Junior smudger

  Ok, so there's been a bit of a break but we're back to bread. We haven't looked at timescale yet and I'm sure you're curious. What I found out is that though the Egyptians depicted bread making in tomb paintings about two and a half thousand years BC, they were not the masters.

  It looks like they were the first lot to work out how to produce creative, consistent results. They sifted flour, (wheat, if you were rich otherwise it was barley), and kneaded it, producing a dough that was liquid enough to be poured in to pre heated moulds that looked suspiciously like inverted pyramids. Another mould was put on top and the whole thing got put back in the oven.

  Others were making bread too, some using pre heated moulds or pots, but maybe leaving the pots in embers or buried to complete the cooking process. The real masters were the Greeks who really came up with the first proper bread oven that could be loaded from the front.

  Meals became bread with an accompaniment. Most folk weren't rich enough for meat so would have whatever veg they had grown, caught while fishing or maybe cheese, on top of the bread. One such bread was cooked in an earthenware platter before being topped. There are familiar dishes that continue that tradition; there is pissaladiere, (one of my favourite treats from French bakeries) and of course pizza, which both started life as bread topped with onion and pickled fish.

  Before I go, I thought I'd explain that today's photo is courtesy of my enthusiastic nephew (6) who, unbeknownst to me, had turned on my phone's camera and run around practicing his craft. When I later got home and started looking through the library I realised a mystery cameraman had been hard at work. The only way I realised it was him was he'd left a selfie behind. Busted!

Kirk out

RevoltingFood.com