Hi gareth981,
"How and when did people discover that yeast could be used to make bread?"
Briefly, yeast wasn't really "discovered" in a "Eureka!" sort of way
but rather it evolved over a very long period of time. Interestingly,
wine, not bread, was probably the first food to be processed with
yeast (found naturally in the environment) and it isn't hard to
imagine someone adding alittle wine to some dough for moisture and
eureka! Once they discovered that they could save a bit of dough for
leavening the next batch (sourdough), they were all set and on their
way to what we think of as bread today.
"Yeast has been an important part of human civilization for a very
long time. The earliest evidence of wine making has been dated to
Neolithic times ~7400-7000 years ago."
"The making of wine was probably man's first experience with yeast
because the process does not require the use of an inoculum of yeast."
"It appears that bread making dates back at least 6000 years, but use
of leavening, which required the development of suitable cereal grains
with easily removable hulls, gluten, and the introduction of yeast
cells, did not appear until around 500 BC (McGee 1984). With the
development of agriculture, it was probably found that addition of
some of the fermenting wine to dough resulted in a lighter, more
pleasant bread. Alternatively, insects may have landed on the dough
and inoculated it with yeast. The use of leavening is described in
several verses of Exodus in the Bible. It was found empirically that
some of the leavened dough could be used as a starter for a new batch
of dough. It is likely that, until recently, the yeast used in baking
was evolving, with the participation of man, because starters were
transferred sequentially from one baking to the next. Following the
discoveries of Pasteur and the development of microbiological
techniques including the concept of "pure culture," specialized
strains were introduced into these industries and evolution was
partially interrupted."
http://www.genome.org/cgi/content/full/10/4/403
Bread Info - History:
"Wheat has been cultivated by man since before recorded history. It is
conjectured by anthropologists that hungry hunter/gatherers first
stockpiled the grain as a storable food source. When it got wet, it
sprouted, and people found that if the grain was planted it yielded
yet more seeds.
Grown in Mesopotamia and Egypt, wheat was likely first merely chewed.
Later it was discovered that it could be pulverized and made into a
paste. Set over a fire, the paste hardened into a flat bread that kept
for several days. It did not take much of a leap to discover leavened
(raised) bread when yeast was accidentally introduced to the paste.
Instead of waiting for fortuitous circumstances to leaven their bread
people found that they could save a piece of dough from a batch of
bread to put into the next day's dough. This was the origin of
sour-dough, a process still used today.
In Egypt, around 1000 BC, inquiring minds isolated yeast and were able
to introduce the culture directly to their breads. Also a new strain
of wheat was developed that allowed for refined white bread. This was
the first truly modern bread. Up to thirty varieties of bread may have
been popular in ancient Egypt."
http://www.breadinfo.com/history.shtml
Planet Wheat - A Short History of Bread:
"About 10,000 B.C., man first started eating a crude form of flat
bread - a baked combination of flour and water.
"Ancient Egyptians are believed to be the first to have baked leavened
(raised) bread. About 3,000 B.C., they started fermenting a flour and
water mixture by using wild yeast which was present in the air. Since
wheat is the only grain with sufficient gluten content to make a
raised or leavened loaf of bread, wheat quickly became favored over
other grains grown at the time, such as oats, millet, rice, and
barley. The workers who built the pyramids in Egypt were paid in
bread."
http://www.cyberspaceag.com/breadhistory.html
Additional Link:
Yeast:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeast
I hope this helps - if you have any questions, please post a
clarification request before closing/rating my answer and I'll be
happy to reply.
Thank you,
hummer
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