Transcription
[Music] It's the one thing every culture has in common. In some way, shape, or form, we all have bread. 80% of the planet, almost 6.2 billion people, have had something made from bread within the last week. Maybe it was a sandwich, a slice of pizza, or a steamed bun, a Mexican taco, or a convenience store dessert, Indian Roti, or a French croissant. It's hard to believe, but all of these are the same thing: different forms of bread. And it begs the question: how did this happen?
Today on OTR, we're unraveling the story, going back to the very first day. To follow the history, trace the myths and legends around its creation, and understand the people and empires that gave us thousands of years of bread innovations. And of course, most of all, we're here to eat. To work our way through past and present with the ultimate day of carb-loading, as we dive into the biggest story in the world of food: the history of [Music] bread.
"Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who have sinned against us." This, of course, comes from the Bible, the so-called Lord's Prayer. Or maybe we should call it the prayer to the guardian of the bread, because that's the actual meaning of the word "Lord" from early English "hord." We don't even notice how omnipresent the concept of bread is in our everyday lives. Just in our language alone, we use it as a term for money, actually in two ways: "bread" or "dough." A bad idea is said to be "half-baked," but a great idea "takes the cake" or might even be "the best thing since sliced bread." If we fail at something, we're "toast." Drink too much, you can say we're "toasted." But if all is just right, we're "warm and toasty." A boring person is just "white bread." Someone smart knows "where their bread is buttered." And when we need to call a meeting, well, we "sit down to break bread." And that's just English. Every language has references, metaphors, or proverbs involving bread. From the ancient Romans to the Ottoman Turks, to today's German, French, and Arabic, bread is everywhere. And it's literally everywhere when you think about just how much everyday food derives from bread.
There are, of course, the loaves we use to make sandwiches or toast for breakfast, the baguette sold from Paris to Saigon, and croissants and pastries found at bakeries and cafes. There's English Yorkshire pudding, biscuits, muffins, bagels, and Chinese baozi. Then there are the flatbreads from Indian Roti to Jewish matzah, Mexican tortillas, and so much more, endemic to everywhere from Central Asia to Ethiopia to the Andes Highlands. Without bread, we don't have pasta for our shawarma, buns for our hamburgers, or cakes to celebrate our birthdays. There would be no cookies, no pretzels, and no Ritz crackers, no croutons for salad, and no dough for pizza. And if I kept going with a list of everything involving bread, it would be a video by itself. But we have a lot of ground to cover. The concept of bread is overwhelming, maybe more than any other food. It's the story of civilization. And every culture doesn't just have its own specialties; it has its own history, its own origin. But as always, we have to start somewhere. And in this case, well, at the very beginning. Before the first panini or cupcake or pita, there was grain growing in the wild, and the breakthrough that would change everything. So let's start [Music] there.
In 1914, an American archaeologist named James Henry Breasted wrote a book about the origins of civilization, tracing the roots of almost everything from the invention of the wheel to written language to agriculture, to one narrow strip of land stretching from Egypt's Sinai Peninsula to the Persian Gulf in the shape of an upturned U. An area of abundance, fed by the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the delta of the Nile River. He named this the Fertile Crescent, and it was there, somewhere in this region, that pretty much all of advanced society begins. But as for why this region was so significant, so essential in building the modern world, well, that traces back to one spark around the year 9000 BC: the advent of agriculture, and specifically the planting of grains.
According to archaeologists, the first farmers focused on one of three crops, depending on the location: emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, and barley. All three are grasses native to the Fertile Crescent, and all appear in domesticated form at just about the exact same time, showing up with the first towns and settlements all across the region. And while we might never know what sparked this breakthrough, we do have a pretty good idea why these were the three that were chosen. And that's because they're all naturally self-pollinating, which means once planted, and with enough sunlight and water, a field can thrive and produce its edible fruit. Yes, botanically speaking, grains are fruits, without any need for outside help from humans or otherwise. It was a miracle plant, and it would serve as the staple, the centerpiece of the world's first true cuisine, alongside other fruits and vegetables native to the Fertile Crescent, from figs and apples to onions, olives, and asparagus.
And how that grain was eaten? Well, it would be soaked in water, pounded into a paste, and then spread out on a rock to cook on top of a fire. The world's first bread. Now, since the beginning of archaeology, historians assumed that farming came first, and then we figured out what to do with our grain. Basically, we planted wheat, and then we made dough. But that might not be the whole story. In 2017, a dig site in what's now Jordan turned up a very surprising find. It was bread made as long ago as 12,500 BC, prepared in the same way as the stuff found in the oldest settlements. It was discovered in a stone fireplace belonging to a civilization called the Natufians, who lived across today's Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, at the heart of the Fertile Crescent. The Natufians were not farmers; they were semi-nomadic foragers. And those first settlements where we see grains domesticated? Well, that would be 4,000 years later. But still, they were baking bread.
Now, this completely rewrote our knowledge of history, because it means that the Agricultural Revolution didn't give us bread; it was actually the other way around. This prehistoric tribe relied on bread from foraged grain, then they set out to plant their own grain and ended up settling throughout the Fertile Crescent. Subgroups that would become the Sumerians, the Assyrians, and the Israelites, trying for 4,000 years before finally cracking the code and setting the course for everything that came after. They set out to make their own bread and ended up creating civilization.
The breads of the ancient world would take on different characteristics as new societies would form. They were all flatbreads, made of a rough flour and water, ground from wheat, barley, or rye. They were cooked over fire or under ash, a technique, by the way, that still exists called arbu, and practiced by the region's Bedouins. And it's not just arbu; a lot of the first breads ever made still survive to this day, recipes that somehow are still practically unchanged after almost 10,000 years. And that brings us to our first meal. [Music]
Well, so this is, um, this is that time in the shoot. Every time we do a video like this where I realize, uh, what my day is going to turn into. Um, this is our first location. Uh, we have five more to go planned after this. Um, and I have overdone it. And I think that's going to be a theme throughout the day. Uh, Daria will join us for at least part of the shoot, so it's not only me and Ian eating everything I order. Um, but let's, let's just start with a bite of, of this. This is the, the fatah, the, the national dish of Yemen, with two different kinds of flatbread, cooked in different kinds of, uh, stone ovens. And then this is something we're going to have later. And I actually ordered one more thing that's still on the way, which I'll talk about when it arrives. But let's just try this [Music] first.
For our first meal of the day, we chose a Yemeni restaurant showcasing dishes with ancient histories in the Arab world. Maybe the most fascinating thing about the breads on offer is that the three we chose are all different, but the dough for each one is identical. Exactly the same: just flour and water. But when cooked with subtle differences – the size or temperature of the oven, or the cooking time – it turns them into different breads altogether. So, this might be the most exciting thing on the table. And there's a reason why we came to this part of the city. You can get naan and tandoor bread, you know, in a lot of places. Uh, the dessert is really interesting, uh, if you want to call it a dessert. But this, so if bread is the first recipe ever, and what I mean by that is the first time we took more than one component, in this case, you know, grain and water, and combined it into something to make a dish, which it might be. It's one of the first recipes. This is probably the first dish ever that that used bread. And what that means is this was a leftovers dish. So this goes back to ancient Egypt. And what it was is you had bread that was left over, you tear it up, and you take whatever you're cooking and you put it on top of it, right? Right. In this case, it's a lamb, a lamb stew. And it looks like there are potatoes in this, which is a New World ingredient. So that itself is not as ancient and historic. But, um, yeah, it's the idea of taking, it's called fata, right? And what fata is, is a dish that goes back 5,000 years to to ancient Egypt, and takes leftover bread and puts something on top of it that adds some moisture. You know, it's a lamb stew in this case, so it softens up that leftover bread and makes it edible. And so this is the first use of bread in a cohesive dish that we've ever, we've ever, pardon me, that we've ever [Music] found.
How do I describe it? It's very mildly spiced. You know, this is again, this is an ancient dish that, disregard the potatoes. Um, it's just a lamb that's stewed, right? And classically, if you look back at, you know, the first evidence of this dish, um, they weren't using spices. Spices weren't for palaces, spices weren't for the masses. And that's still what this tastes like. It's just a savory, you know, very straightforward, simple lamb stew that soaked through some, some bread. It's exactly what it sounds like it's going to be. Um, self-bread soaked in honey. But the interesting thing is how, you know, all three of these are flatbreads, but they're all baked at different temperatures in different sized ovens to get the right texture. Yeah, super cool. Daria, it's a good thing she's not here; she's allergic to honey. All right, Ian, come help me. All, all right.
So this is what we know. The first bread discovered was made in Jordan around 15,000 years ago. The people who made this bread would fan out and settle the area now called the Fertile Crescent, where each subgroup would eventually figure out farming and create their own breads. Now, what would stand to reason is that since we know the beginning, to find the next part of this story, we need to follow the people and try to understand where the old Natufians would move and how they'd spread their technique through trade or expansion. Except when we do trace this history, we find something very different. Somehow, in every part of the world, places with no contact with each other, wherever tribes of hunter-gatherers would turn to farming independently, they'd cultivate grains, grind the grains into flour, and cook the flour into bread. And since they came up with it on their own, well, bread everywhere would take on a thousand different shapes and textures.
In the north of what's now India, the Harappans, the inventors of curry, well, by 5,000 years ago, they were using tandoor ovens to make roti and cooking chapati over fires. The lake dwellers of Switzerland built villages on stilts above the water, but they baked their bread on land using a hot stone, as did the first settlers of Persia, which would become the ancestor of naan. In what's now Croatia, the people made their own version, like the Arabs, figuring out how to regulate temperatures for softer bread, with their ovens having the added benefit of heating the home and providing hot water, allowing humans to thrive in Eastern Europe's cold temperatures. And even where there was no wheat, people still found a way to make bread. Like in South America, where arepas made from cornmeal appear in the oldest fossilized records. Australia's Aboriginals made their bread from millet, and there are some researchers who believe theirs was being baked before even the Natufians. And we could keep going and going and talk about how everyone everywhere came up with their own bread, and nothing connects to anything. And that is kind of the story. So what comes next?
The early history of bread is not straightforward. It's basically a whole bunch of people settling down all over the world and figuring out how to turn grain into food. But when it comes to all the stuff we know today, the foods we referenced right at the beginning, well, there is one common ancestor, one point of origin where a simple dough turned into bread (capital B) and took off on a fascinating and complicated path leading us to the present. And that begins with an accidental discovery on the banks of the Nile River. [Music]
This is yeast. It's a single-cell microorganism, technically a fungus, and it's everywhere: in plants and animals, floating in the air, and even deep underwater. Yeast feeds on sugar, a process we call fermentation. And when grains and water are mixed into a dough, if that yeast ferments, well, it releases CO2, making tiny bubbles that cause the dough to expand and rise.
In ancient Egypt, flatbread was a staple. Every household made dough and cooked it into bread. It was sold at the Nile markets as what might have been the world's first street food. And wheat and bread were essential in Egyptian life. But one day, a baker got distracted. We don't know why. He or she made a dough of emmer wheat and then forgot about it, leaving it out in the sun for a week or even more. But they did. And when they came back, it had changed.
Now, yeast was already well known in Egypt, if not by name. The Egyptians, and just about everyone, relied on it to make wine and beer. They didn't know what it was; in fact, nobody would until 3,000 years later. But they understood that something was causing grain or fruits to become alcohol. So, in each batch, they'd leave a wooden stick to collect the residue, the yeast, and then transfer it to the next batch as a shortcut. The Egyptians almost immediately recognized the connection and began using beer yeast to make bread and bread dough to make beer.
This technology would spread onwards quickly to the Greeks and the Etruscans, the Assyrians and Central Asians. Everyone now leaving their bread. And one technique in particular would, by 1000 BC, become the backbone of bread-making all over the ancient world. It would spread from Egypt, and it was based on that very first happy accident. You mix flour and water and leave it outside for a week or two weeks, and then that would be the base to allow you to bake endless loaves of the softest, crusty bread anyone had ever tasted. A single starter could last for a baker's entire career, so they'd give it names like a member of the family. And as for the bread? Well, today we call it sourdough.
There's something about growing up in, you were in Poland, you know, everyone wherever they grow up has this sort of, I don't know if it triggers childhood, or you smell fresh baking bread and it brings you back to like, just walking down the street at home, or Mom in the kitchen, or going to Grandma's house. Or there's something about being around baking bread that really is, uh, yeah, that's true. Actually, you know, you know, in Poland, we still have a lot of bakeries. Like whenever you come back from a party, I'm, I'm not drinking much right now, but I was, you know, younger, we was party a lot, and then whenever you come back after like 5:00 AM, 6:00 AM to home, you always pass some bakery with like, you know, good stuff, and you can just buy the bread like, not from the shop, but from the window, you know, you just buy the bread, go to home, and it's like, in starving after all this drinking, you just eat this bread with butter, that's it, you know?
Welcome to Larder, one of the best bread shops in Southeast Asia, and a joint venture between two Polish chefs with fine dining backgrounds, Radek Zabinski and Adrian Kenowski. Chef Radek is in charge of the meats and came here from Restaurant Gaggan Anand, currently number nine in the world. And before Larder, Adrian worked at Gaggan under Gaggan Aurora, a Michelin-starred chef. He's in charge of the menu and the breads. Uh, quickly, before we talk about sourdough, can you just kind of walk me through this corner of the room where we have our bread-making sort of process?
Yeah, sure. We have basically, right now, four different dough machines because we do, right now, around 20 to 25 types of different baked goodies. As you see, there's different sizes, they have also different purpose. There, that this tool will be mainly for the breads and for like, oh, sourdough, challah, blah, blah, blah. The small one will be for focaccia because we need high spinner because the hydration for our focaccia is around 98%, that means it's almost like a pancake dough. Mmm. Super liquidy. And if you don't want to like have this liquid dough, but you want to still have like gluten stretch, you need to whip it really hardly, and that's why we use this to machine for that. And then we have, what we have, one bread slicer, loading table to the oven. And what are we working on right here? I'm just, I'm just watching, watching this getting rolled out. I know, L, L, what are we doing? Pretzel. Pretzel. Making the pretzel.
Okay, so very quickly, 'cause I know you have a restaurant to run, and I have food to eat. Sourdough, the, you know, the story we've just told you, you know, how it was kind of first discovered by leaving dough out in the sun by accident, right, back in ancient, in ancient Egypt. It's not that different from how you'd create a sourdough starter today, right? It's just flour, water. It's basically the same. So talk me through sourdough.
Okay, that, that's, everything starts from the good flour with a high amount of proteins and good ratio of the of the all the grain sheets what you have from the, you know, from grain, because this gives you flavor. That means you mix this with water, leave it. When it's ferment, whenever it's ready, you just mix it with again water and flour, put some salt, then it's done. You don't need nothing extra, you know. It's, of course, you can mix different flours, as we do. We do right now, mix of T55, T85, spelt, and sometimes buckwheat, you know, it just depends. Because like, basically T55, which is classic, let's say the most common flour, as a AP, gives you texture and gives you the, like, no, this beautiful bubbles and stuff. And then T85, which is much more bread flour, or like spelt or buckwheat, gives you flavor. That means you always need to like balance the two flours to have like, still nice, beautiful, uh, texture and crust, blah, blah. And then you also need to mix it with flavor. Because for me, you can see a lot of beautiful breads on Instagram, but you can see they use only, you know, like, really basic flour without flavor. And of course, the picture looks beautiful, but there is no taste. And for us, it's important that whenever you buy bread, you can keep it for a weekend at home, and it's still good. Because I really hate when people waste food, you know? This is why I rather to like make, okay, let's, let's, let's mix the bread. Maybe sometimes the bread doesn't look that perfect as an Instagram bread, but I know it's good to eat for a week. But if you come to this restaurant, it's not going to be a week. [Music]
Home. I was just telling Ian a second ago, he's behind the camera. It's okay. We need to roll audio here. Everybody knows what, um, what sourdough tastes like. And then I took a bite, and I changed my mind, because this is so good. This is so good. It's [Music] like, how, how am I getting so excited about just a slice of bread with butter and mortadella? Um, you know, have you ever noticed that people who make sourdough at home, it's almost like they're in a cult? Where, you know, they'll, so the way I treat my dogs as a pet is like how people, you know, look after their sourdough starter. Um, and I understand why, because when you have a perfect version that just came out of the oven, it's soft, it's spongy, it, it's really, um, airy, but still moist. And then the, the crust is, is just that right level of, of, of firm and crunchy, but you can still bite through it. This is, this is really good.
The first sourdough bread was made in Egypt around 1500 BC, which was pretty much the same exact time as the last pyramids were built, the Valley of the Kings was constructed, and Moses received the Ten Commandments. Now, if you know the story from the Old Testament, as he led his people away from Egypt, Moses told them they had to keep moving and didn't have time to let their bread rise, so they'd need to survive on flatbread. This would be the origin of matzah, still a sacred food for the Jewish people.
Now, this is actually quite important because it tells us two things. First, it means that leaving bread must have caught on quickly throughout Egypt. I mean, yeasted bread had to have been common if making flatbread was worth noting in the Bible. And second, well, it means it's time for us to take a dive into bread mythology. The story of Moses leading his people through the desert is found in the second book of the Bible, the Book of Exodus. But if we combine both the Old and New Testament, there are no less than 492 references to bread, from its use as a peace offering in Leviticus, to its role in The Lord's Prayer, as we mentioned right at the start of the video, to the Book of John, where Jesus says, "I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will not go hungry."
In early Christian churches, members of the congregation would bring bread to the service, shared and taken as communion. Then, in the 11th century AD, the Catholic Church declared that bread would be used as a literal representation of the Flesh of Christ, and they began producing their own wafers, which were thin and dissolved easily, so that nobody had to deal with the moral complexity of chewing a tough piece of Jesus. Anyway, when you talk about bread in Christianity, you also have to mention hot cross buns, served each year on Good Friday. These actually date back as far as the third or fourth century AD, when bakers in Greece began stamping breads with the crucifix. Now, at the time, Christianity was fairly new to Greece, but the technique of decorating bread was not. In fact, all the way back in the days of the Empire, the Greeks were stamping sourdough with the word for good health and leaving them as offerings for Demeter, the goddess of bread. Demeter was also honored in Greek weddings with a fresh-baked loaf cut in half, and one piece given to each of the newlyweds to bless their union. This was recorded at the wedding of Alexander the Great and Roxana, by the way, in 327 BC.
To the Romans, Demeter would be known as Ceres, and they'd add another bread-related goddess as well: Fornax, the patron of ovens and baking. And it was also in what's now Italy, according to legend, that in the year 610, a monk decided to reward his students for their hard work in studying theology. He rolled out dough into a strip, which he folded in a shape resembling hands in prayer, and named them "pretzels," or Latin for "little rewards." Today, of course, we call these pretzels.
Now, none of this is to imply that bread in theology started with Europeans. In fact, wherever humans relied on bread, it would also form a part of the system of beliefs. As far back as ancient Mesopotamia, where the god of agriculture, Tammuz, or Dumuzid, is dragged to the underworld to his death, leading to the failure of wheat crops and the starvation of his people. As a result, his consort, Ishtar, the goddess of love, negotiated a deal for Tammuz to be allowed to return to life for six months each year. This is how we got seasons, with crops growing only in the warm months, before Tammuz must return to the world of the dead.
In what's now India, bread is referenced in Vedic texts written as far back as 1500 BC, contemporaneous with the time of Moses. In the Vedas, when roti is baked in the home, the family must make three for use as offerings. The first roti should be given to the family cow, which guarantees blessings and happiness. The second should be left for the gods as a tribute, and the third is for the dog to ensure protection against evil spirits. Only then can the family serve themselves and eat their bread. And finally, in Egypt, Osiris was worshiped as the god of bread, and also life, death, and fertility. According to their mythology, he was murdered and dismembered by his brother, with his body parts sent all across Egypt. His wife, Isis, would spend her life tracking down all of his parts and reassembling them, bringing him back to life. And so, to honor Osiris, Egyptian people once a year would bake a special bread made from grain mixed with Nile mud, dates, frankincense, myrrh, and a dozen other spices, and decorate the bread with precious gems. This would be baked in the shape of a person and then broken into pieces, honoring tradition and also the first example in history of the use of molds to create bread in a certain shape.
Along with yeast and bread molds, the ancient Egyptians also contributed one more innovation to the story of bread. And it also comes about because of mythology. See, while the Festival of Osiris might have only happened once a year, it was still essential for the people to leave offerings to the gods outside their homes each day. And as part of these offerings, bread would be soaked in honey to create something sweet and irresistible, so the gods would take notice and visit a home. This would be the very first example of sweet bread, the predecessor of what we now call cake. And that means before we move on, let's head back to the Arab quarter to see what desserts we [Music] find.
For our dessert, we decided to skip the heavy breads and go with some variation of the original dough soaked in honey. In this case, luqaimat, deep-fried dumplings said to trace back to 13th century Iraq, where they were first called luqaimat al-qadi, or "judges' morsels," because it was said that if you wanted to win a case in court, you should bribe the judge with these, because nobody can turn them down. Variations of luqaimat show up all across history throughout the Arab world, but it's hard to know if they were derived from this, or if they evolved independently, because dough soaked in honey was the first sweet snack almost everywhere. A dessert almost exactly like this, called loukoumades, were popular in ancient Greece and said to be given after events to the athletes of the first Olympics. That, by the way, was around 800 BC, which was exactly when we first find evidence of baklava in Mesopotamia, with flatbread dough layered with nuts and honey. And balls of dough soaked in honey were also served in what's now India, where around 500 BC, they'd replace the honey with a native plant used for the first time ever as a sweetener. That, of course, was sugar.
All right, so in my script that I had written, uh, for this video, this was the dessert segment, and we were going to go to a cake shop or some kind of a bakery and just, just feast on on on cakes. The amount that we've already eaten today, and how much we still have ahead of us, um, I had to kind of tone it down. And so we were very close to the area where there's a, um, Emirates-owned cafe, where Daria and I sometimes would sit by the side of the road and have a snack, which is dough soaked in honey. And we just sat down, and I asked the gentleman sitting next to me, "Do you mind if we, we film something?" He says, "No problem. I also have a YouTube channel." So, nice to meet you. Thank you so much for your time. Arabian Wolf 5, correct? Arabian Wolf Life. How much, in, in Arabic culture, you know, if you go back, we're a history channel, and, and what, how did dessert begin? It began with bread soaked in honey. And obviously, this is deep-fried dough. This is not an ancient dish. But wherever you go, and obviously for your channel, you're traveling considerably, there are variations of sweet bread, but not in the big, fluffy cake kind of way that we're used to in the West. It's, it's more simple. And it's, yeah, honey is a sweetener. It's very simple. And, uh, you can say in all Middle East, similar, there is not, there is no much difference between like the six Gulf countries. So only maybe the names are changing a little bit. This is by Arabic. In in Dubai, we call it Gat, just some small words like Gat Al Gat. And it is all, in Middle East, like same culture.
All right, this feels to me. I have, I haven't been to the Middle East in 13 years now. Uh-huh. As I knock my table over. This feels very familiar. Sitting outside. I do. I need, I need, um, you know, you can see shisha is technically illegal here in Thailand. Yeah. Sitting outside at a cafe, you start a conversation with somebody next to you. This feels like being back. Yeah. To me. To agree. Thank you so much for coming on microphone. I appreciate it. Thank you. Uh, and now you're going to have to help me eat this, because I'm so full, and we have a giant dinner to go to.
All right. For the people of Egypt, in the days of the Pharaohs, bread was obviously very significant. Through their baking and innovations, we find history's first leavened bread, the first desserts, in pretty much every early major breakthrough for their culture. Bread was life. And they thought so too, as they gave bread the word "h," the same as their word for "life."
Finding the roots of the words we now use for bread tells its own story. And for those of us in the Western world, well, it begins like so much of our language in ancient Rome, where bread was called "panis," as in "panis quadratus." This would evolve into the words used today in languages from French and Spanish to Romanian, Portuguese, and even Japanese. "Panis," by the way, was the singular of "panem," as in "panem et circenses," or "bread and circuses," the gift of the emperors to the people. And not coincidentally, the name of the universe in The Hunger Games.
The downfall of Rome began when, in the year 410, the city was sacked by the Visigoths under Alaric I. And through their own conquests in Europe, the Gothic word for bread would also stick around, which is surviving in languages like Russian, Polish, and Czech, and also English, as it would become "loaf," as in "loaf of bread." And as for the word for "Lord," which we referenced in the open. As for the word "bread" itself, well, that would come from the Saxons, the Germanic tribe who settled what's now England and also spoke Gothic, or an older variation. Their word was "brod" or "broad smile," meaning "a piece of something." This would become "brod clef," or "piece of bread," and then just "brod," then "bread."
And the English language would also take another word from the same Gothic language, this time brought by the Vikings, who arrived starting in the 8th century AD. They had a term for their own sweet version of bread, which they called "kaka." This would obviously become "cake," and also the word "cookie."
There's one more bread-related word in common use that also traces back to the fall of Rome. See, the capital might have been sacked by the Goths in 410, but the Empire survived. And the real downfall would actually begin 19 years later, when a group called the Vandals swept south from Poland. The Vandals knew better than to take aim at Rome itself, so instead, they invaded the Roman colonies in North Africa: Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria. But the way Rome was structured, certain provinces were designated only for grain, for supplying flour and bread to the capital. Well, it happened that the very best flour, durum wheat, still the favorite of the Italians, well, this came from the colonies seized by the Vandals. And in a matter of months, there were flour shortages. Citizens began starving. Romans rioted in the streets. And this would be a major factor in the final collapse, which would happen less than 50 years later. And as for the word? Well, that of course was "vandalized," as in "damage or destroy something," a legacy of how devastating it was for Rome when it lost its access to bread. Anyway, let's get back to the [Music] story.
By the time we reached the end of the first millennium AD, a trip around the world would encounter many of the breads we still find as staples today. There were, of course, the sourdoughs of Western Europe and the rye breads of Russia and Scandinavia. Italians, by the fall of Rome, were already making focaccia, and in the year 997, we see the first example of the word "pizza" used to place an order for a dinner in the city of Gaeta. The Indians were making a hundred forms of Roti, chapati, and paratha. And in the Middle East, the staple would be known simply as bread, or in Arabic, "naan." In China, the people of Shandong were eating a bread called "mantou," served stuffed with meat, and sometimes called the world's first hamburger. And there was also "mantou," with a Zhou Dynasty story claiming that this was invented by an ancient general who threw chunks of steamed bread into a river to earn the gods' favor before battle. This is how it got its name, which translates to "barbarian heads."
Far to the West, in Africa, the Ethiopians were turning their native grain called teff into injera, fermented and then cooked on a flat pan. And even farther west, the arepas of Colombia and Venezuela had spread across the region into southern Mexico, where they could be found alongside tortillas made from corn flour mixed with an alkaline solution, something still used for tacos and known as masa. All of these breads are still well known today, but they also have one thing in common, which is that for most of history, they were staples, peasant food. Everything we know about this stuff comes from archaeology and occasionally artwork. But palace cookbooks, upper-class records, treated bread as an afterthought, something served alongside the real dishes at the heart of cuisine. Bread was a lot of things in the Middle Ages; it was a source of food and a part of religion. But what it wasn't was elegant, except in just one part of the world.
Let's pick this up in the 14th century, when a warlord named Timur founded a new empire based in Samarkand, today's Uzbekistan. Now, for the last two centuries, his land had been occupied and administered by the Mongols, and the Crusades had decimated the trading relationship between Europe and Muslim Central Asia. But Timur wanted to make his homeland a new center for culture, so he brought artists, philosophers, and chefs from across the region. When Samarkand shows up in writing over the next few decades, visitors to the city were shocked to find a cuisine unlike anything else. Breads of all shapes and sizes, filled with meats and spices, the delicacies of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, and as far away as Georgia and Azerbaijan. Breads of all shapes and sizes, filled with meats, spices, and fine cheese, lavish, ornate, and royal, and all based on bread. Timur's kingdom would reshape food, not through him, but through his great-great-great-grandson, who would conquer India and start the Mughal Empire. Babur and his descendants would ally with the Persians, trade with Europeans, and the old Samarkand techniques would influence breads everywhere. And I can't think of a better place for our next meal than tracking down the incredible breads of Central Asia. [Music]
Welcome to Ava, a restaurant here in Bangkok specializing in Georgian food, but with the menu encompassing the specialties of Central Asia, from Uzbekistan to Azerbaijan. [Music]
All right, um, so this is, uh, the gravity of the amount of food that we are eating today has has caught up to me. Uh, I'm already full. Uh, this is, uh, if you ever want to meet Daria and I in person, this restaurant is probably a fairly safe bet. We were just here on New Year's Eve. That would represent our union. What do you mean? This restaurant? Or just to know us? This Daria loses complete control when there's this much bread on the table. Uh, so really quickly, let's go through what we have. Um, so Daria, you're in charge. Let's just tell me what, let's start with the superfluous bread on the. Which do you want to have a little bread as a, as a starter? No, no, no, no, no, no. Absolutely. Do we say anything about salads? No. Forget the salads. Okay. Start with this. This is the, um, this is the signature dish of this restaurant, or anything that's Georgian. This is called Khachapuri Adjaruli, from the region, special region in Georgia. So apparently there are several regions that are famous for their own style of bread and cheese mixed together, and this is one of the most famous ones that especially made it out of Georgia for the in the rest of the world. So this is Khachapuri. As far as I know, it's an Imeruli, I might be mistaken, but from my memory, it is an Imeruli flatbread with different fillings. And in this case, it is stuffed with spinach and cheese. Classic Imeruli dish. Okay. Next one is Pide, which is also called a Turkish pizza. So it's basically pizza. What's, can you say it? Pizza bread? It's called flatbread. It's a dough, dough, yes, with different fillings. This one is with lamb, I think, and spices. Correct. And this is, I don't remember the exact name of it. This is something, something Samarkand. So it's an Uzbek dish. It's delicious. It's basically fluffy, yeasty bread with a meat filling. Correct me if I'm wrong, but they've just brought in a new chef from Uzbekistan to make this dish for this restaurant, and it's new on the menu. And the first time we had it here was New Year's Eve, and it was delicious. Reason why we planned this for the shoot, because this is by itself worth a video. Uh, this looks amazing. So I'm going to keep holding it up. It is so hot. Like my fingers. Thank you very much. My fingers don't have much feeling left after a lot of years in kitchens. But that was, that was really [Music] hot.
Georgian and Central Asian cheeses are salty. So to me, the flavors are so much more intense. You see this? It looks like bread stuffed with meat, but it's intensely salty. Our cows don't cry. Really hold salt inside. Let's just shut up and [Music] eat. The crazy thing is also, everything on this table, including the sourdough, everything on this table is well over a thousand years old. Everything. Everything. Which is wild when you think about, you know, this as such a, you know, exciting feast of dishes that are popular today. All of these dishes are ancient. And, um, and so are you, and so, so, so am I. All right.
Well, bread was taking on royal characteristics in Central Asia. In Europe, it was feeding a growing peasant population thanks to advances in milling. Now, the first mills, water-powered wheels using the current of a river to grind flour, were described in ancient Greece as far back as the 3rd century BC. They were simple: a paddle built into a source of running water with a horizontal wheel that would turn in the current. When the wheel would turn, it would cause a millstone to rotate, grinding against a stationary stone onto which grains would be laid out. They weren't advanced, but they did refine flour, letting bakers start making more delicate breads, like cakes and desserts.
With the Romans came mills with interlocking gears, which let them turn in lower currents. And across the European flatlands, the Romans also used animal-powered mills, first invented in Carthage, which would show up independently around the same time in Han Dynasty China. And the windmill first appears in the 7th century, developed by the Persians. And according to legend, designed by a slave assigned to Caliph Umar, the father-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad. By the second millennium AD, it was common for every single town, every settlement, to have its own mill. William the Conqueror, in 1096, counted one for every 300 people across the whole of England. And as Europe rebuilt after the Black Plague, mills became bigger and bigger, dotting the landscape from Portugal to the Netherlands.
Now, what this meant was that refined flour was now common. Breads got softer, and this opened up a lot of new uses for bread. From the 15th century onward, we see a lot more cakes and pastries. We see new dishes like the Austrian Kipferl, or today's croissant. And we see the simple loaf of bread used not just as a side dish to a meal, but as a meal itself. Which brings us to the next part of our story.
It's the middle of the 18th century, and English men of noble birth were busy with high-minded pursuits like taking grand tours of Renaissance museums, playing polo, and ballroom dancing. And then at night, while many of them would mask up and hide out at some of the most debaucherous and lowbrow parties the world had ever seen, the so-called Hellfire Clubs were places where the elite could gamble and make all kinds of trouble. And nobody enjoyed these gatherings more than John Montagu, statesman, military officer, and the fourth Earl of Sandwich. According to the story, one night he found himself so absorbed in his card game that he refused to stop, even after hours and hours, and shouted to his cook to prepare him something to eat that he could consume with one hand without interrupting his gambling. So the cook placed a slice of beef between two pieces of bread. Other members saw this and asked the cook for what Sandwich was having, and cuisine would never be the same.
Now, in fairness to history, this was not the first time something was stuffed between slices of bread. A lot of other cultures had this idea, from the Jews to the Romans to the Greeks and the Ottoman Turks. But it never really went mainstream until that night at the Hellfire Club. So why was this any different? Well, as it happens, there were two things going on around the same time that would bring the sandwich into the global spotlight. First of all, this was pretty much the exact start of the so-called Industrial Revolution, where factories began to open, and millions of people left the farms and went to work. And that meant they'd need food to eat on the go. And nothing was more portable or easy to assemble than a sandwich. And second, in the late 1700s, the Dutch became the first to package and sell commercial yeast, allowing large-scale bakeries to make soft bread without the sourdough process.
As industrialization swept the planet, wherever there was bread, we see the arrival of the sandwich, with cultures making it their own by taking their own tastes and flavors and slapping them between slices of bread. It was the perfect dish for its time. So let's go get a sandwich.
We all, everybody, you know, the whole topic of sandwiches is, uh, when the industrial revolution was happening, and we needed something to eat fast, we just took whatever our cuisines were and put it onto bread. So it's different for everybody what their tastes and sandwiches are. You are disgusted by my American peanut butter and jelly. Everybody is. However, Daria, whenever we're talking about sandwiches, is all about the simplicity. Just throw some meat and cheese on a piece of sourdough or a bun. You're still hungry? Am I still hungry? I haven't been hungry in [Music] hours.
Choosing a place to get a sandwich is hard, in part because we're stuffed, but also because even in Thailand, you can't walk 10 steps without finding a good sandwich. So for the sake of footage, I chose Nevermind, a German baker that also doubles as an industrial baking shop with shelves displaying bread molds, a million kinds of flour, and everything else we now.
Take for granted, and they also make a really good ham and cheese. You know, last shoot, we haven't put it up online yet, but the last shoot, we were in a Hong ethnic Village in rural Central LA, and everything we're eating is something that is completely unknown by the outside world, right? And so the challenge for me is describing what does something taste like? What is this? It's really nice, every once in a while, after two years of doing this channel, when the pressure is just completely off, and it's literally just like, it's a ham and cheese sandwich, you know? You know, you know what this tastes like. So I, I can just, I can just eat, and it's fine.
If you go back far enough, like the ham in a ham and cheese sandwich was from the Gauls, right? Who, this is a German bakery, right? So the ham has been made for, what, I don't remember. It's been a few, few months since we did that video, but it's been a couple thousand years that was made by the Gauls of Western Europe. Cheese, again, has a lot of different points of origin throughout the world, but it spread through the Roman Empire, right? Where you see the cheese start to kind of spread across Europe, and then the Industrial Revolution, people start going to work in factories, throw it on some bread, and there's a sandwich. And, um, and so, yeah, it's really cool to kind of see how people interpreted their local cuisines as sandwiches, you know, within the last couple hundred years. So local workers in the United States would eat peanut butter. That's what you need after a hard working day. And why are you giving me? What, what did I do? Like, why does that have to be an attack on me?
While the 18th century saw wealthy British aristocrats drowning themselves in booze and sandwiches at underground Hellfire clubs, the upper class in Germany were developing their own unique and somewhat less debaucherous tradition. When a member of a wealthy German family would celebrate a birthday, their cooks would honor the occasion with a decorated cake called a "Geburtstagstorte." In May 1746, Count Nicholas Ludwig of Zinzendorf ordered his chefs to bake one as large as they could fit in the oven and to top it with candles, one for each of his 46 years. And thus was born the birthday cake.
The first cookies were baked in 7th Century Persia, then spread to Spain during the Muslim Conquest. From there, they'd catch on across continental Europe and were a particular favorite of Queen Elizabeth I, who would honor guests by serving them cookies baked in their own likeness. Cookies made from gingerbread. Bagels got their start in Poland as far back as the 1400s, made in Jewish communities and taking their name from a Yiddish word meaning ring or bracelet. And their deep-fried cousin, the donut, was invented in New York in the early 1800s by immigrants from the Netherlands, with a name first referring to "oliebollen," a Dutch snack that looks like a cinnamon roll, but that actually came from Sweden. Crackers began as survival food, served as military rations practically everywhere from ancient Rome to the Persian Empire to the American Civil War. And biscuits, well, those started like everything else in Egypt, used as rations for sailors. Muffins were created in the late 19th century in the US after the advent of baking powder, but their precursor, the so-called English muffin, well, that's actually Welsh, first recorded in the mid-1700s. Tortillas are, of course, ancient, but their most common use, the taco, dates to the 1700s and the workers in Mexico's silver mines. In fact, the word "taco" was actually a term for explosives used in mining. Baguettes, like the croissant, originated in Austria, or at least the technique of steam baking came to Paris with an Austrian baker in 1839. And pizza, made, as we mentioned, for a thousand years, but taking its modern form in 1889 when a chef in Naples created a dish to honor Queen Margherita, covering a dough with the colors of the Italian flag: red, green, and white, from tomato, basil, and mozzarella.
Now, with bread so ingrained in our society, no pun intended, the idea of it suddenly disappearing would be unthinkable. And it's hard to imagine the chaos that would happen if a place that relied on bread suddenly found itself without any grain. I mean, don't forget about the ancient Romans, after the invasion by the Vandals. And actually, that happened a few centuries earlier as well to the Greeks, because of a government policy that declared all wheat and barley must be sent to Athens, with everyone else forced to survive on whatever was left over. The city-states rebelled, the people turned against their leadership, and this was a trigger for the end of that empire too. And, of course, most famously, in 18th century France, a severe famine led to starvation, but the palace continued to claim whatever flour was left to be milled. You probably know about this because when Marie Antoinette was told the people had no bread, she supposedly replied, "Then let them eat cake."
Across the world, a lack of bread has always been a trigger for political upheaval. American history teaches of the Boston Tea Party that triggered the revolution, but the actual seeds were planted decades earlier when a rise in bread prices led to three years of riots from 1710 to 1713. And after the war, another tax on bread led to violence in New York in 1837, so intense that President Martin Van Buren had to send in the army to subdue his own home state. And just in the last few decades, a rise in bread prices caused riots and a change in government in Tunisia in 1983. And again in Tunisia, just 15 years ago, protests against the government would be marked with chants for "bread, freedom, and dignity." And then they'd reach a fever pitch in neighboring Egypt, where grain shortages led to a spike in price to as high as $400 per kilo of flour. Governments would fall one by one, and today we call this the Arab Spring.
Anyway, the point is, we might take bread for granted, not really noticing how omnipresent it is wherever we are. But even here in Thailand, which is a tropical rice-growing country, it's all around us. So for one last meal, we might as well head to a Thai night market and cap off our day with some Roti and maybe a glass or two of that beloved bread relative.
This is Chapter Market, a brand new food court that just opened less than two weeks ago. So far, it's something of a well-kept secret, with around 80 stalls of some of the best local food jammed into a space half-hidden off of Sukhumvit 26. And with the exception of about 30 seconds of the annoying John Ferris more than two years ago, I think somehow this is the first time we've ever filmed at a Bangkok night market. This is the most cliched YouTube thing that I think I've ever done. People are looking at me like, "Oh, this influencer is here, just walking around with his fancy dog." Vango, come on, you fancy dog. Just being like, "Hey, let's take this walk around the market." I, I feel like very much a, a, can I, can I count as an influencer? Do you feel, do you feel influenced? Come on, Vango, good dog.
Cheers. Another product related to bread. Blanca grew up in my, grew up in my bar in Beijing. She is a problem drinker. Well, it's been a long shoot. This is not a camera trick. We literally did this entire thing today in one sequence. There's every single part of this video that you've seen was shot in the same day. And, um, bread was a, people ask, people, bread was tough. People ask in the comments sometimes, like, "Why do you do this all in one day? That sounds crazy." And my, you know, to me, it's like, no, it's fine. I, I want to get it done so that we can start writing the video. This was crazy. This was one that, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm on struggle street, as they say. Had made the limit. You, what pasta? Pasta? Pasta video pushed me towards the breaking point. Pasta video was close. Bread was, was heavier. Uh, we just did a walk around. Ian and I, when we were filming Blanca, stop trying to take advantage of the. You're getting back down again. All right. When, uh, when we were waiting for the Roti to be done, Ian and I took a walk around and we were just looking. You know, this is, this market's brand new, right? This only opened like less than two weeks ago. And, um, there's going to be, they say on the sign is 80 food stalls. Right now, there's probably 50 that are open. And we were just counting the ones that are, you know, related to bread, right? Like, just how ubiquitous is this in life in a country that you don't associate with bread, like Thailand? Uh, there's just so much. Like, I think we, we counted more than 20 of the shops here where something is based on, based on bread. And it's wild. And it's, it's just like, you take that out, and our entire worldwide cuisine completely changes. And you take that out, and I lose like 10 kilos right away, just from the, the weight that I gained today. Uh, Daria, cheers. Give me a dog. Give me a dog. And pick up a beer. Vango.
Come on. It's chaos. Oh, oh, they're excited because they, there's one of the places here that serves up pup cups. So they think that they're going. I didn't even associate that. They think that we're having our own pup cups. These are grown-up cups. Wow. Ian, good job today. Daria, I marginally helped. I'm doing my part. Good dogs. The dogs were good. Were the dogs good? Did they, yeah, they were. Cause any damage in the house while we were filming? I was overexcited about going here. Well, bonus walk. You want to get pup cups for the, for the dogs? Did do. Oh, and those have bread in it. The little pup crackers.
In 1912, a jeweler and watchmaker in Des Moines, Iowa, named Otto Frederick Rohwedder had an idea. He thought with his knowledge of machinery, that there might be something he could do to make bread, the one thing everyone had in common, more accessible for eating on the go. It took him four years just to solidify his idea into a finalized plan. And he was so confident that this would be revolutionary, so sure of his invention, that he sold all of his businesses to pay for his work. And then in 1917, his laboratory caught on fire and destroyed his prototypes and all of his notes and blueprints. But Rohwedder was not deterred. He went back to the jewelry business to save up money all over again. And then in 1927, he rebuilt his lab and by the next year, he'd patent his design for the world's only bread slicing machine. He sold his first unit to the Chillicothe Baking Company in Chillicothe, Missouri, and they'd begin to sell their new product with the slogan, "Sliced bread: the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped." After that, it became common in the bread game for advertising to include comparisons. "Sliced bread is the greatest thing since..." whatever. Then during World War II, a moratorium on steel production made bread slicers unavailable. And when the war was over, well, everyone realized how much they missed this one invention. So the phrasing would change. Any new product was now "the best thing since sliced bread," with the quote entering the mainstream thanks to comedian Red Skelton, who said it in reference to the home television.
Anyway, the immediate success of Rohwedder's sliced bread was in part due to timing, as while he was still working on his idea, another inventor in the American Midwest had his own breakthrough, which would have an equally outsized impact on the future of bread. His name was Charles Strite, and he was an immigrant from Wales who found himself frustrated while working at a factory in Minnesota that the cafeteria always managed to burn his toast. So just like Rohwedder, he took his last savings and began working on his own design, which he'd patent in 1921 and release just months before the bread slicer. It would be called the "Waters-Genter Pop-Up Toaster," soon renamed the Toastmaster.
Now, while the toaster and the slicer were both massive innovations that helped bring bread to the masses, and while the world's industrialization made sandwiches and tacos and fast foods indispensable, the real breakthroughs in the 20th century were less about the consumer and more the production. As every step in the bread-making process, from farming to harvesting wheat, milling and refining flour, and turning it into a food source, has advanced in leaps and bounds. Today, thanks to modern science and agriculture, bread is available everywhere. No matter where you are, you don't have to go far to find cookies or crackers, sliced bread in a package, or a fresh baguette straight from the oven. You can assume that your local cafe probably sells croissants and wraps, and that every other block there's a burger or taco or shawarma where you can get lunch. As much as 80% of the world's population eats bread in some form, if not as a staple, then at least as part of their diet, with the country of Turkey leading the way at a very impressive 200 kilos per person per year. And to make all that bread, the world in 2023 produced more than 23 billion kilograms of flour, a staggering number, but actually less than usual, mainly due to the war in Ukraine, a country where bread is so essential that the yellow in the Ukrainian flag represents fields of wheat. Wheat is also on the flag of Bolivia and the Afghanistan flag, three countries on three continents, all paying tribute to our first planted crop. And of course, there's my own country's patriotic anthem, which starts with a line about amber waves of grain.
Look anywhere and you'll find bread used in weddings or served at funerals, from churches to convenience stores, street carts to three-star Michelin restaurants. Ever since the first bread was made somewhere in the Fertile Crescent 10,000 years ago, our world has grown into a wide spectrum of cultures, but this one thing has tied it all together. From the ancient Indian Roti and Chapatis to the corn tortillas of South and Central America, from the baguettes of France to the flatbreads of Botswana, the Native American fry bread to the damper of Australia. If we follow the trail of breadcrumbs, we find a society built by agriculture, from helping us build villages and feeding our growing cities, to opening the door to some of our greatest innovations. A world without bread would be a world without pizza, without burgers, without Christmas cookies and pulled pork sandwiches. In any way, we don't need to think about that because there would be no world without bread, at least not this one, because without it, well, none of this might have ever happened.
All right, Gary, I promised I'd work this line in by the end of the video, and that's the way the cookie crumbles. So.
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You have time for one more sandwich in your life. What's your sandwich? What's your perfect sandwich? What's that going to be? Trammy, rye bread, sprouts, aioli. And you're just quoting the bagel that you created in my, in my hometown. This is Botto's Bagel from Charlotte Hill. So good. I'm so glad that that is now your dream on a bagel. On a bagel. On a bagel. Okay. Yeah, it was really good, actually. Pulled pork for me. Pork. Boring. Crispy onion straw. Good coleslaw. Pulled pork. We've been eating a lot today. I can't, I can't do it anymore.