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BREAD - The Origins
by Lynn Monk
Bread is probably the oldest
and most basic of recipes. Known recipes date
back to the last ice age, around 10,000 BC. Early
man was barely out of his cave when he first came
up with the extraordinary idea of grinding the
grain, that he would normally just chew, into
a powder. Now why would he want to do that? Perhaps
we'll never know! Anyway, the result of this brainwave
was a product we now know as flour.
Probably the earliest record
of a
product that we know of was found by archaologists
excavating close to the pyramids. There, they
found the remains of a huge "commercial" bakery
that was probably built to feed the slaves who
built the pyramids. This bakery is estimated to
have produced around 4000 loaves of
a day. But whilst the pyramid builders may have
been slaves, it is very likely that the bakers
were not! Indeed, the skill of
baking has, throughout history, (until very recent
times) been revered. We now look upon our TV chefs
for the fame and glamour of culinary skills, whilst
our humble bakers are relegated to a life behind
the bakehouse door. But it wasn't always that
way around. Bakers have always been free men.
In ancient Rome, a good baker was a celebrity.
He was given the key to the city in exchange for
his skills. There was a "downside" however, he
had to sign his children over to his "employer"
so that the family skills and recipes would never
be used by rival townships. Not only that, but
he also had to promise never to visit the collisseum
nor consort with gladiators or comedians!
In those days there used to
be two kinds of bakers, those who made brown bread,
and those who made white bread. The famous ones
mentioned above were the white
kind. These were the bakers who worked for the
rich and famous, the kings and queens. This was
due to the fact that white
was very expensive. There were no machines at
that time to sift out the "impurities" from flour
to make it white. It was all done by hand and
required special skills and knowledge. What a
difference from the present day, where many people
consider wholemeal to be the best bread!
On this site we want to give
you the facts about
and baking. We have an expert on hand to help
you with your baking queries. Our expert is Peter,
an artisan baker whose skills were learned many
years ago as an apprentice with one of the last
traditional
bakers in the UK. These skills are, after more
than 10,000 years of use, now becoming obsolete
in the commercial baking industry. This is very
sad. Not only because we are about to lose a much
revered tradition, but also because of the many
benefits that producing
by hand has on the health of the consumer and
the quality and flavour of the product itself.
Over time, many new articles and resources will
be added to this site. In view of this, we urge
you to sign up to our mailing list so that we
can send you any news about
as soon as it happens. You will also receive a
10-part course on home-baking, each with a unique
recipe specialy created by our artisan baker,
Peter. These recipes were previously a closely-guarded
trade secret that were used only in Peter's own
bakery. They have never been published before
and cannot be found anywhere on the Internet except
in this FREE 10-part course.
One-time bakery proprietor turned music producer, Lynn Monk, re-lives the knowledge learned in her years under the guidance of this site's expert artisan baker, Peter, by writing a few articles about bread.
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