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.
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.
But why not let a bucket of water vaporise by it self? There are plenty of hot days during a year, and you don’t need salt immediately.
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.
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.
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]
You ever just boil some wheat then leave your leftovers in a jar too long?
All the f-ing time!
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.
People already explained that salt was relatively easy to get, steps to make bread are not that complicated and probably occured through trial and error, and for ale, it’s quite probably just cereals left to soak in water too long + natural yeast and you get an accidental alcohol. The trickiest part is to finetune the process to make it a bit consistent, but finding it out is very easy
Also once you have yeast going, keep that shit. It’s easy enough to do for yogurt, beer, wine, and bread with some extra steps.
Shit once wine is fermenting you can usually just take some of it say 1/10th, sit it aside mash more grapes and throw it in and that fermentation will take hold on the new sugars and keep going. Beer shouldn’t have been much different there. Bread starters you have to feed, but if you are making bread daily or a few times a week it’d be easy to keep.
Want to make yogurt, the easiest way it to buy yogurt, and use the end of it to start your batch.
I have to rack a bunch of hooch tonight and start a new batch and i’m going to try this thanks for the advice. i have looked into washing the yeast but it never occurred to me to just toss the few extra cups i get after racking into the next batch.
i switched to raw sugar and made invert sugar with that and it’s the most active batch of yeast i have seen yet so i think it should work well!
Let me know how it goes!
it’s looking good! I poured my juice and some invert cane sugar right into the lees in the primary and about 12 hours on i can see bubbles so it looks like it started! Pretty cool if it takes this will be the first alcohol I have made without directly tearing a yeast packet.
i wonder how many times i can do this before the primary needs to be sanitized.
Awesome to hear! You should be able to just poor a bit out, clean your equipment and put it back in and keep going
"Modern commercial brewers reuse yeast for several fermentations, often up to 40 or 50 batches, usually by pumping yeast directly from the bottom of one cylindroconical fermenter into the next. "
https://www.seriouseats.com/homebrewing-reusing-yeast-how-to-reuse-yeast-for-brewing-beer
oh that’s pretty neat! This is going to cut my cost per gallon by a decent chunk that Côte des Blancs champagne yeast is not cheap but i’m also lazy so bought more instead of washing. Being able to stretch it even a few batches is cool. I checked it again just now and it’s going strong, too!
Clearly it’s some kind of [perpetual stew] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew?wprov=sfla1) of yeast, which would make a good name for an obscure local band of extreme metal
