Traditionally, people made bread from whatever grain grew best in the area where they lived. Because of the climate, soil and other conditions, different grains grow better in certain regions of the world. Wheat, rye, corn, barley, millet, kamut and spelt are some of the grains used around the world.
Ever since people began to migrate from Africa to West Asia, about 70,000 BC, they have probably always eaten wheat, which tastes good and is also a good source of carbohydrates. But for hundreds of thousands of years, people did not grow wheat intentionally. They just picked wheat wild, wherever it happened to grow.
Sometime around 10,000 BC though, the area around Mesopotamia and Egypt became crowded enough, and the climate hot enough, that there was no longer enough food to go around just by picking it, and people had to begin growing it on purpose. In what is now known as the Fertile Crescent, the oldest archaeological evidence for wheat cultivation comes from Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Armenia, and Iraq. Around 9,000 years ago, wild einkorn wheat was harvested and domesticated in the first archaeological signs of sedentary farming in the Fertile Crescent. Wild einkorn wheat still grows in the Fertile Crescent.
Around 8,000 years ago, a mutation or hybridization occurred within emmer wheat, resulting in a plant with seeds that were larger but could not sow themselves on the wind. While this plant could not have succeeded in the wild, it produced more food for humans. In cultivated fields this plant outcompeted plants with smaller, self-sowing seeds and become the primary ancestor of modern wheat breeds.
Gradually people also made the wheat easier to grow and eat, by choosing the seeds of the best plants for the next years’ planting. They chose wheat with big heavy heads (the part you eat), and wheat whose berries were easy to separate from the chaff and straw (the part you don’t eat).
It was the Egyptians who are credited with using a “starter” of wild yeast from the air that was kept and mixed with other dough and baked to create a leavened product. Legend has it that a slave in a royal Egyptian household forgot about some dough he had set aside. When he returned, it had doubled in size. Trying to hide the mistake, the dough was punched down furiously and baked. The result was a lighter bread than anyone had ever tasted.
The ancient Greeks had over 50 kinds of bread. Public bakeries and ovens were built by the government for everyone’s use and were popular places to visit the neighbors.
The Romans continued the idea of the public bakery. They also required that every baker put an identification stamp on the loaves. In Roman times, grain was ground with millstones and the finest flour was sifted through silk sheets!
Christopher Columbus’ ships were packed with wheat on his second voyage to the New World, and the first sourdough is believed to have been brought here on those ships. While wheat was grown in the United States during the early colonial years, it was not until the late 19th century that wheat cultivation flourished, owing to the importation of an especially hardy strain of wheat known as Turkey Red wheat.
Hand-picked and carried to Kansas in 1874 by Mennonites from Crimea, Russia, Turkey Red wheat once covered over 90 percent of wheat acreage in the Great Plains.
Click here to read about Turkey Red wheat and its emergence in the Ohio Valley.
- Karen Kahle