Egyptians were baking with yeast by 2600 BCE
After mash-on-hot-rock flatbreads, Egyptians built early ovens and applied beer yeast to dough. By 2600 BCE their bread methods already resembled today’s principles. Baking is dry heat older than most recipes—and still the craft that turns paste into crust and crumb.
Baking cooks with dry heat in an oven, ashes, or on stones, usually above about 148°C, moving heat inward until batters and doughs set a dry crust around a softer center. Caramelization and browning build flavor. Bread and rolls topped 2025’s commonly baked foods. The same dry heat makes cakes, pies, cookies, pizza, and meats en croûte or en papillote; roasting traditionally names whole animals. Eggs yield custards and soufflés that often need a bain-marie’s gentle water bath; baked Alaska demands even heat for hot meringue over ice cream.
Archaeology finds ovens and worktables from Hacilar in Turkey to Jericho dating to 5600 BC. Rome professionalized pastry cooks (pastillarium) from about 300 BC; by 1 AD more than three hundred worked in the city, and Cato catalogued libum, placenta, and other festival breads. The Collegium Pistorum bakers’ guild formed in 168 BC. Thirteenth-century London loaded bakers with some twenty regulations, including sealed marks on loaves. Nineteenth-century soda leaveners and street carts expanded sales; factories later automated what homes and guilds once did by hand.
Commercial ovens may split baking elements from broiling radiation; Dutch ovens and Asian steam baskets offer other enclosed heats. Gram-accurate scales beat casual cups for consistency. Freshness fades fast, so industry leans on additives and "home-baked" labels, while hotels such as the Ritz London bake scones the afternoon they are served. From wild-grain paste on rock to sealed guild bread, baking remains nutrition, economy, and the smell of a just-opened oven door.
Source: Baking
