Today, if you step out anywhere, whether in a city or a small town, you can always find bakeries. With the advancement in technology and new inventions, this art is thriving. New delicacies and fusion cuisines are giving rise to more and more baked products, and social media is doing its job of making them popular.
Bakeries are such a normal part of our lives that we barely pause to think about how they came to be. However, research highlights that baking, the process of cooking by dry heat, especially in an oven, is probably the oldest cooking method. In fact, bread was already a common staple in prehistoric times.
Archaeological evidence suggests humans began baking about 10,000 years ago. This was when they settled down from their nomadic life and started farming. With accessible grain, milling it into flour and baking bread was a natural next step.
Ancient Egyptian tombs also yielded stale bread, shedding light on baking during that age. However, in 2018, the history of baking as we knew it completely changed.
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Reports show that Amaia Arranz-Otaegui, an archaeobotanist from the University of Copenhagen, found tiny black particles scattered around an ancient fireplace.
She was collecting dinner leftovers from the Natufians. This hunter-gatherer tribe lived in the area more than 14,000 years ago during the Epipaleolithic, a period between the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras. Well, she was shocked to realize that these black particles were actually the oldest bread remains in the world.
Researchers found these charred flatbread crumbs at the Shubayqa 1 site in the Black Desert of northeastern Jordan; they were almost 14,400 years old.
“Finding bread in this Epipaleolithic site was the last thing we expected!” says Arranz-Otaegui. “We used to think that the first bread appeared during the Neolithic times, when people started to cultivate cereal, but it now seems they learned to make bread earlier.”
When we speak about the history of baking, we have to talk about the historic bakeries discovered in Pompeii. Historians claim that buying bread was extremely common in ancient Rome, and they have found about 35 bakeries in Pompeii. Many homes back then baked their own bread, but buying from bakeries was still popular.
Bakeries were easy to identify because of their large bread ovens. And here’s the interesting part: archaeologists found around 80 loaves abandoned in an oven at the time of the eruption, showing that demand for shop-bought bread was high.
Today, a few old bakeries around the globe are still operating. For instance, the Hofbäckerei Edegger-Tax is the oldest operating bakery in Graz, Austria. Founded in 1569, it served royalty and still bears the imperial insignia on its storefront.
Although it was first mentioned in 1569, the building is believed to date back to the 14th century. Its best-known specialties include “Sissibusserl” and “Kaiserzwieback”. The bakery claims many products are still made by hand using traditional recipes.
