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It’s been called the staff of life, and is one of mankind’s oldest foods. I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet. In a moment, some thoughts about the world’s first bread.
“Well, raised bread as we are, familiar with it in super-markets and bakeries and so on, is largely, a European production. But, people have been making things like bread all over the world for thousands and thousands of years, often from materials very different than wheat and wheat flour. For example, people make flat breads from tropical roots like cassava and taro.
Harold McGee is the author of Food and Science. He tells us the tradition of bread baking is long and varied.
“Bread is essentially ground up plant material of some kind that’s then cooked so that it solidifies. It can be either flat or raised. And the distinctive thing about European breads is that they’re very light in texture.”
So what would the earliest forms of bread have been like?
“It’s a little hard to say what the first bread would have been because there are so many different materials from which you can make something like bread. In the Middle East where wheat and barley were domesticated maybe ten thousand years ago or so, probably the first breads were being made from both, or from a mixture. Whatever wild grasses were around and could be gathered in sufficient quantities to, to make gruel, grind them up, add water and make a paste, that would make it more digestible. And then if you happened to let that paste sit around for a while and ferment, and yeasts would grow in it then you’d end up with some of that bubbly material that would give a lighter texture.”
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We’ll hear more on bread making in future programs. Pulse of the Planet is presented with support provided by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.
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