Bread

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Bread is one of the oldest human-made foods, and the oldest evidence of it does not come from a kitchen. It comes from a 14,500-year-old Natufian site in the northeastern desert of Jordan. Older still, in Europe and Australia, rocks dating back 30,000 years carry starch residue from pounded plants. Someone, that long ago, spread starch from the roots of cattails and ferns onto a flat stone, set it over a fire, and made a primitive flatbread. From those scorched rocks to the loaf wrapped in plastic on a supermarket shelf runs a single thread. Along the way, bread became a staple across Europe and the Middle East, a sacred element in Christian ritual, and a word people use to mean money. How does water, flour, and a scattering of invisible microbes turn into something elastic enough to fluff and trap gas like styrofoam? Why did the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans treat a good loaf as proof of civilization? And how did a machine invented in 1961 change what most of the Western world now eats every day? The answers run from Sumerian ovens to a research lab in Germany.

• 2. From Flatbread To Leaven

  ›

  Around 10,000 BC, with the dawn of the Neolithic age and the spread of agriculture, grains became the mainstay of bread-making. Yeast spores sit everywhere, including on the surface of cereal grains, so any dough left to rest will leaven itself. An early leavened bread was baked as far back as 6000 BC in southern Mesopotamia, the cradle of Sumerian civilization. The Sumerians may have passed the knowledge to the Egyptians around 3000 BC, who refined the process and began adding yeast to the flour. The Sumerians already used ash to supplement the dough as it baked. Early bakers had several ways to make dough rise without buying anything. Pliny the Elder reported that the Gauls and Iberians skimmed the foam off beer, called barm, to produce what he described as a lighter kind of bread than other peoples made. Wine-drinking regions improvised differently. They used a paste of grape juice and flour left to ferment, or wheat bran steeped in wine, as a source of yeast. The most common trick was the simplest. A baker kept back a piece of yesterday's dough to leaven today's, the seed of what we now call a sourdough starter. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all treated the degree of refinement in the bakery arts as a marker of a civilized people.

• 3. The Grains That Make A Loaf

  ›

  Common bread wheat makes the largest single contribution to the world's food supply of any food. Its high gluten content gives dough sponginess and elasticity, which is why it dominates the loaf. Bread is the staple of the Middle East, Central Asia, North Africa, Europe, and European-derived cultures in the Americas, Australia, and Southern Africa. This stands in contrast to parts of South and East Asia, where rice or noodles fill that role instead. Other wheat species do the same work in smaller numbers, including spelt, emmer, einkorn, and kamut. Non-wheat cereals such as rye, barley, maize, oats, sorghum, millet, and rice can all become bread. With the exception of rye, they are usually blended with wheat flour, because they carry less gluten on their own. Baking without gluten at all is a harder problem. Gluten-free breads draw on flours from almonds, rice, sorghum, corn, legumes such as beans, and tubers such as cassava. Without gluten, the dough may not hold its shape as the loaf rises, and the crumb can turn dense with little aeration. Bakers compensate with additives such as xanthan gum, guar gum, hydroxypropyl methylcellulose, corn starch, or eggs to rebuild the structure that gluten would have provided.

• 4. Foam, Crust, And Crumb

  ›

  Structurally, bread can be defined as an elastic-plastic foam, the same category as styrofoam. Two proteins in wheat do the architectural work. Glutenin forms interconnected gluten networks through interchain disulfide bonds, and it gives bread its elastic nature, springing back to shape after deformation. Gliadin binds weakly to that network through intrachain disulfide bonds, and it gives bread its plastic nature, holding a new shape after enough force is applied. Air pockets within the gluten network come from carbon dioxide produced during leavening, which is why bread qualifies as a gas-in-solid foam. The crust forms from surface dough during cooking. Intense heat at the surface drives the Maillard reaction between sugars and amino acids, hardening and browning the outside and giving it a more complex, more intense flavor than the rest of the loaf. Old wives' tales claim that eating the crust makes a person's hair curlier, and that the crust is healthier than the interior. Some studies back the second rumor, finding the crust holds more dietary fiber and antioxidants such as pronyl-lysine. The crumb is the internal porous material, a mass of bubbles with elastic walls. As bread ages and goes stale, the crumb grows firmer. One darker finding lives in that browned exterior. Acrylamide, which forms in starchy foods heated above 120 degrees Celsius, has been found in bread, and more than 99 percent of it sits in the crust.

• 5. The Baker's Arithmetic

  ›

  Professional bread recipes are written in baker's percentage notation, where the flour is set at 100 percent and every other ingredient is given as a percentage of that weight. Measuring by weight is more accurate and consistent than measuring by volume, especially for dry ingredients. The ratio of water to flour matters most of all, because it shapes texture and crumb more than anything else. Hard wheat flours absorb about 62 percent water, softer wheat flours about 56 percent, and most artisan formulas run between 60 and 75 percent. Higher water means more carbon dioxide bubbles and a coarser crumb. A common recipe calls for 500 grams of flour, roughly 1.1 pounds, which yields a single loaf or two baguettes. The protein content of the flour is the best indicator of the quality of both the dough and the finished bread. Specialty bread flour, with 12 to 14 percent protein, is recommended for high-quality loaves, while a lower-protein flour of 9 to 11 percent needs a shorter mixing time to build gluten strength. Overmix it and the dough oxidizes, turning the crumb whiter than the cream color most artisan bakers prefer. Fat plays its own balancing act. It coats and lubricates individual strands of protein, and a fat content of about 3 percent by weight produces the greatest leavening action. Too much fat, though, and the lubrication splits the protein structures apart. Salt earns its place beyond flavor. It restricts yeast activity and strengthens the gluten, and some artisan bakers hold it back until after a 20-minute rest so the dough can autolyse first.

• 6. How Bread Rises

  ›

  Most bread eaten in the West is leavened, meaning gas is added to the dough before or during baking to produce a lighter, more easily chewed loaf. Chemical leavening is the quickest route. Bakers either use baking powder, or combine an acidic ingredient like buttermilk with baking soda so the acid and soda react to produce gas. These chemically leavened loaves are called quick breads and soda breads, the family that includes muffins, pancakes, American-style biscuits, and banana bread. Yeast is the more familiar engine. The species most commonly used, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, is the same one used to brew cereal-based alcoholic drinks, and it ferments sugars to release carbon dioxide. Commercial baker's yeast, drawn from a pure culture, gives uniform, quick, and reliable results, while many artisan bakers grow their own culture that can leaven for years if kept well. Pre-ferments add flavor by giving the leavening agent a head start. A poolish is a loose mixture of roughly equal flour and water, a biga is stiffer with more flour, and a pate fermentee is a piece of dough saved from a previous batch. Sourdough takes the slow path entirely, relying on naturally occurring yeasts and lactobacilli rather than any added commercial yeast. The lactobacilli produce lactic acid for that mildly sour taste, and longer ferments can build acetic acid, the main non-water component of vinegar. A starter can be kept alive indefinitely with regular additions of flour and water, and some bakers tend starters many generations old. At one time, every yeast-leavened bread was a sourdough. Not every method is benign. Salt-rising bread uses no yeast at all and is instead leavened by Clostridium perfringens, one of the most common sources of food-borne illness.

• 7. The Factory Loaf

  ›

  The Chorleywood bread process arrived in 1961 and changed bread for much of the world. It uses intense mechanical working of the dough to slash the fermentation period and the time needed to turn out a loaf. That high-energy mixing even allows grain with a lower protein content to be used, and the method now runs in large factories everywhere, producing bread quickly and cheaply for both maker and buyer. Critics have questioned what that speed does to nutritional value. A study by the University of Hohenheim sharpened that worry. Industrially produced bread tends to carry a high proportion of FODMAP carbohydrates because it rises for so little time, often only one hour. Those FODMAPs cause flatulence, a serious problem in intestinal conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome. The study found that a rising time of four hours breaks down about 90 percent of the FODMAPs that cause discomfort, with the highest level always present after one hour and falling thereafter. Grain choice barely mattered. Flours like spelt, emmer, and einkorn contain fewer FODMAPs, but the difference between grain types runs only 1 to 2 percent by weight. The conclusion was that baking technique, not the type of grain, decides whether a bread is well tolerated. Original cereals seem gentler mostly because traditional, artisanal methods with long dough processes tend to accompany them. A long rise pays off in other ways too. It breaks down undesirable phytates more effectively, develops flavor, and leaves the finished bread with more biologically accessible trace elements. Aeration offered another industrial shortcut. The Aerated Bread Company, founded in 1862, forced carbon dioxide into dough under pressure and sold the result in its high-street tearooms until it ceased independent operations in 1955.

• 8. Bread As Metaphor

  ›

  In Russia in 1917, the Bolsheviks promised peace, land, and bread, putting a loaf at the center of a revolution. Across many cultures, bread stands in for basic necessities and living conditions in general. A bread-winner is a household's main earner, with little to do with actual bread, and the same idea sits inside the phrase putting bread on the table. The Roman poet Juvenal mocked shallow politicians and a distractible public who cared only for panem et circenses, bread and circuses. The word reaches into religion, money, and language alike. Bread is one of the elements of the Christian Eucharist alongside wine, and it carries meaning in other faiths including Paganism. In English-speaking countries, dough and bread both serve as slang for money, and a striking innovation gets called the best thing since sliced bread. To break bread with someone means to share a meal, and the English word lord descends from the Anglo-Saxon hlafweard, meaning bread keeper. The reverence has a shabbier shadow. Bread has long been subject to food fraud and adulteration with fillers, and in medieval times bakers stretched it with sand. The pressure has not vanished. The Russo-Ukrainian war has made sourcing wheat flour harder and raised fresh concerns about bread flour fraud, a problem as old as the staff of life itself.