Baking in Egypt

I’m studying Ancient Egypt at the moment, so I thought I’d blog about what I’ve learned about their baking routines.

Ancient Egyptian bread was made with wheat. The barley that they grew was baked into loaves for the purpose of brewing beer.

Emmer wheat, after having been threshed would break into spikelets. A spikelet was a packet of chaff that held two kernels.

The chaff needed to be broken open without damaging the grains inside. This was achieved by moistening the spikelets and pounding them with wooden pestles in a stone mortar. Because the water made the chaff pliable, it could be shredded easily without crushing the kernels inside.

The chaff and kernels would be left out in the sun to dry. The kernels would then be separeated from the chaff with sieves made from rushes. The sieves, however, did not do this work thouroughly enough, even though the grain was made to pass through them many times. Therefore, the last step required that the Egyptians go through the stuff and pick out the remaining chaff by hand.

The mortars were often made of a softer stone, and so flakes of stone (and sand, blown in from the drying) which were not filtered out by the sieves obviously ended up in the bread, and that is why bread in those days wore down horribly on the teeth of the ancient Egyptians. Also, when there was no oven available, the Egyptians would bake their loaves on the hot sand, and that obviously added to the sand content in the bread.

The grain, once separated from the chaff (um, sort of…) was then milled into flour on a flat grinding stone, called a quern. The chaff could be saved and was used to stuff mummies.

This entire process (with the exception of the threshing) was done by the women. They rarely worked with large batches; usually they would prepare and grind only enough grain to feed their families for that day, as that is all they had time for. The women would have to kneel while grinding the flour on the quern, and the tedious work repeated every day often eventually caused disabilities. The quern, however, was later raised, which made the work easier.

The dough for bread was made simply of flour and water. Sometimes some leavening ingredient was used; this was usually either some sour dough left over from the baking of the previous day, or some leaven from the brewing of beer. Sometime later on, the Egyptians may have used yeast.

The dough was left to rise in warmed molds.

During the Old Kingdom, dough was baked in bread molds that were set in rows on a bed of embers. These molds were bell-shaped.

By the New Kingdom, open ovens were invented. The ovens were made of clay, mud bricks, and mortar. It was at this time, perhaps, that flat loaves of bread were introduced. The dough was stuck to the wall of the oven. and as they baked, they slowly peeled off. The loaves were caught before they could fall into the embers that heated the oven.

By that time, the texture of bread was more varied. Whole or coarsely ground grains were incorporated in the dough, much like our modern multi-grain breads. Sometimes, the loaves were baked with a hollow in the center, that would later be filled with things like eggs or vegetables. The Egyptians learned to sweeten and flavor their bread with ingredients such as honey, sesame seeds, oil, herbs, and fruit such as dates.

Bread was a synonym for hospitality, and also of food itself in general, being the staple food of the Egyptians. The finest breads were offered to the gods, besides being buried with the dead.

During the New Kingdom, some loaves were actually formed into shapes like fish and humans. Because of the climate, some bread that was buried with the dead have been preserved; some of the loaves are over 5,000 years old.