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See also: Flat Bread; Banana Bread; etc.
BREAD
Around 10,000 B.C. man first started eating a crude form of flat bread—a baked combination of flour and water. Ancient Egyptians are usually credited with inventing the oven and discovering yeast leavening. About 3,000 B.C. they started fermenting flour and water mixtures by using wild, air-borne yeast. Eventually they added sugar, salt and flavorings such as poppy and sesame seeds.
One bushel of wheat yields 42 loaves of commercial white bread (1 1/2 pound loaves) or 90 one pound whole wheat loaves.
It takes a modern combine about 9 seconds to harvest enough wheat to make 70 loaves of bread.
In 1890 women baking at home produced more than 80% of the bread eaten in the United States. By the late 1920s, 94% of the bread eaten was baked by men in commercial bakeries.
The average American eats almost 60 pounds of bread a year.
Otto Frederick Rohwedder has been called the father of sliced bread. He worked for many years on developing a bread slicer, starting in 1912. His firsts efforts met with resistance from bakers, who informed him that the sliced bread would quickly go stale. By 1928, Rohwedder had finally designed a slicer that would also wrap the bread. A baker in Battle Creek, Michigan was the first to begin using his machine.
Sliced bread was banned in the U.S. during WW II. Sliced bread went stale faster, and so Americans used more wheat, needed to feed soldiers. Also, bread slicing machines needed metal parts for repairs - metal that was needed for war production.
Kansas produced more than 490 million bushels of wheat in 1997. This is enough to make more almost 36 billion loaves of bread.
Humans have been eating raised breads for over 6,000 years.
In 1910, 70% of the bread in the U.S. was baked at home.
Automatic electric bread making machines were introduced in 1992.
The first mechanical dough mixer was supposedly invented in the 1st century AD by Marcus Virgilius Euryasaces, a freed slave. It consisted of a large stone basin in which wooden paddles, powered by a horse or donkey walking in circles, kneaded the dough mixture of flour, leaven, and water.'
(Encyclopedia Brittanica)
January is Wheat Bread Month and Bread Machine Baking Month.
Zwieback is German for 'twice baked', and refers to a sweetened bread (or rusk) that is sliced and then rebaked or toasted until dry and dry and crisp. The term dates back to the 1890s.
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