America has been having a love affair with bread since before she was a country. In fact, most humans everywhere enjoy some type of bread all around the world. It is something that humans have done for over 30,000 years, say many historians.
Bread has been a very popular food for thousands of years for many different reasons. On of the main reasons is that it is not too terribly difficult to make. Of course, you need an oven hot enough to bake it in, but if you have that, you only need a couple of key ingredients.
Wheat flour is one of the primary ingredients and the other is yeast. Wheat flour is the most popular type of flour that is used for bread baking. It has two proteins that will form gluten, which gives bread its elasticity and structure. Yeast is another major ingredient in baking bread. Yeast is single-celled organisms that feed off of simple sugars. Yeast is what quite literally brings the bread to life.
Many of us go through our lives and eat our bread without giving much thought. We go to the local supermarket and try to pick the fresh bread from the bread that is already beginning to go stale. Sometimes we do not even realize what we are sacrificing when we buy supermarket bread instead of bread baked with local ingredients from the quality bakery in town.
When you have bread baked with local ingredients in the town nearest you where wholesale baked goods are being produced and sold, there is a kind of freshness in the taste and smell of it all that you can only find in that neck of the woods. It’s in the soil. It’s in the technique and the local ingredients.
In the latter part of the 20th Century, Americans began eating less bread. It was certainly still a vital part of what was a part of many meals, but the mass-produced, mass-delivered types of bread that filled the grocery stores all around the country were not as thrilling as they once were. There was much that was bland in the way of bread making.
Recently, there has been a rediscovery of traditional types of artisanal breads. Bakers all over the country are producing breads that are similar to those that were baked a thousand or more years ago.