How on earth did humans learn to bake? Presumably the short answer is “through trial and error”, but what possessed them to grind ears of wheat into flour in the first place? And then to mix it with water and yeast and cook it?
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Partly down to: we may die if we eat that, but we’ll definitely die if we don’t eat anything. I assume bread came about through grinding up seeds that were too tough to eat, perhaps for older members of the group, and adding water to make it more palatable. Once fire became consistently available, it’s not too hard to imagine someone finding you could make a sort of pancake on a hot stone, through accident or idle experimentation. If you’re short of food, you eat your accidents and experiments. And then, if you left your watery ground up grains around for a while, they’d sometimes ferment. You wouldn’t throw stuff out that had gone a bit weird and might discover that the fermented gloop tasted OK after you’d cooked it on a stone. All just-so stories, but it seems feasible over vast amounts of time.
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Learning how to bake is straightforward. You don’t need a teacher, you just knead a bit of dough to get started.
. It was wild varieties of wheats and barleys, mixed with starchy tubers. That’s long before any cereals were cultivated and before pottery was developed; an age with flint tools only. No yeast was needed, but they had fires and had been roasting meat for thousands of years, so the idea of cooking food to make it easier to digest was familiar. The great advantage of grains (along with nuts and any other collectable seeds) over fresh fruits is they can be stored for months between growing seasons when there might be little available to hunt and nothing fresh to gather.
More interesting still – how did nomadic hunter-gatherers learn to stay in one place long enough to grow a wheat to make bread? Farming must be the single most socially disruptive invention ever – and there have been plenty of competitors.
that wheat domesticated humans, not the other way round.
, where nature lends a hand.
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