People were baking bread thousands of years before anyone farmed grain
The oldest evidence of bread-making comes from a 14,500-year-old Natufian site in Jordan's north-eastern desert, millennia before agriculture took hold. Physically, a loaf is a foam, like styrofoam: gas bubbles trapped in a stretchy protein web. And a 1961 British invention now makes much of the world's supply.
Grinding stones from Europe and Australia carry starch residue some 30,000 years old, suggesting people pounded roots such as cattails and ferns and may have cooked the paste on hot rocks as a crude flatbread. Once farming spread around 10,000 BC, grain became the base. Because yeast spores cling to cereal grains, any dough left to sit will rise on its own. Southern Mesopotamia was baking leavened bread by about 6000 BC, and the Egyptians, who may have learned from the Sumerians around 3000 BC, refined it by adding yeast.
Ancient bakers found leaven wherever they could. Pliny the Elder noted that Gauls and Iberians used barm, the froth skimmed off beer, to make unusually light bread, while wine-drinking regions fermented grape juice with flour or soaked bran in wine. Most common of all was saving a lump of yesterday's dough, the ancestor of sourdough starter. Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all treated fine baking as a mark of civilisation. The English word, recorded around 1200, originally meant a bit or morsel.
Bread wheat dominates because of its gluten, and wheat supplies more of the world's food than any other single crop. Two proteins do the work: glutenin forms a springy network through disulfide bonds and bounces back when squeezed, while gliadin gives a plastic quality that stays deformed. Carbon dioxide from fermentation inflates pockets in that network. Rye can make bread alone, but barley, oats, maize and millet usually need wheat mixed in. Gluten-free loaves rely on gums, starches or eggs to hold their shape and still tend to be dense.
Bread is the staple across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, while rice or noodles fill that role in much of South and East Asia. Mass production changed sharply with the Chorleywood process of 1961, which uses intense mechanical mixing to cut fermentation time and allows lower-protein grain. It makes bread fast and cheap, though critics question its effect on nutrition.
Source: Bread
