The History of Bread

Bread might be the most important food humans ever made. It’s older than farming, older than cities, older than writing — and for most of history it was the meal, with everything else just something to put on it or eat alongside. I’ve eaten bread everywhere I’ve traveled, in every state and more than thirty countries, and I’ve never found a culture without some version of it. Here’s the long, remarkable story of how a paste of ground grain and water became the staff of life.

Older than agriculture

We used to think farming came first and bread second. It turns out to be the other way around. Archaeologists have found the charred crumbs of a flatbread in the Jordanian desert that are around 14,000 years old — made by hunter-gatherers thousands of years before anyone domesticated wheat. People were grinding wild grains and baking them on hot stones long before they settled down to farm.

In fact, one of the leading theories is that the desire for bread and beer is part of what drove us to invent agriculture in the first place. Once people knew how good ground, baked grain could be, it was worth the enormous effort of planting and harvesting it. Wheat and barley were among the very first domesticated crops, around 10,000 BC, and settled human civilization grew up around the grain fields. We still call fertile farmland a “bread basket.”

The Egyptians and the magic of rising

For a long time, all bread was flat. The leap to risen bread — light, airy, leavened — is usually credited to ancient Egypt, thousands of years ago. Whether by accident (a dough left out caught wild yeast from the air) or careful observation, the Egyptians learned to capture fermentation, and they built the first dedicated bread ovens to bake it.

Bread was so central to Egypt that it was practically money. Workers who built the monuments were paid in bread and beer — two forms of the same fermented grain. An Egyptian’s word for a well-off person translated roughly to someone who had plenty of bread. That deep link between bread, labor, and daily life has never really gone away.

Greece, Rome, and the professional baker

The Greeks turned baking into a craft, developing dozens of varieties and building better ovens. The Romans turned it into an industry: professional bakers’ guilds, water-powered mills to grind grain at scale, and — crucially — public bread. Rome fed its citizens with a grain (and later bread) dole, the annona, because a city that couldn’t feed its people didn’t stay peaceful for long. “Bread and circuses” was a real political strategy. When you eat a good loaf, you’re tasting something that empires organized themselves around.

Everybody’s bread, everywhere

One of the things I love about bread is how every culture made it their own with whatever grain and fuel they had. Wheat gave Europe its raised loaves; but there’s also the flatbread of the Middle East and India, the rye and pumpernickel of Northern Europe, corn breads of the Americas, rice-flour breads of Asia, the injera of Ethiopia, the tortillas of Mexico. Same fundamental idea — ground grain, water, heat — a thousand delicious local answers. Traveling and eating my way through them is a big part of why I bake so many kinds now.

For most of history, all bread was sourdough

Here’s a fact that surprises people: until about 150 years ago, essentially all leavened bread was sourdough. There was no packet of yeast. Bakers raised their dough with wild yeast kept alive in a starter, or with barm — the foam skimmed off fermenting beer. Every bakery, every farmhouse, kept a living culture going, passing a little of yesterday’s dough into today’s. The tangy, slow-fermented loaf we now treat as artisanal was, for thousands of years, simply bread. That’s why I gave sourdough its own whole section — it’s not a trend, it’s the original.

White flour, and then fast bread

Two 19th- and 20th-century inventions transformed bread, for better and worse. Roller milling made pure white flour cheap and universal — once a luxury, now the default. And in 1868 commercial baker’s yeast arrived (Fleischmann’s in America), giving bakers a fast, reliable, predictable rise with none of the care a sourdough culture demands. Bread got quicker, softer, more uniform, and much cheaper.

The endpoint of that road was industrial bread — culminating in fast factory processes that can turn flour into a wrapped, sliced loaf in a couple of hours. It’s a marvel of efficiency, and it’s also, to my taste, where a lot of bread lost its soul: the flavor that only time can build got engineered out.

The revival — and why I bake

The good news is that the pendulum has swung back. Over the last few decades there’s been a huge artisan bread revival — bakers rediscovering long fermentation, whole grains, wild yeast, and the slow methods that make bread taste like something. When the world stayed home in 2020, half of it seemed to start a sourdough starter. I think people are hungry, literally and otherwise, for food made with time and care.

That’s why I bake. Making bread connects you to the single longest, most universal thread in the whole human story — and the best part is that the “old” way, the slow way, genuinely makes a better loaf. The rest of this section is how I do it: the ingredients and the science, a deep dive on sourdough, the artisan craft, everyday loaves, bagels, and the ovens that bake it all.