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Bread in its many forms is one of the most staple foods consumed by humanity. Traditionally bread is based on flour derived from the cereal wheat. Many other types of cereals, pulses and even legumes can be milled to give a ‘flour’ but the ability of the proteins present in wheat to transform a gruel of flour and water into a glutinous mass which becomes bread is currently limited to wheat and a few other commonly used cereal seeds. Genetic manipulation may yet combine the special protein characters of wheat with other more conveniently grown and processable seeds, for example to deliver no crease or a more rounded shape, but today we are still dealing with a cereal crop largely unchanged, in the genetic sense, from the time that humanity discovered its ability to make a special food many thousands of years ago.

Many consider bread to be one of the oldest, if not the oldest ‘processed’, food. We are unlikely ever to identify the moment when bread was ‘discovered’ though it is likely that the place of discovery was in the Middle East where the origins of cereal farming also lie in antiquity (Zohary, 1969). In its earliest forms, bread would have been very different from how we see it in industrialized countries today, and it would probably be closest in character to the modern flat breads of the Middle East. We will probably never know whether the gathering and cooking of wild grass seeds provided the spur to arable farming or whether the ability to grow and harvest the forerunners of modern wheats provided the impetus for breadmaking. Whichever way round the two events occurred, there is no doubt that one depends on the other and this simple relationship is the foundation of all modern breadmaking.