Atlas Trail
Ingredients Made by Transformation
Some of the most important ingredients are not found but made: milk becomes cheese and yogurt, grain and fruit sugars become vinegar, and soybeans become tofu and miso. This trail follows eight of them, roughly from the oldest recorded use to the newest, to show how fermentation and curdling turned perishable raw foods into lasting staples.
Stop 1 of 8.
Ingredients
Milk is the starting point: the atlas dates its earliest use to between 9000 and 7000 BCE in Mesopotamia, and it is the base for other dairy products, which is why the trail begins here.
Stop 2 of 8.
Ingredients
Cheese is made by curdling milk, adding rennet or similar enzymes to coagulate the casein and then separating the curds from the whey. The earliest evidence of cheesemaking in the Mediterranean dates to about 5200 BCE on the coast of Dalmatia in Croatia.
Stop 3 of 8.
Ingredients
Yogurt is milk fermented by bacteria, chiefly Lactobacillus delbrueckii subspecies bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus, which turn milk sugars into lactic acid. Its origins are unknown, but Neolithic people in Central Asia and Mesopotamia probably discovered it around 5000 BCE.
Stop 4 of 8.
Ingredients
Butter shows a third way to transform milk: churning cream or milk to separate the fat globules from the buttermilk, leaving a spread of about 81 percent butterfat. Salt was added from antiquity to help preserve it during transport.
Stop 5 of 8.
Ingredients
Vinegar is usually made by a double fermentation, first yeast turning sugars into ethanol and then acetic acid bacteria turning the ethanol into acetic acid. The first documented evidence of vinegar making is from the ancient Babylonians around 3000 BCE.
Stop 6 of 8.
Ingredients
Yeast is the single-celled fungus behind the first step of that fermentation. With at least 1,500 recognized species, about 1 percent of all described fungi, most reproduce by budding.
Stop 7 of 8.
Ingredients
Tofu is made by pressing the curds of coagulated soy milk into blocks, from silken to extra firm. Its making was first recorded in the Chinese Han dynasty, and legend credits Prince Liu An of Anhui province.
Stop 8 of 8.
Ingredients
Miso ends the trail with a fermented paste of soybeans, salt and the mould culture koji. It descends from the Chinese condiment jiang, and the earliest secure Japanese reference, under the name misho, is in the Taiho Code of 701 CE.
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