By: Lia Contesso
Submitted: 2010-06-30 08:04:38 | Word Count: 521
Among the bakery products, bread is the most ancient and common, but in modern times you can easily find any kind of products, form freshly baked bread to the deep-frozen pastries. Bread was already known at the homo erectus’ times – we are talking about one and a million years ago: they milled cereals with two stones and mixed them with water, then they cooked the mixture on a hot stone. Many years later, around 3500 B.C., ancient Egyptians discovered that fermenting the dough, that is to say leaving it to rest a night and cooking it on the day after, the bread was more fragrant.
For the Hebraic population, instead, the unleavened bread had a symbolic meaning: the fact of being not risen and of lasting for a long time associates it with trips, hence to the Egypt exodus; for Christian people bread reminds the Last supper. Continuing the trip through time discovering bread, we must go to Greece, where great bakers started to produce as many as 70 different qualities of bread.
Coming to modern times, technology came to help bakery: industrial machineries help out the bakers with their work, although their work keeps being very tiring, and they keep having to start working in the middle of the night to let the dough take its time to rise and the to cook. Apart from the machineries, nowadays there are modern technologies as well, that allow a long preservation of the bakery products: the frozen bread, for example, is very used in bars and pubs that offer sandwiches and appetizers of various kinds to their clients, and buying it they make the storage easier.
There are many kinds of bread, of course, and they change according to the areas and to the use it is destined to. For example, the kebab bread uses to be soft, round and empty inside, to allow space for the abundant filling; referring to the German bread, instead, you generally mean rye bread, that in the northern countries is common because it stands cold much better than wheat. In Italy, then, the abundance of kinds of bread and bakery products is such that even for Italian people it’s difficult to know those out of their region; just to name some, there’s the cafone bread in Naples, the piadina in Romagna, grissini in Turin, carasau in Sardinia, tarallo in Apulia, Genoa’s focaccia ... the list is very, very long – and tasty!
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Other than accompanying meals and being a base for sandwiches, bread is used in many ways and, most important thing, you never really have to throw it away: when it’s old you can use it to make breadcrumbs, used in many recipes, or you can make a bread cake, easy and yummy. Summing up, bakers have an essential role for all of us: the result of their work arrives on every table, and you can find it in any bar!
