Robert Beck - Bread

Robert's bread and recipes are unique in our current cultural economic climate as each piece is still touched by the baker compared to the vast majority of our daily wheat product which is dispensed via machinery and supermarket chains. Considering that bread is an epic tale in the history of the world, documentation of this worthy process and skill is timely.

Wheat is believed to have originated in Ethiopia(1) at the headwaters of the Nile and the Egyptians discovered the art of baking which saw that grain replace barley as the most popular food source. By allowing the dough to ferment, the Egyptians conducted a world changing chemical experiment, enjoying the product of this magical process- leavened bread. The actual scientific details of yeast cells remained unknown until the seventeenth century Dutchman Van Leeuwenhoek observed it with his microscope.

(1) Nikolai Vavilov, Russian scientist, explorer and plant collector in 1927 established that Ethiopia was a 'gen' centre for the grass we know as wheat.