Bread
What is more satisfying than to detect the aroma of bread baking in the oven? I know: eating a piece of freshly baked bread slathered with real butter after it has had a chance to cool a bit. Occasionally, I feel the longing for some fresh home-made bread, so I pull out my favorite bread recipe from a bread book our daughter gave me. Fortunately, bread is quite easy to make.
I mix the milk, oil, salt, sugar, yeast and flour together to make the dough and set it aside to rise for about an hour. The book our daughter gave me has at least twenty-five recipes for a variety of breads using yeast which makes me aware of the many varieties of bread and reminds me that bread has been around for a long time. So I decided to do a bit of research.
Bread in one form or another has been one of the principle forms of food for mankind from earliest times. The trade of the baker, then, is one of the oldest crafts in the world. Called the “Staff of Life,” bread began in the Stone Age over 7000 years ago. Four hundred years ago, Egyptians discovered a kind of yeast to add to the bread which “leavened” it (made the dough rise). In all its various forms, bread is the most widely consumed food in the world and is an important source of carbohydrate. Also bread is compact and portable, easy to carry around and munch on. Added to this, bread has religious connotations because it has become an important part of worship for many church traditions.
Three primary innovations have created “modern” bread. 1) Leavening which makes the texture of bread light and fluffy. Originally, flatbread, bread without leavening, was all that was made. We still have many popular flatbreads: Eastern pita, Indian naan and Central American tortillas. 2) Refined flour. The earliest bread grains were ground by hand with hard rocks. Today we have how to create smooth, finely ground flour which softens the texture of the bread. 3) Mechanized slicing. Bread was originally sold as whole loaves. In 1917, an itinerant jeweler, Otto Rohwedder, created the first mechanized bread slicer which led to sandwich making for an employee’s short lunch hour making bread even more versatile.
The difference between flatbread and loaf bread lies with the yeast. The biochemical process of fermentation that is responsible for bread dough rising was not understood for many years. Not until the invention of the microscope and the pioneering scientific work of Louis Pasteur in the late 1800s was yeast identified as a living organism.. Yeast is a live, single-celled organism which warm water brings to life. It eats and digests portions of the sugar in the dough. As it feasts, it begins to release gas bubbles of carbon dioxide and small amounts of ethanol. These bubbles trapped in the bread dough cause the rising action we see. This action progressives slowly, so that is why we must give it some time before we form the loaves and bake them.
We can find many recipes for the making of bread which usually results in two loves. I urge you to give it a try if you have never worked with yeast before. Not only does the taste of home-made yeast bread satisfy your taste buds, but sharing the second loaf with a good friend can cement a great relationship.