Making Bread

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Today we are making bread. We have been doing this for years. It is a really tasty bread.

We use a grain called Spelt. This grain originated a few thousand years before man began to use wheat to make flour. So this is an old way of making bread.

I have several plastic containers of spelt stored away. It is in a well sealed container. I buy it in 50 pound sealed containers. It will store for around 30 years. (But I suspect that because of the design and type of storage it will last for over 100 years.

We take the grain from the storage box and then grind it into flour. Then my wife takes the flour and creates the bread. It really taste very good, very hardy.

Good work, sir.

I've never ground my own grain but I've made bread from spelt flour before. A few people in my family don't get on with this new fangled 'wheat' and we'd heard they might be able to tolerate spelt better. I found the full whole grain flour a bit much, heavy and dense, but a 50/50 mix of whole grain and sieved wholegrain resulted in a bread that the perfect flavour and texture.

Nothing better than homemade bread freshly out of the oven with a bit of butter.

Hungry now

The hexaploid wheat that we make bread with today dates back about 8,000 to 10,000 years. Before that, we had diploid and tetraploid wheats. If I'm not mistaken, spelt is a tetraploid wheat so you are right that it did predate the hexaploid wheat that is so common today.

Hexaploid wheat was accidentally developed by a tetraploid wheat picking up an additional set of chromosomes from a related diploid grass in what is known as horizontal (or lateral) gene transfer. It is thought that some ancient farmer had both the grass and the tetraploid wheat in the same field. It is quite possible that the two were mixed together in the seeds because the difficulty with removing all of the contaminants in the seed with the techniques available at that time.

The hexaploid wheat and the global warming of the time, is what made civilization possible. Without hexaploid wheat and without global warming, civilization, if it existed at all, would be far behind where we are today. The global warming enabled mankind to leave the subsistence style of living to settle down and begin farming. The hexaploid wheat has an enomously greater range than does the tetraploid and diploid wheats and this range enabled mankind to spread out faster and further than it would have been possible without having the hexaploid wheats to create bread to survive.

You don't often hear someone refer to a development of something like 10,000 years ago as "new fangled".

It appears that I am wrong. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelt, spelt is a hexaploid wheat, not a tetraploid wheat. So it has only been around at most about 8,000 to 10,000 years.

It is really a good tasting form of wheat. I began storing various grains for food about a couple of decades ago. I always felt that it was prudent to store a little bit for a rainy day.

I like making bread. I usually just make basic white bread or French bread, though.