People can grow vegetables and simply eat. But bread is way too complicated.
There is a bakers’ dozen of big steps to go from wheat into bread. And multiple special structures needed too.
Same with beer. Wine makes total sense but how do you even invent ale? How are these common foods everyone knows and uses?
I was thinking “imagine if mediveal people knew how to boil seawater and sell salt” and now I spent 20 extra minutes in the shower.
Beer and bread share a common ancestor: gruel. Put grain in water to soften. Works better if you also heat the mixture. Now you have a carb-rich slurry or paste in which bacteria have been killed off, suitable for staying alive.
Don’t eat it all right away. Let it sit around for a bit, and wild yeasts will grow in it first, before bacteria start colonizing it.
Pour off the liquid: that’s a primitive beer. Let the remaining mash dry out a bit; that’s a primitive bread.
Actual beer and actual bread are just evolutions along the same lines.
What really blows my mind is the dude that mixed oil and eggs and decided to beat the bejesus out of the mix for half an hour by hand and got mayonnaise.
When you got nothing else to do except wait for GTA 6 you might as well beat the shit out of some mayonnaise
Cooking must’ve been very exciting before all the recipes were discovered. It must’ve been like culinary alchemy.
yeah it’s too bad every possible food has already been invented
Medieval people totally knew how to boil water and leave salt behind, and the most basic bread was probably an accidebtal discover when people used to put hard grains in water to soften them, someone had the idea to ambush them first
People back then were just as smart as people now. Knowledge accumulates slowly over time and that’s that limits progress. We discover things slowly but once we know them we discover even bigger things I’m a feedback loop.
They knew you could, but mostly didn’t because it takes a ton of energy to boil off water. There was no petroleum, no coal, so you would need a bunch of wood. So you use a bunch of wood to boil a liter of ocean water and you would get about 35 grams of salt. It just wasn’t worth it.
We’re cooking on the shoulders of giants.
These people, they had the same brains we have now. But they largely got by on a lot of physical labor so they had a lot of time to think. And they didn’t have a lot of exterior lighting to go around and do things in the dark so they had a lot of time to experiment inside.
I think it’s easier to consider that probably every combination of everything to eat and ways to cook things has been explored in depth. Every single seed of every weed out there has been ground and tried.
Nah dude just read about the earliest versions of beer and bread and it all makes sense. The earliest version of beer was more like a fermented porridge of malted barley, and the earliest version of bread was like a rough corn bread. Over time people improved both products but it was slow going. The key is knowing that dough and wort will just naturally ferment on their own if left out in the air and that both of those things can be made way more simply than a modern bread made with white all purpose flour or wort made with malt syrup.
Ancient people were just as smart as modern people, they just weren’t as educated.
Humans are really good at figuring things out and tweaking things based off of previous results.
They also had more free time to figure things out.
They also didn’t have televisions, computers or phones to distract them. So they’d watch the stars or nature for entertainment and eventually, naturally see patterns and wonder what would happen if they applied those patterns for their own gain.
And less things to work with, so had to get creative to avoid diet fatigue (which is lethal) and only those creative enough people survived to create the people today.
A lot of fermented stuff like bread, cheese, wine and beer most likely started as “stuff forgotten in a pot” - not very complicated. In case of bread you need: two stones for milling the grain, a pot to mix it with water and store it, and then a fire to bake it. Not medieval tech, but way earlier.
Beer has been known since at least the bronze age, there are recipes known today, but the initial stage was, yet again, mill some grain, mix with water, forget in a pot.
Wine: forget some fruit in a pot.
Source: Reading history, plus my ADHD brain keeps forgetting stuff in the kitchen. I accidentally invented soda one of these days, because sometimes the forgotten stuff gets fizzy, too (you do need to invent the hermetically closing jar for that though, open clay pot doesn’t work in that case)!
Btw one of my crazier theories (although I’m not the only person considering it) is that it wasn’t us domesticating the world, but that we were domesticated by yeast. So it was inevitable that we kept producing vessels and feeding the fungus with sugar in ever more refined ways. Fungus wants to grow.
I really want to know what was going on in the head of the first person to eat yogurt. “Hey mark, you know that milk we were trying to turn into cheese? Well it’s not milk anymore, and it’s not cheese either. I’m going to try it with some berries or something.”
Probably some variation of “fuck I’m hungry”
It’s a great motivator.
My favorite “oops” story… Guy went camping and wanted to keep the food in the cooler REALLY cold so he used dry ice instead of ice.
Accidentally created carbonated grapes. People have duplicated the effect with home soda machines.
Google “Fizzy Grapes”.
I’ve done this a bunch of times when camping.
Good, crisp apples are the best. A carbonated honeycrisp apple is amazing!!!
I always heard it was wheat that domesticated us
It was probably a range of plants and fungi seeking interaction with a species that could care for them and bring them to new places. Maybe wheat and yeast ganged up to control the apes? However the first plant humans propagated were fig trees, and apparently the first plant we grew in a gardening context was the bottle gourd (pot to ferment stuff in!) Maybe we find out one day which of those fuckers are responsible for us having credit scores and 9-5 now!!
The first step with bread is grinding the corn. This a basic way to make it edible for the tribe. Have you ever tried to bite on a corn of wheat or rye?
Mix it with water and cook it to make it softer, and you get a kind of porrige. Leave it warm over night, and you have a sourdough. Rekindle the fire on the next day, and you’ll have a proto bread.
From there to the white bread made with a dozen chemical stabilizers, acid regulators and raising agents as they are sold in the supermarket is just the result of refining the process.
From there to the white bread made with a dozen chemical stabilizers, acid regulators and raising agents as they are sold in the supermarket is just the result of refining the process
Or there’s just, you know normal bread, flour, water, yeast and salt. You don’t need all that extra crap.
Of course nobody needs it. But >99% only know it that way.
99%
I highly doubt that. Being from a European country, a bakery around the corner with fresh bread is the most normal thing. Supermarket bread is highly frowned upon here and definitely not something most people would ever buy. As is the case in most of the world (either by baking themselves or going to the bakery) - except of course the USA I presume
If you believe that your local bakery can survive without those chemicals, think again. There are a handful of specialized bakeries that actually work on “clean” recipies, but they are rare and much more expensive.
Yes, even in Germany, the country of bread, rising agents and acidity regulators are common. Whenever you see a “bakery” put prepared rolls into the oven, you can be sure that chemistry is the bakers best friend.
You think the rest of the planet is like the US. It actually isn’t. It’s more like 4% know it that way.
You have fallen for the myth that salt was rare and expensive in ancient times. Medieval people did know how to make salt out of seawater. There were salt works all over the coasts of Britanny and Normandy during medieval times. Salt was not rare or expensive, except that they did need a lot of it because it was one of their prime preservation ingredients, so they needed barrels and barrels of the stuff, and that could drive prices up. But it was not because they didn’t know how to produce salt in enormous quantities.
Same goes for Roman times. The myth that salt was so rare and precious that it constituted part of the pay for a Roman soldier is wrong. It was because salt was such an important part of the diet and for preservation that it was given this way. They got grain and oil as well.
It’s also because salt is heavy as fuck, so transporting it from coasts and places with salt mines was expensive.
As expensive as any other good weighing the same. They would have transported it mainly on ships, where weight wasn’t really a problem. Salt wasn’t particularly expensive, that is my point. You seem to be suggesting the opposite, ignoring basically everything I just wrote in my comment.
Salt was not expensive for people living near the coast/inland salt mines. It got very expensive for people not living near centers of salt production, where ships don’t help much with transportation. It’s heavier than water by volume, because it’s a rock.
I was adding to your comment, because you skipped over the shipping costs, which made up the majority of the price for people not lucky enough to live near salt production.
It’s like mangoes today. If you live where they grow, they’re cheap as fuck. If you don’t, they’re expensive, but not impossible for most people to purchase.
you don’t have to boil seawater to make salt. you let it evaporate in the sun.
Not in northern Europe you don’t, unless you want your salt diluted even more.
Short as it is on the cosmic scale, history’s been a pretty long time. Nobody found wheat and started making bread the next day. It was an incredibly long process that probably started with soaking the grains they were eating to make them more palatable and easier to consume. Then somebody thought to heat the wet grains. Then someone decided to crush the grains and you had porridge or gruel. A few iterations later someone comes up with a simple unleavened bread. Naturally-occurring yeast and dough left alone for a few hours could probably lead to rudimentary rising dough from there, and eventually we have brioche and marble rye.
Check out the Wikipedia page on salt pools in the Camargue region of France. https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salins_d'Aigues-Mortes
This dates back to antiquity.
People needed beer because the water was not always safe to drink. The alcohol in beer kills parasites and bacteria that might make you sick. Even kids drank light beer in medieval times for this reason.
I believe that the the claim that medieval people needed to drink beer because water wasn’t safe to drink is a bit of a myth. They built aquaducts, dug wells, etc.
As far as I understand it, it was more to do with preference (beer is great!) and calories. Beer was a good way to turn grains into easily quaffed liquid meals.
To be fair, wells and aquaducts are fairly clean ways to get water (read: animals haven’t shit or died in it yet). Rivers and other surface water were as bad as today, if not worse because it was a de facto village sewage system. Water quality issues were also mitigated by a diet very heavy in stews and soups, so less extra hydration was needed.
Why do you think that shit was put into the waters. There were no artificial fertilizers. Dung (animal and human) was an important resource you wouldn’t want to waste. Till quite recently it was normal to collect your waste in the cesspool and than fertilize your fields with it or sell it to an farmer
You ever just boil some wheat then leave your leftovers in a jar too long?
All the f-ing time!
How Bread Built Civilization: From the First Farmers to the Modern Factory [1 hour documentary]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=892yaBEwtbM
How Salt Shaped Society: From the Roman Empire to the French Revolution [53 minutes documentary]
