bread, from seed to loaf by Stephen Simpson

I've been watching videos about the history of bread and beer. I watched very good videos on early humans as hunter gatherers chancing upon grassland areas and discovering new food source in grains. But carrying around all those grain bundles was ridiculous and that's how they decided to settle and stay put. And that was the beginning of civilization arising in the area of the Fertile Crescent. I saw maps of the Fertile Crescent and expansion routes.

I did not find what I was looking for, a video on the beginning of bread and beer occurring simultaneously in history. I guess I'll have to make one myself. The videos I found and watched, although very good and quite thorough and fun to watch treated both bread and beer as separate specialties. Because they are separate specialities. But they both have the exact same genesis, and they both arose from a mysterious unseen element that must have seemed to early humans as magic. Yeast. Natural yeast flying around all over the place clinging to everything including the grain as it grows. The videos do not give this element it's due. When relating bread with beer they say something like "the barm from beer was added to dough for leavened bread" or conversely in discussing Egyptian beer, "pieces of bread were dropped into vats of water to make beer."

Maybe so. And maybe they both occurred by themselves, and interchanged with each other over time. The area of the Red Sea is so yeasty that bakers prepare sponge and set it outside their workplace. Within hours it's inoculated and active with yeast and bacteria culture. And it's a very good culture. You can buy it from Sourdough International online. Likewise, areas of Great Britain are so yeasty their beer in inoculated with airborne yeast by open vats. The same thing can happen in Egypt and other areas across the globe. Some places are incredibly yeasty, like Hawaii. My brother bet me that my experiment wouldn't work. I said, "James, come on. Look around at all this flora abundance. At every level of plant life. That same thing occurs on the microscopic level. I'm certain this will work very fast." And it does. I collected airborne cultures three times in excess of what was already on (imported) flour within hours. Overnight the collections are outrageously strong. There is no need whatsoever for commercial yeast in Hawaii. It's all right there at hand. That will go for making both bread and beer. Commercial strains would be for the purpose of being specific and exclusive. Not for speed. I still have my Hawaiian cultures, and they're still very strong, unique in their aspects, and undiluted by mixing with stains in Denver air and on flour. They overtake all of that.

It doesn't seem to occur to food archeologists that beer and bread are the same things in liquid and solid forms and that the same airborne yeast and bacteria organisms are responsible for both. Occurring at the same time.

Early beer wasn't anything like beer today. Hops wasn't an ingredient until thousands of years later. Early beer was thick and with chunks. People drank it straight from the vat with straws. Early beer was much closer to bread.

Bread and beer are twins. Paternal kind of twins that look different, yet they were both born the same moment in history by the same chance encounter, through the same agencies, wheat, water, and natural yeast and heat. They have the same DNA. They grew up together and after all these centuries and all these millennia of specialization they are still inseparable no matter how spectacularly specialized both have become all across the whole world.

This picture is actually black. It's on the side of a vase. They're drinking beer through straws because the beer has chunks in it. The reed straws are kind of a chunk filter. 

The dizzying effect of drinking the beverage put the drinkers in mind of connecting with their gods. They associated beer with gods.  There was a social, communal aspect to drinking beer.

The cuneiform figure for beer is an actual vase with two lines through it. It's shown in the first square. Both bread and beer were currency. Workers were paid in bread and beer. 

I wanted to discuss milling flour but that is an unnecessarily broad subject. Any video you may watch will leave out more than it includes. I just now watched a very good video that takes viewers through the whole process from combining grain in the field to cleaning the wheat of debris of sticks and again for metals, and again for stones, partially smashing to dislodge husks, shaking to separate husks, pulverizing to semolina flour, smashing to talc like powder, recombining for whole wheat, husks for animals. Good as the video is, it does not show exactly how the burrs work in opposite directions at different speeds to hold the grain and abrade it just so. It does not show how wheat grain is graded before being milled. It does not show how white flour is separated by protein percentage to market flour as low protein percentage for cakes, high protein percentage for pizza bread dough and bagels, and in between protein percentage for everything else, for ordinary household use covering both cakes and bread. You can actually feel the differences at hand by simply pushing or stretching high protein dough. It forms gluten connections instantly. Whereas all purpose flour take a little more work. The video did not discuss how grain from  various sources are combined at the mill. In fact, a large mill cannot answer where their grain comes from. It depends on the day. It depends on what they are milling that day. None of the videos discuss this complexity.

But this guy, Stephen Simpson keeps the whole process simple and straightforward. When this video finishes another is cued. Both videos show his whole process of growing his own wheat, harvesting, milling, and baking his bread. They are two very sweet videos.

And I wonder how he does so well with 100% whole grain. Usually those loaves bake as bricks. But his do not. He bakes some wonderful rolls. He uses two teaspoons of commercial yeast. I thought that was funny. It's a very small batch. It actually doesn't matter how much yeast he adds. Within an hour one teaspoon of active yeast will multiply to two teaspoons worth. It is active, after all. Overnight he could use 1/8 teaspoon for the same result and the additional beneficial element of time in fermentation, so additional character to his bread. But this is his show and he uses two teaspoons. 

This video receives surprisingly kind comments over there on YouTube. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do and decide to watch it and the second video. I wonder why Stephen Simpson hasn't landed on the idea that his grain already has on it all the yeast that he needs for fantastic sourdough bread. He has his ways, and his ways work very well for him.