Malting: the oldest biotechnology

Malting is perhaps the oldest biotechnology. The cultivation of barley and wheat was probably beginning in the near-eastern Fertile Crescent about 10 000 BC.

The malted grain apparently was ground and formed into a ‘doughy’ loaf, which could be dried and stored until needed. The improvements in texture and flavor of foods prepared from grains following their accidental germination would soon have been noted and followed by deliberately sprouting grain.

Malted products such as green malt were often given as wages in kind to workmen and serfs of the temple administrations but they disappeared as a food with the rise of the Third Dynasty of Ur.

This shift of malted cereals from a food preserve to a basic substance for brewers may have been cause by the shift in food habits way from the preference of soupy cereal dishes, often seasoned by sour fermentation.

Malting and brewing are believed to have been practiced for at least 6000 years. One such reference to malting, in a city in Sumer, the Goddess Ninkasi was glorified as Brewster to the Gods.

Beer-making is often illustrated in ancient Egyptian tomb-painting. The ancient toms of Beni Hassan about 5000 years old yielded artifacts that showed beer to be an item of commerce being sold not only in public drinking places but as an item of export along the ancient trade routes.

The discovery of beer is ascribed by ancient authors to the Egyptians. Herodotus, Pliny, Strabo and others, assert that beer was prepared from barley, and was called zythos.

According to Xenophon, who wrote 400 years BC, the Armenians also prepared fermented drink from barley.
Malting: the oldest biotechnology

Milling in ancient Egypt

Neolithic Egyptians developed bread from emmer, barky, and even a type of millet. The grain was stored in beehive-shape silos until needed and they ground the grain on flat stones called querns and then baked in and oven or in heated clay bread molds.

Both men and women assisted in making bread, with men performing many of the tasks. Women generally were the millers. Figures of women milling grain have been found in the tombs of the later Old Kingdom (c.2575-2510 BC) to early Middle Kingdom (c.2030-1640 BC).

Milling itself was a tedious process and the cause of many injuries. Several handfuls were place on a stone quern with a gently curve surface for milling. The upper surface is not perfectly smooth, but is kept somewhat roughed. A stone shaped like rolling pin with a curve to match the curvature of the grinding surface was rolled back and forth, grinding the grain into flour, which was caught in a container at one end of the quern.

The miller kneeled over on the ground, grinding on the wide saddle quern; then in the Middle Kingdom, the milling process was performed on workbenches. The rotary quern was not invented until about the fifth to third centuries BC, somewhere in the western Mediterranean.
Milling in ancient Egypt

History of wheat flour milling

Domestic cultivation of wheat has been documented at least since 9000 BC. The popularity of wheat has to do with its high content of gluten, which helps bread rise and is responsible for its elastic texture.

The first mills were either of the mortar and pestle type. The grain was place in a large saucer-shaped stone and a smaller rounded stone was used to crush it.

Or the saddlestone or metate which held the grain in a wide, shallow concavity in a flat or slanted stone where it was rubbed with a more or less cylindrical stone.

These primitive implements were followed by the quern, well known from early dynastic Egypt inward and consisting of a circular upper stone turned by hand power to animal power on a stationary lower stone.

Sometimes between 6000 and 5000 BC breads were made form wheat flours in both Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Romans adopted many of the milling and baking practices from Egypt. It appears that the Romans were the first people to develop a large mill that could be driven by a horse or a donkey.

Gristmills, such as the one at Jamestown in 1621, ground corn and wheat for meal and flour helping to feed the colonist and making the millers key local figures.

New York City became the first commercial center for wheat milling. Exporting wheat flour appears to have begun in the 1648s and the need for some form of inspection to ensure and maintain a good reputation was recognized by 1674.
History of wheat flour milling

History of baking leavened bread

The grain paste left to stand for a time sooner or later collects wild yeasts form air, and begins to ferment. This was the beginning of leavened bread, although for most of human history the presence of yeast was mostly accidental.

It is believed that the use of sourdough in bread leavening production developed in ancient Egypt in approximately 3000 BC and from there spread gradually to Europe, throughout ancient Greece and the Roam Empire until the present.

The ancient Egyptians developed the art of cooking leavened doughs in molds the first loaf pans. The molds were heated and then filled with dough, covered and stacked in a heated chamber. These were perhaps the first mass-produced breads.

During the Barbarian migration period in Europe, bread was not the primary food of the Barbarians and industry bread manufacturing disappeared.

The technology of sourdough bread appeared in the monasteries until the twelfth century when the profession of baker reappeared in France.

An important innovation in Roman baking was introduced by the Gauls, a European people who had been conquered by the Romans. They discovered that adding the froth from beer to bread dough made especially light, well leavened bread. This is the beginning of the use of a controlled yeast source for making bread doughs.

Since the nineteenth century, baker’s yeast has almost completely replaced sourdough in the leavening of bread.
History of baking leavened bread