Bread Baking, From the Beginning of Civilization to Now

Those ancient bakers didn’t loaf around

“Bread is a celebration.” — Lynne Rossetto Kasper

Now that everybody’s baking homemade bread because of the Great Pause, I thought it would be interesting to look back at bread across the ages.

Do you prefer quick breads or yeast breads? Either way, you’re making a bread loaf, and that word comes from “hlaf” in Old English, about mid-5th Century.

But bread itself is much older than that. I’m not going to count the starch residue of cattails and ferns that has been found on rocks from 30,000 years ago and that may have been pounded and cooked over coals like flatbread.

First yeast breads

No, the first evidence of bread as we know it is from 14,500 years ago in Jordan’s desert. In the Neolithic Age, about 10,000 BCE, grain growing became common. Since yeast is everywhere in the air, people discovered damp grain left lying around fermented, so yeast bread was the first bread. The Gauls found that beer foam mixed with ground grain made lighter bread, and the Iberians found that wheat steeped in wine made better bread.

In about 50 CE, Pliny wrote that people kept a small piece of dough from the previous day to start their bread the next day. And the race for the best sourdough bread was on!

Modern yeast breads

To get dough to rise, you need a high-gluten flour for the yeast to eat. Wheat is the most common base for yeast breads, followed by rye. Low-gluten grains, like barley, corn and oats, are usually mixed with wheat flour to help the yeast ferment. Non-gluten breads are very dense, because they can’t rise.

If you are using a bread-making machine, you are missing out on one of the greatest pleasures in life: making bread from scratch with your own hands!

You can find more complicated recipes, but the simplest is one of the oldest and only needs three things: yeast; wheat flour; and water. You also need one more thing: time.

How to bake yeast bread, Dad’s way

My Dad taught me how to bake yeast bread from scratch when I was about 13 years old. It was a rite of passage. Little girls are allowed to help make quick breads, but only big girls get to help make yeast bread. It’s messy, it’s time-consuming, and it’s amazing!

Get active dry yeast from the store, because it’s pre-measured and fast rising. So you put one packet of yeast in a cup of warm water, let it sit for 15 minutes and soon you can see all those lovely bubbles. While you’re waiting, clean the countertop, table or flat surface where you’ll be kneading the dough later.

Now put on an apron. Sift 2 cups of flour (half white, half wheat) into a big bowl and add the yeast water, stirring slowly with a wooden spoon and adding enough extra warm water that you get a consistency a little thicker than pancake batter. (At this point, we always added some sugar to help the yeast, but you don’t need it to make it work.) Then stir slowly 100 more times, and cover the bowl with a warm, damp towel. Now go play a board game with your Dad for an hour.

Put your apron back on (you’ll really need it for this part). First, whisk an egg and add it and a splash of oil to the batter to make the bread less dry, then add in a pinch or two of salt, for savor (but you can leave all those out). Mix in another cup of flour or more until the dough is a bit stiff. If it’s still really gooey, add more flour until the dough is hard to stir, then spill it out onto a clean, flat, flour-covered surface.

Pour more dry flour on top. Now gently fold the dough in half, turn it a quarter turn, and fold it in half again. The dough will be very sticky at first, so add more flour on top, and also pick the dough up now and then to put more dry flour on the countertop. Keep kneading and adding flour forever (maybe 10 minutes), until the dough ball stops looking like the swamp creature and starts to actually look like a smooth ball. Test it by putting your hand together on the top and slowly stretching them away from each other. If the dough feels a little elastic and the top stretches and splits into small circles (sort of), you can stop kneading.

Pick up the dough ball and put it into an even bigger bowl that has been oiled. Cover with a warm, damp cloth and set aside for an hour. If it’s a cold day, put it on top of the oven so the pilot light will keep it warm. (This may be a Dad myth.) Scrape the rest of the loose dough off the work surface and clean your hands. Now go play in your room because Dad wants to sit down and read quietly for a bit.

OK, now comes the really fun part. First, put your apron back on and wash your hands. Then take the bowl with the dough ball, remove the towel, gasp at how big the dough is now, then punch the dough with your fist! Wahoo!

Next, scatter a little more flour on your work surface, and spill the dough back onto your countertop and spread it out a little bit. This is the point where you will add any extras, like chopped nuts, chopped dried fruit, more sugar, shredded cheese, chopped sweet chilis, whatever, just be sure the pieces are small. Scatter some of the goodies across half the flattened dough, and, guess what? Fold it in half. Then slightly flatten and scatter more goodies, and fold again. Keep folding in goodies until they start falling out the other side when you fold the dough, then start the serious kneading process again. You don’t have to do 100, but knead it at least a couple dozen times, probably adding a bit more flour, as the dough will have gotten softer while rising in the bowl.

When the dough won’t take any more flour and the ball is nice and stretchy tight, you can make shapes with it. If you want to keep it simple, you can just round the dough into a perfect circle, and press it down a little so it’s nearly the same thickness in the middle as on the sides. If you want to get fancy, divide your dough into three equal amounts, roll each into a long snake and braid them, tucking the ends under. Either way, before you shape it, pinch off two tiny pieces of dough, about enough to fit in each palm with your fingers closed. Now put your perfect creation onto a large, oiled baking sheet for a half hour so it can rise a little more. Put the two small balls of rounded dough nearby. Turn on the oven to 325. Play cards with your Dad for a half hour.

Just before the dough goes in the oven, you can baste the top with butter, (for yummy goodness), or egg yellow thinned with water (for a gorgeous shiny golden top), or even plain water to help make a thick crust. If you are baking a round loaf, you can cut a small X in the center, or cut some little lines radiating out from near the center.

Now stick it in the oven. Our oven cooked a little warm, so we baked at 325 for an hour or longer. Some people bake at 180–200, some people bake at 375 for a half hour. You’ll have to check your recipe and test your oven. To find out if the bread is still raw in the middle: if it’s round, thump it and it should make a thunking sound if it’s ready, or for all breads you can stick a toothpick in the side and if it comes out gooey at the tip, it’s not done yet.

Every 15 or 20 minutes during the baking, pull the bread out partway and baste again with your chosen baste, but do it quickly so it doesn’t get cool. When the little round balls look brown (at first or second basting), take them out to eat so you can have a preview taste, because the loaf won’t be ready for a while yet.

When your bread finally comes out of the oven, it will look amazing and smell amazing and you’ll be dying to eat it, but let it set for 15 minutes before you cut it, or else it’ll be a mess. You already ate your little buns, so you can wait.

OK, now cut the bread or break off pieces, slather it with real butter, and share with family and friends. Congratulations! You can now commune with your 10,000 years ago ancestors. May you break bread together in peace.

(Historical information from Wikipedia.)

If you’d like to read about how other things are made, try ice cream and flax: