Bread: 30,000 Years of Imperfection

On September 24, 2015, Philip spoke at York: Crafted's PK Nights event. PK, or Pecha Kucha, is a presentation format that limits the amount of time spent on each slide and uses images to support the presentation. The classic version is 20 slides, each with 20 seconds of commentary, for a total presentation time of 6 minutes and 40 seconds. The slides advance automatically. Here is Philip’s PK presentation. Video by Randy Flaum.

So who here has been to Intercourse…. Pennsylvania. Intercourse, Pennsylvania. Okay, good. That's where my day started at 3 a.m 

–These are not pretzels in case anybody was curious, it's just beautiful bread.--

But I delivered 350 pretzel rolls this morning. Went from York, to Intercourse, then to Hanover for a fundraising account. 

So this is about bread. A little bit about pretzels, but mainly about bread: 30 000 years of imperfection. 

I'm Philip Given with York City Pretzel Company. We opened in December of 2014 in Downtown York, just a couple blocks from here, and then in April of 2015 in Intercourse.

So where did all this begin? Where did bread begin? Well it looks sort of like that. It started with unleavened flatbread, so if you think of matzah, pita, naan, tortilla, anything like that without yeast is sort of how it looked. 

Every culture really had a flat bread, including these guys. Anybody know who this is? Egyptian, ancient egyptians, so 5,000 ish years ago these guys were making bread out of emmer grains and beer. They were brewing beer 5,000 years ago. 

So pretty much throughout history if you look at beer and bread–the development of those two things are side by side–their bread ended up looking a little bit like this. It doesn't look terribly appetizing to us today but five thousand years ago this was revolutionary.

It wasn't until modern flour, modern wheat, started to be harvested–looks like this–that we really started to think of bread as the life-sustaining thing that we think of it as today. 

We didn't really have a way to harvest this until the 19th century and one thing that you'll learn later on tonight, I think, is that the Industrial Revolution really paved the way for modern farming, as well as modern food. 

So from that wheat, there's three parts: that little sleeping part there is the germ. We get rid of that. We get rid of the bran–that's the outside. We just use the endosperm.

So in the 19th centry, we figured out a way to remove those two parts and just use that fatty part called the endosperm, which is full of delicious starchy carbs. 

Anybody know what this is? Yeast! All right, so that's the other thing: in the 19th century we learned how to propagate yeast. 

The Egyptians probably had cultured wild yeast but again, thanks to brewing technology in the 19th century, we learned how to propagate modern yeast. 

Without yeast, we wouldn't have what you see here, which is flour, salt, and yeast. It's really the foundation for every bread that's made across the world today.

Flour, yeast, water, and salt. These four ingredients: you can make anything. Baguette, pretzel, Italian, French, English muffin, white bread. These ingredients allow for the chaos of thousands of possibilities thousands of delicious ways to end up with awesome bread and thousands of terrible missteps to end up with gross bread that you don't want to eat. But that's part of the art and that's part of the science around it. 

Over proofed, under proofed, under salted, over salted. You can see here starting on the left: under proofed dough is going to be gummy, it's going to be gross, it's going to be kind of flat. You can see it's flat on the bottom. 

Overproofed dough: it's going to be yeasty tasting, really yeasty tasting, you don't want that. If you just don't know how to shape bread you can end up with some funny things happening down there in the right but if it's just right, like we saw at the beginning *chef’s kiss* 

So go from the ancient Egyptians to this, which is the Industrial Revolution. I feel like this is a little Willy Wonka-ish possibly, but this is what happened to bread. The industrialization of bread is often cited as bringing us into the modern world. 

Bread feeds more people across the world than anything else. Our culture went from each house making five to ten loaves a week to factories making five thousand, to now hundreds of thousands of loaves of bread a week. 

Flour is shipped across the country on train cars from the midwest to factory silos across the United States. And then of course we end up here with Wonder Bread.

Wonder bread, well first sliced bread, was patented in 1912. Wonder Bread was first marketed in 1930. There's a lot of things to say about Wonder Bread, about white bread. It totally and permanently–some say irreparably–changed the world's definition of bread. 

We went from thinking that a chaotic and crusty and earthy thing existed to this. What has now become the definition of “generic.” Right? That's what white bread means. 

But don't worry: we really do have a crop of people in the United States that you can trace to the early 1900s if you go to San Francisco. A new crop of crafters that want to do things the old school way; they want to go back to doing it by hand. 

Not that all of that technology isn't important, because without the technology we wouldn't be where we are today. So some of it today is done by hand on a commercial level but mostly not. We take the cues from the Industrial Revolution. We use smaller, more efficient versions of those machines, of those ovens, but we go back to the most important part of it, which is the art behind bread making. 

So using the science, using the art, crafting these products by hand, and most importantly, spreading the gospel of good bread, which is ultimately tied to good food. 

Hey, it's a pretzel. 

Because that's what bread has been about from the beginning, right? It's about breaking bread, no matter if it's under proofed or over proofed, or if it looks like a pretzel, if it looks like an English muffin. 

Bread's about sharing things and about sharing experiences with people. It's about community. 

And we can still have some fun, right? We can add sesame seeds and poppy seeds and flax seeds (I don't actually know what cereal mix is; I'll find that out for you), but we can add cheese and we can make sandwiches… and most importantly, we can make pizza out of bread, which is pretty sweet. 

But it's not all about generic white bread anymore and that's where we're at. We went through 30,000 years of evolution. 

Right in the middle of that, is the perfect loaf of bread that we can end our day with slice it up, a little bit of butter, a little bit of olive oil, and a cold beer and it's a perfect imperfect craft.