This page is called a Herstory of Baking, because (you guessed it), in most societies until quite recently, baking the daily bread was predominantly the collective job of women.
It was through this process of grinding grain, mixing dough and baking bread that bakers’ and brewers’ yeast – the friendly microbe who eats sugar, expels carbon dioxide and thus makes dough “rise” with air bubbles – was cultivated. Thanks to countless generations of women brewing beer and baking bread, we have little packets of yeast on our supermarket shelves today. And to blow your mind just a bit more, what is in those little packets is alive! Alive, yet dormant, microorganisms (as my son fondly calls them, The Yeasty Beasties) who, with some warmth, water and a bit of sugar to eat, will wake up and show you just how alive they are.
How on earth do they get in to those packets? Where do they come from? What follows is nowhere near an adequate testament to the legacy of all the women and men who have cultivated these amazing living things, but a brief timeline of how we came to know….
Our Friends, The Yeasty Beasties
Yeast is something that we use all the time when making bread doughs. But how many of us know of its origins?
Wild yeasts are single-celled microbes that are in the air all around us, on the leaves and the bark of trees, in the soil and on the skins of fruit. When did humans first discover yeast and work out that if we added it to flour and water, it turned out a lighter loaf? How did we harness this knowledge? How did it effect the growth of human societies?
There are many different types of yeast in the environment, from those that cause fungal infection such as Candida, to others that are used in the brewing industry and in wine-making. The yeast that has evolved through human bread and beer making is Saccharomyces cerevisiae, or Bakers’ Yeast.
Ancient Sourdough
Human communities used yeast to make beer and leavened bread before the development of written language. Nomadic tribes living in the fertile crescent made their own beer, which was shared at large gatherings as a symbol of peace and hospitality. The earliest known record of baking known today are hieroglyphics showing bake-houses with dough rising next to bread ovens, which suggest that that ancient Egyptians were using yeast and the process of fermentation to produce alcoholic beverages and to leaven bread over 5,000 years ago.
We don’t know when or how the first leavened bread occurred. Possibly one day a mixture of flour meal and water was left longer than usual on a warm day and the yeasts that occur in natural contaminants of the flour – or even in milk that may have been added for flavor – began to ferment before baking. The resulting bread would have been lighter and more tasty than the usual flat, hard cake.
Simply stated, the fermentation process in dough can be described as the breakdown of the starches in flour – producing carbon dioxide – which, in turn, expands the gluten proteins in the flour and causes the dough to expand. A small amount of alcohol is also produced but this evaporates as the bread bakes. (This is the inverse of brewing beer or wine, in which alcohol is the desired product rather than a bi-product.)
Gradually it became the norm to produce leavened breads, keeping a soft lump of one day’s fermented dough to add to the next baking session’s fresh batch to speed up fermentation. Although we mostly use commercial yeasts today, bread from a “sourdough” starter is not at all uncommon – and is more or less what the ancient Egyptians would have been baking. Over the course of time, the use of these starter cultures helped to select for improved yeasts by saving a “good” batch of wine, beer or dough for inoculating the next batch. During fermentation, the wild yeast in sourdough converts the starch in the flour to protein; in fact, sourdough contains the greatest amount of protein for its weight and size of any comparable food.
In ancient Egypt wine-making and brewing occurred alongside baking. It can’t have taken long for some fermenting brewing liquor – a kind of liquid yeast, or barm – to have ended up in the bread dough, whether accidentally or experimentally. However it first occurred, bread made with dough and fermenting liquid is even lighter than sourdough. Barm, the foam that develops on top of the beer as it ferments, is one of the main by-products of the beer-making process. It was almost always removed due to it’s strongly acrid taste (the practice of adding herbs such as hops to beer started as a way to mask this flavor). Barm is really just a dense culture of fermenting microbes, which when added to bread dough resulted in a terrific rise, creating a light, fluffy bread so coveted for its taste and texture that, throughout recorded history, wherever you find beer, you find bread.
Brewers and Bakers, Beer and Barm
In England in the 1468 – 9 Brewers Book of Norwich, the name for barm was “goddisgoode” because it was made by the blessing of God. In the absence of understanding, God was invoked as the great provider.
In the 17th Century, the Paris Faculty of Medicine spent months debating whether bakers should be allowed to use beer barm for their bread. They eventually decided that it would be injurious to health, based on the fact that St Paul, in I Corinthians v, 7 signified that it was a corrupt substance. They banned it. Nobody seems to have taken much notice and bakers continued to use barm for the fine light bread that the gentry demanded. Bread made using the ancient sourdough methods remained the staple food of the masses.
Until the early years of the 19th Century, British cookery books included instructions for brewing, as well as baking, as a matter of course. Beer-making was the sole reliable source of baking yeast. The barm from wine-making tends to be very bitter and therefore rarely used for baking. Housekeepers were urged to ensure that the beer barm that they used to leaven their bread was not bitter, stale or too strongly flavored with hops. Washing it was crucial. The quantities and quality of beer barm varied from one batch to the next, so the cookery books were unable to be specific about either. It was down to the experience of the cook to produce both a good beer and an acceptable loaf of bread.
The Enlightenment of Bread
The exact nature of yeast – where it comes from and what it is – remained a mystery for millennia. It was the invention of the microscope in the early 17th Century which finally allowed scientists to see what a single-celled yeast looked like and they soon realised that yeast cells multiply in a sugar solution, but they did not realize that they were alive. Liebig, a renowned 19th Century food chemist, claimed that it was decomposition of the cells which caused fermentation and would not accept the developing theory that yeast was a living organism.
It was Louis Pasteur who ended the mystery, in 1859, and discovered how yeast works. He established beyond doubt, using grapes, that it was the dust on the surface of the fruit’s skin which made wine ferment, that yeast was a living organism and that only active living cells can cause fermentation. By the mid-20th century, microbiologists determined that one gram of yeast contains 20,000,000,000 (twenty billion) single-celled living micro-organisms.
The Commercialization of Yeast
There were many attempts to produce a form of solidified yeast which would be more stable, less bitter and easier to transport and store than liquid barm. It was eventually Austrian chemists who perfected the method of producing and compressing yeast using spirit distilleries in the mid-19th Century. (The basis of the distillation was originally a wort, or infusion of grain, made up of wheat, rye and malted barley. Sometimes an infusion of potatoes and sugar was used. These days bread yeast is usually grown on a solution of molasses and water.)
Dutch distillers then took the lead in the increased production of commercial yeast and in exporting it to the rest of Europe. This new process revolutionized baking. Yeast was standardized, and its mass production helped enable the rapidly-increasing population of western Europe during the Industrial Revolution.
Since that time, bakers, scientists and yeast manufacturers have been working to find and produce pure strains of yeast that meet the exacting and specialized needs of the baking industry, sometimes known as the “baking industrial complex” (the marriage of factory farms, bread factories and government agencies responsible for half a century of wonder bread and its ilk). They have largely succeeded. Today yeasts are produced in large factories and exported all over the world. They are reliable and of high strength, work fast and can be bought dried or compressed. Their existence enables bread to be made quickly and easily, feeding much of the planet.
We Are What We Bake
Our human history can be traced through traditions of brewing and baking. Knowledge of fermenting grain led to the arts of brewing and baking which spread, from ancient tribes, to civilizations all over the world. Virtually every cultural group from every continent on the planet has their own unique daily bread that has for centuries been a staple of their diet. Today, in much of the world, people continue to leaven their bread with yeasts produced by the brewing of fermented beverages, and keep alive sourdough starters that have lived in their family’s kitchens for hundreds of years. As bread-in-a-bag became a staple food for much of the world in the 20th century, movements for cultural, environmental and social change have resisted the loss of this knowledge by keeping bread baking alive in supermarket-reliant societies all over the world. Parents teach their children and, grandmother to granddaughter, each generation reclaims their heritage.
Rise Up Baking is a proud supporter of people and communities reclaiming their own food cultures, and of local and global movements reclaiming real food. May we always remember how to bake our own bread!
Bibliography
Joe Pastry: Baking News, Tips, History and Science, “A Short History of Yeast”
The Red Tent by Anita Diamont, c. September 1997. ISBN 0-312-35367-6
ooh i had no idea you were doing this. how wonderful!