Water, Crushed Grain, and Heat

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Somewhere, sometime, people on their way to being civilized, discovered that you could fill your stomach with a porridge made of crushed grain seeds and water heated with rocks in a skin.  Then somebody accidentally dropped some of this stuff on a flat rock serving as a hearthstone.  Bread wasn't exactly invented that day, but someone had taken the first step on the road to bread.  Take a look at William Rubel's  Bread:  A Global History or maybe H.E. Jacob's Six Thousand Years of Bread:  Its Holy and Unholy History.  Bread, like salt, was absolutely necessary for life, and the grain it was made from, its color, and its price were all powerful social markers.  The price of bread could start a revolution, and the security of colonial grain supplies made empires like Rome very nervous.  Only peasants made their own bread.  Everybody really important could send out for bread or had bakers on staff.

Not these days.  Home-cooking foodies are baking their own breads, adopting not only the techniques of home bakers of the past but the more complicated techniques of the artisan bakers of Europe and North America.  It takes a little time and a little effort, but you can make good bread with ingredients available in any supermarket plus a couple of pans, a bowl, and a little muscle.  Try Beth Hensperger's Beth's Basic Bread Book whose photographs will inspire you as will Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Bread Bible.     And when you've looked at these, check the shelves around them.  Somewhere there is the perfect bread recipe and technique for you.