Bread is older than farming. In 2018 archaeologists reported charred crumbs of flatbread from an ancient hearth at Shubayqa 1, a site in the desert of north-eastern Jordan. Hunter-gatherers known as the Natufians had baked them about 14,400 years ago, from wild cereals and the ground roots of a club-rush, some four thousand years before anyone is known to have planted wheat. So if you are looking for the oldest recipe in the world, bread is a serious contender: flour, water and heat. Sourdough, the first way of making bread rise, came later, and exactly when is still one of food history's open questions.
Before the farm: the first flatbreads
The Shubayqa crumbs are tiny, but under the microscope they show the marks of real bread-making: grain that had been ground, sifted and mixed with water into a dough before it was baked, probably on hot stones or in the ashes. Making it would have been hard work, with every handful of flour ground by hand from wild plants. The researchers even suggested that a taste for bread might have been one of the things that encouraged people to start cultivating cereals, though that remains an idea to test rather than a proven fact.
For thousands of years, most bread was flat: quick to bake, easy on fuel and ideal for scooping up everything else. It still is across much of the world. The oldest written recipes we have, on Babylonian clay tablets from around 1750 BC, are mostly for stews and broths. Nobody wrote down how to make bread. It was simply too basic to need explaining.
How bread learned to rise
Wild yeasts and lactic acid bacteria are everywhere: on grain, in flour, in the air, on our hands. Mix flour with water, leave it somewhere warm, and within a few days it begins to bubble and smell pleasantly sour. That bubbling paste is a sourdough starter, and a spoonful of it will make a fresh dough rise. The story usually told is that someone forgot a bowl of dough, came back to find it swollen, and baked it anyway. It's plausible, but it is a guess. Nobody recorded the moment.
What the evidence does show is that ancient Egypt ran on bread and beer, two products of the same grains and, very likely, the same microbes. Archaeologists have excavated large bakeries at the settlement of the workers who built the pyramids at Giza, complete with the pottery moulds they baked in, and tomb paintings show every stage of the work. Egypt is often credited with inventing leavened bread, but when rising first happened, and where, is still debated.
By Roman times, bread was an industry. In the first century AD, Pliny the Elder noted that the peoples of Gaul and Spain leavened their bread with the foam skimmed from brewing beer, which made it lighter than bread elsewhere. At Pompeii, buried by Vesuvius in AD 79, excavators found whole round loaves, carbonised in the oven and scored into eight wedges, looking remarkably like a country loaf today.
Bread, law and the baker's dozen
Because bread was everyone's staple, its price and size were a matter of public order. In medieval England, the Assize of Bread and Ale, dating from the thirteenth century, fixed the weight of a loaf according to the price of grain, and bakers who sold short weight could be fined or put in the pillory. The story goes that bakers began adding a thirteenth loaf to every dozen to stay safely on the right side of the law, giving us the "baker's dozen". It is a satisfying explanation, though a hard one to prove.
Throughout this long stretch of history, bread rose in one of two ways: with a piece of old dough saved from the last batch, which is sourdough by another name, or with barm from the brewery. In practice, for most of history nearly all leavened bread was fermented slowly by wild microbes.
Sourdough's second life
That changed in the nineteenth century. Louis Pasteur showed that fermentation was the work of living yeast, and commercial baker's yeast soon made rising quick and predictable. Sourdough retreated to farmhouses and to the traditions that could not do without it, such as the dense rye breads of Germany and Scandinavia, which need the starter's acidity to set properly. In the Yukon and Alaska, prospectors carried pots of starter through the winter and were nicknamed "sourdoughs" for it. In San Francisco, sourdough baking has continued since the Gold Rush, and one of the bacteria found in starters was named after the city, although scientists have since found it in starters all over the world.
In 1961 British researchers developed the Chorleywood bread process, which uses intense mechanical mixing to make a soft loaf in a fraction of the traditional time. Much of the bread sold in Britain is still made this way. The reaction came slowly, then all at once: artisan bakeries in the late twentieth century, and in 2020 a lockdown boom in which home bakers everywhere started keeping jars of starter on the kitchen counter.
Meanwhile, the world's flatbreads never went away. Ethiopian injera is made from a batter of teff flour left to ferment for days, a sourdough flatbread in all but name. Turkish pide, Indian naan and Lebanese pita each tell their own long story. Nordic crispbread, which, the tradition goes, was baked in big batches with a hole in the middle so it could be stored on poles, is a direct descendant of the hard, dry breads that got northern Europe through its winters.
Baking better bread at home
- Weigh everything. Bread is chemistry, and cups and spoons are too rough. Salt at about 2 per cent of the flour weight is a good starting point.
- Use your starter at its peak. A lively starter roughly doubles within 4 to 8 hours of feeding and smells yeasty and sour, not like nail varnish. Use it when it is domed and bubbly.
- Give it time. A long, cool rise, such as a night in the fridge after shaping, deepens the flavour and makes the dough easier to score.
- Bake hot, with steam. A lidded cast-iron pot preheated to 240–250°C traps the dough's own steam for a crackling crust. Take the lid off for the last 15 to 20 minutes.
- Wait before slicing. The crumb is still setting as the loaf cools. Cut it straight away and it turns gummy.
Where to find it in our books
The Healthy Kitchen bakes its way along the older branch of this family tree, the flatbreads and crispbreads. Try the Turkish Pide-Style Wholewheat Flatbread with Za'atar, the Injera-Style Teff Flatbread with Berbere Butter, or the two Nordic classics, the Swedish Rye Crispbread with Caraway and Flaxseed and the Norwegian-Style Multiseed Crispbread (Knekkebrød). Search the recipe finder for flatbreads to find more across the range, or browse all twelve volumes.
Questions people ask
What is the oldest bread in the world?
The oldest bread found so far is charred flatbread from Shubayqa 1 in north-eastern Jordan, baked by hunter-gatherers about 14,400 years ago from wild cereals and plant roots, thousands of years before farming began.
How old is sourdough?
Nobody knows exactly. Leavened bread was well established in ancient Egypt, and until commercial yeast arrived in the nineteenth century almost all risen bread was fermented by wild yeasts and bacteria, in other words sourdough or brewer's barm. When the first loaf rose is still debated.
Did the ancient Egyptians invent bread?
No. Flatbread was being made more than ten thousand years before the pharaohs. Egypt is famous for early leavened bread and large-scale baking, but even that "first" is uncertain.
Is sourdough healthier than ordinary bread?
Long fermentation breaks down some of the starches and fructans in flour, and some people find sourdough easier to digest. But it still contains gluten, so it is not safe for people with coeliac disease, and a white sourdough is nutritionally close to other white bread.