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About 20 years ago, an archeologist discovered the remains of what appeared to be a large, ancient "bakery" near the pyramids of Giza. Evidence showed it to have been built somewhere around 2500 BC to feed the workers who were building the pyramids. The grain used at that time wasn't any of the grains we use today, but rather an ancestor of our modern strains of wheat called emmer wheat which, along with strains of barley and millet, were important to the Egyptians of that time.
The history of yeast and bread go hand-in-hand. While modern manufacture of what we call "baker's yeast" only goes back aboy 150 years, mankind has been using yeast to turn grains into bread and alcohol for thousands of years.
It's estimated that humankind began cultivating grains in western Asia, and that cereal grains were introduced to Europe as long ago as 8,000 years by way of Kurdistan and Egypt to south-eastern Europe. From there they progressed north to Scandinavia and westward to Britain, arriving there in the Neolithic (New Stone Age) Era around 3400 BC. Such grains were parched on hot stones or boiled into a paste or gruel.
One can only imagine that somewhere along that long timeframe, someone parched some gruel on a hot stone, and "discovered" flat bread. And some "Stone Ager" maay have left some gruel in a warm place, then parched that fermented paste on a hot rock, "discovering" raised bread - what we call today "sourdough" bread. There is some evidence to suggest that the leavening of bread begain in Egypt around 4,000 BC. By the time of the Old Testament, both leavened and unleavened bread were synonomous with nourishment. From the time of the Greeks onward, refined white bread was prized and only available to the upper classes.
While flat breads were made from many varieties of early grains, it wasn't until a new strain of wheat that could be husked was selected that the leavening of bread began to became possible. Leavened bread requires gluten. Wild wheats had hulls that required the grain to be parched in order to separate the grain from the husk, and heat destroys the gluten-forming proteins.
From Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking" - "Grinding equipment progressed from the mortar and pestle to two flaat sones and then, around 8000 BC in Mesopotamia, to a circular motion that made feasible the eventual use of animal, water and wind power. Fermentation, originally a matter of chance contamination by airborne yeasts, was promoted by the use of a piece of old dough - the method of choice to this day for the most prestigious bakers in Paris, as well as the makers of San Francisco sourdough - and then by the use of yeast-containing beer sediment. By Alexandrian times, around 300 BC, yeast making was a specialized profession in Egypt. Finally, there were improvments in cooking equipments. The open fire was succeeeded by the griddle stone, after which arose the primitive oven, which vontained both coals and bread. The dough was stuck to an inside wall.
"Leavened bread seems to have been a rather late arrival along the northern rim of the Mediterranean. The new wheat was not grown in Greece until about 400 BC and flat barley breads were probably the norm well after. We do know that the Greeks enjoyed breads and cakes flavored with honey, anise, sesame or fruits. The Roamsn satarist Juvenal wrote that his countrymen were interested in only two things - 'bread and circuses' - and huge amounts of wheat were imported from nothern Aftica and other parts of the empire to satisfy the public demand. During Pliny's lifetime, most bread was made in the home by women although a corporation of bakers had been formed in 168 BC."
During the Middle Ages, Arabs brought the windmill to Europe from Persia, and the profession of bread making was established beginning around the 11th century. One use of flat bread at the time was the "trencher", a dense,dry thick slice that served as a plate at medieval meals.
Bread-making was often tied to brewing, as solutions of fermented grains, wheat, rye, hops, malted barley or potatoes and sugar were drawn off used by bakers. These ale yeast solutions (also knows as "worts") were often bitter, however, and tempermental.
During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, much experiementation was done to try to create a form of solidified (or "dried") yeast from ale worts. Commercial-scale production was made possible by Austrain chemists and Dutch distillers around the turn of the century. This new "compressed" yeast was beneficial to distillers but bakers were wary of it as it's strength was variable and it was often bulked out with undesirable fillers. But by the end of the 19th century, British distilleries were producing yeast for the home market and much advertising for such products exists today. However, throughout the 1800's and into the early 1900's, most leavened bread used a either a brewer's wort or a homemade yeast solution (barm). Cookbooks and recipes for bread routinely included instructions for brewing up a home-made yeast which were knows as "patent yeasts". The basis for home-made yeasts was a mash of grain, malted barly or rye, sometimes flour, sometimes boiled potatoes; anything and everything that would give a good ferment and convert into sugar and then alcogol was calll into use for the making of barms. Hops were usually included as a preservative or preventative of sourness. Most barms needed to be seeded with existing yeast from the previous brew. Others were made on a wort left to ferment spontaneously.
The hunt to produce more reliable and efficient sources of bread leaving continued throughout the 1800's. What we know today as "fresh yeast" became commercially available in the mid-late 1800's for bakers. At the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, Charles and Maximillian Fleischmann (Austro-Hungarians who had come to America in the 1860's) introduced their new product, a compressed cake of fresh yeast. That became the hallmark of bread baking until America entered World War II, when Fleischmann Laboratories developed and manufactured Active Dry Yeast, specifically to ensure that GIs could enjoy home-baked bread.
So it was the late 1800's that the nature of leavening began to be understood as we learned the secrets of a particular fungus called "yeast". In 1867, Louis Pasteur discovered that yeast is composed of microscopic organisms whose activvity caused fermentation. Around the same time, baking powders were developed to leaven bread. Since Pastuer's time, more than 350 different species have been identified, along with countless additional strains and varieties. Only a few of these play a role in bread leavening. Commercial baking yeast is one specific strain, Saccharomyces cerevisae. An active sourdough culture contains multiple species, none of which are baker's yeast, along with another microrganism, Lactobacilli. The strains of yeasts in sourdough vary from region to region and country to country. Lactobacilli thrive in an acidic environment and produce a variety of mild organic acids, alcohols and other compounds that contribute to the flavor of sourdough bread. One researcher has identified no fewer than 55 separate coumpounds.
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