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HISTORY OF BREAD
1. Pre historic people collected wild grains and ate them just as they found them
2. About 9000 yrs. Ago grains were actually harvested. Many times they were roasted over a fire or mixed with water to make a porridge. My family still makes whole grain porridge today.
3. Stone Age the first loaves of bread were really
just a thicker paste from the porridge, formed into cakes and dried in the sun.
Some of this type of bread has been found preserved in Stone Age settlements.
4. From the bread drying in the sun came baking the bread on hot stones. An experience still sought after by brick oven bakers.
5. Egyptians and Chinese seem
to be the first to experiment with fermenting the dough. Well-preserved loaves
of bread have been found in the pyramids dating back 5000 years. The bakers used
the yeast produced in brewing beer to ferment and leaven the bread. This was also
the time that "ovens" were invented. Many of these oven were made with
bricks of Nile clay and resembled beehives.
6. Around 600 BC Phoenician sailors carried the Egyptian ideas and developments to Greece where they were refined into an art. Greek bakers were considered very important!
7.
Romans developed bread making even further, with the invention of rotary milling
stones. Milling and baking were twin arts at this time. By 1000 AD milling and
baking had been separated into two professions. Bread was very important and the
Bakers and Millers were among the richest people in any town.
8. For centuries stone-ground whole grain flour formed the basis of the bread for BOTH the rich and the poor.
9. Then it began that the bread for the poor was coarse,
heavy and brown (hence the name Peasant bread). The bread for the rich was lighter
and more refined due to sifting the flour. This white bread became status symbol.
The whiter the flour the richer the household. Due to the money to be made by
selling white bread to the rich, bakers began to try to "whiten" the
bread even more. They would use lime, alum and chalk to whiten the flour. This
was the advent of using additives purely to make a profit. A practice that has
become commonplace today!
10. In the late 1800's (1870) the invention of a new roller-milling process for flour made the process of milling grain and sifting out all the good stuff very easy to do. This made the lily white bread available for both the rich and the poor.
11. It only took until the end of the
century of the nutritionally deficient dysfunctions to arise. The government began
to require that addition of some nutrients (man made in synthetic form of course)
to "enrich" or "fortify" the stripped white flour. Unfortunately
this practice is still with us today……so are the diseases!
12. Our commercial breads of today are typically made of 40-60 additives to make it just the right crumb, texture, shape, and taste. Worse than that would be the over 700 chemicals used in commercial baked goods. These include bleaching, improving agents, raising agents, enzyme active preparation, yeast stimulators, preservatives, emulsifiers, stabilizers, anti-oxidants, coloring agents, acids and dilutes. All this just to make a cheap, perfect, ready for long distance shipping and to sit on a store shelf loaf of bread!
13. The sad fact is that while Man's
quest to "improve" on nature's perfection by adding all the "stuff"
to make it better we've taken out the life sustaining nutrients, fiber, phytochemicals,
taste which made whole grain breads and baked goods truly the staff of life! YOU
have the power to put the NUTRITION BACK INTO YOUR BAKING and into your life!