The First Grain Foods

Before human beings learned to plant, they gathered wild foods. The seeds of various wild grasses, the   ancestors of modern grains, were rich in nutrients and valued by prehistoric peoples as important foods. These seeds, unlike modern grains, had husks that clung tightly to them. People learned that by toasting the seeds, probably on hot rocks, they could loosen the husks and then remove them by beating the seeds with wooden tools.

The early development of grain foods took place mostly in the eastern Mediterranean regions, because, it seems, this was an area where wild grains were especially abundant.

  Because of the lack of cooking utensils, it is probable that the earliest grain preparation was made by toasting dry gains, pounding them to a meal with rocks, and mixing the meal to a paste with water. Because the grains had already been cooked by toasting them to remove the husks, the paste needed no further cooking. Later it was discovered that some of this paste, if laid on a hot stone next to a fire, turned into a flatbreads, such as tortillas, are still important foods in many cultures

Unleavened flatbreads made from rain pastes are the first step in the development of breads as we know them.

To understand how breads developed, one must also understand a little about how grains developed. Modern yeast bread depend on a combination of certain proteins to give them their structure. For all practical purposes, only wheat and its relatives contain enough of these proteins, which form an elastic substance called gluten. A few other grains also contain gluten proteins, but they do not form as good a structure as wheat gluten.

Further, the proteins must be raw in order to form gluten. Because the earliest wild grains had to be heated in order to be freed from their husks, they could be used only to make grain pastes or porridges, not true breads. Over time, prehistoric people learned to plan seeds and, eventually, they planted only seeds of plants whose seeds were easiest to process. As result, hybrid varieties developed whose husks could be removed without heating the grains. Without this step, modern breads could not have come about.