Food Tradition

Bread Baking

Food Production and Processing Traditions

The tradition of turning a cereal grain, most often wheat, into a baked loaf or flatbread, whether leavened by wild or cultivated yeast, chemically leavened, or left flat and unleavened. Leavened bread baking is itself an application of fermentation, and the two traditions overlap directly wherever a dough is left to rise before baking. Bread traditions vary enormously by region, from wheat-leavened loaves across Europe and the Middle East to the flatbreads of India and the Middle East and the wheat-based pizza dough of Italian cuisine.

Facts

Origin Period, From (Year)

from -12,400 1

Radiocarbon dated to roughly 14,400 years before present (calibrated to a circa 12,400 BCE calendar date).

Origin Period, To (Year)

to -10,000 2

the subject's own accountMarks the end of bread baking's origin period as the point the source dates the spread of grain agriculture, closing the pre-agricultural phase this entity's own origin-start-year (circa 12400 BCE, the Shubayqa 1 find) already covers.

Origin Region

The Shubayqa 1 site in northeastern Jordan, where charred remains of flatbread made from wild cereals and club-rush tubers were baked by Natufian hunter-gatherers, predating the advent of agriculture by several thousand years. 1

Connections