How flour and water became the world's obsession

Bread has been a staple for thousands of years. From banh mi to Turkish balloon bread, here's how different cuisines roll in dough.

Bread dishes come in all forms, including this Vietnamese roast pork banh mi. Source: Adam Liaw

The human obsession with bread began long before jaffle-makers cluttered our cupboards and we gave our sourdough starters pet names like Gal Gadough or Levain James.  

In 2018, researchers came across the charred remnants of the oldest bread in the world – flatbread from 14,500 years ago, discovered in Jordan. Locally, Dark Emu author and Yuin farmer Bruce Pascoe has declared Indigenous Australians to be the world's first bakers, based on ancient grindstones found here. One 65,000-year-old tool, used for grinding seeds, was credible proof First Nations communities were producing flour here many millennia ago. It was a history-changing revelation, given ancient Egyptians were previously considered to be the earliest bakers, 18,000 years ago.

"I failed form three maths, but I could work this out," Pascoe told SBS's Bad Taste podcast, hosted by Jess Ho. "That our Aboriginal people have been making bread twice as long as anyone else on earth."

Loaves feature in practically every cuisine around the world, from Spanish pan con tomate to Guyanese plait bread. Here are other examples of how prized bread (or "bread winners", if you'll tolerate the pun) gets served around the world. 

Japan

"My family would always buy bread from the bakery every Saturday for lunch," says Yu Ozone, who grew up in Tochigi in Japan's countryside. The local shop offered many Japanese specialties: fruit sandwiches, rolls topped with yakisoba, melon bread, chocolate cornets oozing with custard and much more. They had an entrancing effect on the co-owner of Sydney's Comeco Foods.

The Japanese word for bread ('pan') is derived from the Portugese 'pão' – a reminder that Portuguese traders introduced bread to the East Asian country in the 16th Century. Japan's one-of-a-kind take on bread has led to countless specialties, such as melonpan (named for its cantaloupe shape) to shokupan (a pillowy milk loaf used in katsu sandwiches) and anpan (a red bean bun invented in 1874 ­at a Tokyo bakery by a former samurai warrior; his family still runs the business today). 

At Comeco Foods, Ozone sells shokupan crafted from rice to ensure it's vegan and gluten-free for her diners. The spongey loaf resembles the type her mother regularly baked during Ozone's childhood.

"I have many happy memories about bread. When I suddenly developed gluten, egg, and dairy allergies, I was devastated since I could no longer eat any. I imagined that others with similar allergies might miss the fluffy bread as much as I did, so I started selling some at my store," Ozone says.

"The bread was so well-received that many people wanted to try other Asian breads, so we started selling sausage rolls, chocolate cornets, corn mayo bread, pizza bread, etc., on limited occasions. We're now preparing to offer gluten-free, vegan, and additive-free breads with a selection similar to that of Breadtop."

And if you end up with leftover loaves, you can always blitz them into a panko alternative. "Extra shokupan can be made into breadcrumbs and used as batter for making schnitzels or karepan," Ozone suggests.

Russia

Jaimee Edwards is known as the "fermenting queen" at Sydney's Cornersmith, where she teaches food workshops. She's also co-author of Cornersmith's Use It All book and its upcoming "Kitchen Companion", titled The Food Saver's A-Z. This new volume includes many ways to repurpose leftover ingredients, and the bread chapter mentions her grandmother's kvass – a fermented Russian drink produced from stale rye bread. "Black rye bread was the bread of choice. It has a lot of flavour – you ferment it and becomes a very low-alcohol table beer, akin to a kombucha," she says. 

Edwards can recall drinking it from age 12 onwards. Although kvass is a little boozy ("oh, were we drinking beer? Oh, I guess so!" she says and laughs), she points out it's not that controversial to serve it to a child. The drink has a similar alcohol content to a "really ripe banana", Edwards says. 

The author recalls growing up with rye sandwiches filled with leftovers (meatballs, herring) that led to a degree of schoolyard embarrassment.  

Today, though, she's happy to share Russian-inspired ways to use up bread. In The Food Saver's A-Z, she recommends a black rye salt recipe from Darra Goldstein's book, Beyond the North Wind: Russia in Recipes and Lore. "The bread is soaked then dried, then blitzed, then mixed [with salt]," she says. "It's a really delicious seasoning. I would suggest, if you've got a really good tasty bread, to experiment with it." 

Turkey

According to charred samples found at Çatalhöyük, Turkish people were baking bread in ovens at least 9,000 years ago. And the concept of 'askıda ekmek' ("bread on a hanger" or "suspended bread") goes back centuries in Turkey: if you pay it forward, extra bread is set aside for people in need at your bakery.

Anyone seeking out a loaf might end up with somun: it's oval-shaped, fluffy, and feels like a crusty sourdough when you break it apart with your hands. "This is the type of bread I grew up with," says Efe Topuzlu, who was born in Istanbul.

The co-owner of Sydney's Malika Bakehouse, Above Par and Izgara eateries says somun is predominantly what you'll find when looking for Turkish bread in markets, bakeries and shops. It was also a fixture at his family's Sunday breakfasts – something he'd drag through his eggs and savour.

But it's Ramadan pide that rules at Malika Bakehouse, pressed by hand and finished in a stone-based oven.

"It's celebration bread, actually, people line up to get this bread before the opening day of feast," Topuzlu says. As a kid, he'd burn his hands sourcing the pide straight from the bakery oven, rushing home with the hot, paper-protected loaf for Ramadan festivities.

It's celebration bread, actually, people line up to get this bread before the opening day of feast.

Its circular dough is baked at Malika Bakehouse all year long. Older loaves are cubed into croutons, flavoured with foamy butter and placed under thinly sliced lamb at sister venue, Izgara, for its Iskender dish. And at his other diner, Above Par, lavash is served with lamb kofta. "If this is not sold the same day, we put it in the oven with some drizzles of olive oil and za'atar and we make it crispy bread," he says. These crackers then are presented with Above Par's basturma dish. 

Using up old loaves was a familiar routine at home. His mother would take kaşar ("it's like an aged cheddar cheese') and melt it on top of stale bread in an oven. This "quick breakfast" was a childhood favourite.

For anyone missing the puffy, steam-filled centre of the 'balon ekmek' (Turkish balloon bread) at Above Par – don’t give up hope. Topuzlu plans to bring it back once he secures a dedicated chef who can make it to order.  

Don't expect the Turkish bread found at kebab shops – with their skateboard shapes and seed-studded surfaces – at any of Topuzlu’s venues, though. He agrees with fellow Istanbul-born chef Somer Sivrioğlu that this isn't truly "Turkish" bread. "We don't have this back at home," Topuzlu confirms.

Vietnam

The baguette's complicated Vietnamese citizenship began in the 1800s, when France colonised the Southeast Asian country. The bread here was initially kneaded from expensive imported ingredients, which made it off limits to locals and a delicacy only enjoyed by French expats. The local humidity made it tricky for the European-style dough to rise, so baguettes were adapted with rice flour, which produced a lighter and fluffier version. This became the foundation of banh mi, which took off once the French left and Americans began shipping in wheat (a crop the French had trouble growing locally). Since its inception in 1950s Saigon, these ingredient-stuffed baguettes can be found at Vietnamese bakeries and pork roll shops all over the world.

Nina 'Teddie' Huynh, a brand strategist who was recently a chef at Sydney's Yellow restaurant, has many great banh mi memories. 

When her Vietnamese relatives went on beach outings, they'd bring a massive collection of banh-mi-making ingredients and a haul of bread so huge, it had to be carried in "an empty commercial-sized bag that the flour came in". The family would sit on a blue piece of tarp, sun-baking as they loaded their bread with Peking duck, soy sauce, Sriracha and fresh-cut cucumbers.  

She also favours the very last bite of banh mi – when all the pâté, mayo and charcuterie have bottlenecked into one squishy ingredient-overload. Huynh also fondly recalls the comforting way her Vietnamese grandmother would serve her a baguette, charred over a flame with chopsticks, with soy-splashed eggs. It was her closest translation of Western eggs on toast.

Nina Huynh's family inspired her to pursue her dream of becoming a chef at Sydney’s Yellow. Source: Nina Huynh

Bread is also a handy vehicle for enjoying Vietnamese curry. "We used to rip the fluffy parts out and eat that in the broth first and then use the crispy 'shell' part to load it up with bits of sweet potato and slow-cooked beef and create perfect crisp, succulent mouthfuls like a Vietnamese version of a birria taco, juicy and flavourful," she says. 

All old baguettes would get smartly repurposed in her home. 

"Mum used to use leftover or stale banh mi for her prawn toasties; she would slice them about half a centimetre thick, put her seasoned prawn and pork mince, and then dip them in flour slurry and fry them up as appetisers."

Italy 

Italian bread has been drawing attention for thousands of years. Roman poet Horace declared Altamura in Puglia to have "the best bread in the world" back in the first century BCE. The inner crumb has a distinct yellow tinge, thanks to the region's durum wheat. 

Flavio Carnevale, who grew up in nearby Rapone, regularly enjoyed something similar to Altamura's famously golden bread: the potato-semolina loaf his aunt would bake in a wood-fired oven for the family. "That's basically the cousin of it," he says, comparing her yellow bread to Altamura's version. 

At the pandemic's start, when the chef transformed his Marta osteria into a daytime Italian bakery, he knew there were three breads he wanted to serve: his aunt's potato-semolina bread, Roman focaccia and Lariano loaves. The latter two are specialties from Italy's capital, and reminders of Carnevale's days baking for priests and nuns at the Vatican.

He also offers other Roman staples, like ossi bread (named after the breadstick's resemblance to bones). His version is inspired by a famous Italian bakery that warms its ossi on hazelnut shells.

Carnevale also serves schiacciata, which is like an airier version of focaccia. Its name means "pressed-down" or "squashed", which tells you how the dough is treated before it's baked in the wood-fired oven.

Given all the sifting, kneading and rolling required to creates loaves, pastries and focaccia slabs, Carnevale is careful to repurpose anything that's not sold. "Whatever we don’t use, we make [into] meatballs or bruschetta. We can not throw any bread away, ever."

Italian cuisine, of course, is full of great bread-recycling recipes – from panzanella to ribollita.  

"One of my absolute favourites is called 'cooked bread', pane cotto," he says. Fried eggs, Basilicata peppers and Pecorino transform the soaked cubes of bread into something spectacular. "Oh my God, we used to fight for that," he says. There's a summer version of it, too – topped with tomato, basil and oregano and also worth battling over.

 

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