using water to knead their dough, someone used beer and ended up with what we all love now fluffy light bread.

From being baked on stone, to the supermarket (wonder) sliced bread that we all know, bread has come a long way.

References:

Livesciencecom. (2018). Livesciencecom. Retrieved 29 October, 2018, from https://www.livescience.com/17820-image-gallery-ancient-bread-stamp.html

Washingtonpostcom. (2018). Washingtonpostcom. Retrieved 29 October, 2018, from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40951-2004Aug4.html?noredirect=on

Historycom. (2018). HISTORY. Retrieved 29 October, 2018, from https://www.history.com/news/a-brief-history-of-bread

Livesciencecom. (2018). Livesciencecom. Retrieved 29 October, 2018, from https://www.livescience.com/62536-who-invented-bread.html

Ben Guarino, the Washington post. (2018). ScienceAlert. Retrieved 29 October, 2018, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/07/16/these-crumbs-come-from-the-worlds-oldest-bread-it-might-have-resembled-a-pita/?utm_term=.499390eb45ba

Washingtonpostcom. (2018). Washington Post. Retrieved 29 October, 2018, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/07/16/these-crumbs-come-from-the-worlds-oldest-bread-it-might-have-resembled-a-pita/