Bread has been the “staff of life”
since mankind switched from being hunter-gatherers to an agricultural
lifestyle, roughly 10,000 years ago. The ability to store food for
the winter made life outside the tropics a lot more pleasant and also
brought about the end of the nomadic lifestyle, since it was
inconvenient to carry around six months' worth of food. Bread is so
important to daily life that it has been part of our various
languages for millennia: the word companion comes from Latin
com "with" + panis "bread" -- literally, “those you share bread with”.
Bread is simple.
- Take a pile of grain (wheat rises due to the gluten in it, other grains not so much) and grind it into flour.
- Add water to make a really thick paste or dough.
- Add flavoring or fruits as desired.
- Add a “leavening” agent to make it rise if you want fluffier bread. This will improve the taste and texture of the bread.
- Bake it in an oven until it is cooked all of the way through.
Let's take those steps in order and
explore them in detail.
1. Grain
Any cereal grain (oats, wheat, barley,
maize [corn in North America], rye, etc.) can be used as the base for
bread. Except for the unfortunate souls with celiac
disease who can't eat gluten-containing grains (wheat, rye, and
barley), most of us eat wheat bread. Wheat could (may) be an article
all by itself. There are so many different types of wheat, and so many
different uses for them, because it was one of the first plants that
people domesticated and is one of the most wide-spread.
Grinding your grain into flour can be
done with something as simple as a round rock, a classic grist mill, or as
complex as a commercial flour mill. The goal is to break up the
individual pieces of grain to expose the inner parts (see diagram below) to
the water, leavening agent, and heat in order to make them easier to
digest.
Rounded rocks used to grind grain into flour. Look in river or stream beds to find naturally rounded rocks, as the water rolling them against each other tends to round them nicely.
Grindstones from a couple of powered mills. Depending on where you are they could be turned by wind, water, or animal power.
The grooves help channel the flour towards the center as it was ground. The green thing next to them is a one-cylinder gas engine that could be used for powering just about anything with a pulley on it.
A hand-cranked grist mill. There are modern versions on the market that work on the same principle. If you decide to buy one, make sure you buy quality. Getting spare parts from China could be a problem after a major crisis.
Most common grains have the same
structure as wheat (bran, endosperm, and germ) so the one picture
gives you a general idea of the internals. The hull or bran is the
protective shell around the seed, our bodies treat it as fiber (or
roughage as grandma used to say).
The endosperm is the stored energy for the seed. Cereal grains store energy in the form of starch, which is a complex carbohydrate that breaks down into simple sugars when eaten.
The germ or embryo of the seed is where you'll find the proteins and oils. When storing grain it is best to store it intact, since the oils in the germ will go rancid soon after they are exposed to air.
The endosperm is the stored energy for the seed. Cereal grains store energy in the form of starch, which is a complex carbohydrate that breaks down into simple sugars when eaten.
The germ or embryo of the seed is where you'll find the proteins and oils. When storing grain it is best to store it intact, since the oils in the germ will go rancid soon after they are exposed to air.
2. Add water
Bakers, like many other professions
that have been around a long time, have developed their own methods
of measuring. When you see a recipe for bread that measures the
ingredients in %, it is likely a baker's recipe and the unit of
measure is called a “baker's
percent”. They start with the weight of the flour being used as
being 100% and all other ingredients are measured (by weight) as
percentages of that weight. Most recipes call for about 60% water +/-
5%, depending on the type of wheat being used.
3. Add flavoring
Fruits, honey, sugar, butter, or
anything else you want to add to liven up your bread. Raisin bread
toast was a Sunday morning treat for us when I was growing up, and
Grandma's sweet rye bread was worth going to holiday dinners for by
itself.
4. Add a leavening agent
The most common leavening agent is
yeast, a naturally occurring fungus that digests some of the sugars
and starches in the dough and produces CO2, which creates voids or
bubbles in the bread. This only works with grains that have a high
gluten content, since the gluten acts as a binder and traps the CO2
in the bread. Maize (corn), oats, and rice do not have the gluten
needed to trap the CO2 and will only make “flat-breads”.
Chemical leavening agents are commonly
used in “quick” breads like pancakes and muffins, since they
don't require the hours of preparation time that yeast does. Chemical
leavening agents include baking powder ( a mix of a base and a weak
acid that react with heat and water to produce gas bubbles) which is
a delicate balancing between getting the desired bubbles without
imparting any chemical tastes to the bread.
Beer, sour milk, a portion of a
previous batch (starter bread ), and a bunch of other methods have
been used to leaven bread through the years. They're all a source of
yeast or bacteria that will convert sugars into CO2 and make bubbles
Mechanical leavening is the use of a
whisk or mixer to incorporate air into the batter and usually works
best on small pastries and with a high protein content (eggs are the
usual source of protein). The proteins make for a “stickier”
batter that holds the air bubbles.
5. Bake until cooked
Most bread is baked in an oven,
although the quick breads (pancakes and biscuits) can be cooked on a
griddle or pan. An oven is simply a box exposed to controlled heat; the box keeps ash and combustion products out of the bread and
spreads the heat out so the bread cooks from all sides at the same
time. Ovens can be made out of metal, brick, or stone -- they all work
about the same. (Oven construction is another topic that is worthy of a separate article.) They can be fueled by wood, gas, coal, or
electricity, but as long as there is some way to control the heat and
keep it at the desired level for the time it takes to bake the bread, it's an oven.
Bakers provide a service for those who
don't have the time or kitchen to make their own bread. They also
make pastries and cakes for special treats and occasions. By
providing both the staples and the minor luxuries, they become a part
of every town. Because the process of making bread takes considerable
time, they usually start their day well before other people are out
of bed so their product is ready for sale when the customers come in.
If your training and lifestyle tends towards early mornings and
customer service (and eating left-overs), you may want to look into
learning more about what it would take to set up a bakery if there
isn't one in your area.
Note: all images that are not my original work
courtesy of http://www.public-domain-image.com/
, http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/,
or http://morguefile.com/ and are license-free, non-copyrighted
images.
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