The origin of bread

According to the history books, before 6000 BC, the ancient Egyptians used grains to prepare various foods, for example, mashed wheat flour and water were mixed to make dough, which probably left some dough, so natural fermentation took place. When they cooked the remaining fermented dough in the oven, an accident happened: the round, dry and hard pancakes baked in the oven without fermentation turned into soft, fragrant and elastic food-real bread was born. However, at that time, people only knew the method of fermentation but didn't know its principle. It was not until the 7th century/KLOC that people began to study it. /kloc-in the 9th century, French biologist louis pasteur successfully discovered the principle of fermentation, thus uncovering the mystery of bread making handed down from ancient Egypt. It turns out that there are countless fungi in the air, one of which is yeast. If it falls in a suitable environment, it will carry out anoxic breathing, decompose sugar, and produce carbon dioxide and alcohol. If the bacteria fall into the dough, carbon dioxide gas will make the dough swell, thus making soft bread. The definition of bread in modern baking textbooks is: bread is a fermented baked food. It is a soft tissue convenience food which takes wheat flour, yeast, salt and water as basic raw materials, and adds a proper amount of sugar, grease, dairy products, eggs, fruit materials and additives, and is made by stirring, fermenting, molding, proofing and baking. Bread has a history of nearly ten thousand years from its birth to today. During this period, great changes and updates have taken place in bread raw materials, bread quality, bread types, baking technology and equipment. As a result, the quality of raw materials for bread is getting higher and higher, and there are more and more kinds of bread (it is said that Germany has more than 300 kinds of bread per capita in the world), and the technology, technology and equipment for making bread are becoming more and more sophisticated. Bread, as an extremely nutritious staple food, plays an irreplaceable role in people's daily life and is paid more and more attention by modern people who advocate health. At present, bread is the staple food of most wheat-producing countries in the world, and the nutrition authorities are also vigorously promoting people to eat bread. This is because bread has the most comprehensive nutrients and the highest nutritional value in cereals. Its calorific value and digestive absorption rate are higher than other staple foods that people often eat, such as rice and steamed bread. Eating100g of bread is equivalent to eating 200g of rice. Yeast is used in bread production, which contains a variety of enzymes, among which protease can decompose protein in dough into peptone, polypeptide, amino acids and other substances; Amylase can decompose lipids into substances with simple structure and easy digestion and absorption by human body. After baking, the starch in the flour is fully gelatinized, which is very beneficial to the action of enzymes. There are far more enzymes in bread than in foods that are not fermented or neutralized with alkali after fermentation (alkali destroys vitamins in flour). In addition, ordinary plants contain calcium phytate, which is difficult for human body to digest and absorb after being combined with calcium in human body. After bread is fermented and baked, phytic acid in flour is destroyed, which improves the digestion and absorption rate of human body. In addition, various nutrients, such as sugar, eggs, milk, oil and so on. Generally, it is added to bread during the production process, and even miscellaneous grains such as soybeans, cereals and corn are added to achieve nutritional complementarity and improve the utilization rate of nutrients. The author has visited Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, France, Belgium and other countries to study and inspect the baking culture. Thereby further deepening the impression of the importance of bread as a staple food. In Germany, people can't live without bread for three meals a day, and the per capita consumption of bread reaches 84 kg/year, ranking first in the world. With the advantages of production and scientific research, large well-known manufacturers, such as Austria's Barker Delin, Germany's Brown and Belgium's Platus, have developed various kinds of bread ready-mixed flour, such as soybean bread, corn bread, rye bread, whole wheat bread, multi-grain bread and potato bread, which pay attention to nutrition, are convenient to use, and have excellent quality and unique flavor. In Munich, Germany, the author witnessed a large-scale bakery product distribution factory named Müller, which used Cowen's pre-mixed powder of miscellaneous grains bread to produce a large number of miscellaneous grains bread on the production line. In our country, most people still eat bread as snacks, and most people like to eat snack bread with high sugar, high oil and sweet softness. Today, with the high incidence of diseases such as hypertension, diabetes and hyperlipidemia, staple bread and miscellaneous grain bread with low sugar, low oil and high fiber will be more and more favored by modern people. In the process of bread production, the continuous innovation and improvement of bread ready-mixed flour and frozen dough technology will enable people to eat nutritious and fresh bread products at any time. Advocating food and bread is also in line with the Chinese people's eating habits, which can reduce the time people spend on cooking. Most hotels in Europe do not have their own bakeries. The main reason is the high cost of labor and equipment. The products produced by large and medium-sized baking products distribution factories like Miller are cheap and stable in quality, and of course they have become suppliers of baking products such as bread in these hotels. When I visited Miller Bread Escort Center, I learned that more than 65,438+000 special trucks loaded with all kinds of freshly baked bread leave the factory at 4 o'clock every morning and are delivered to hotels, supermarkets and other users in Munich and even as far away as southern Austria. In Beijing, the author noticed that some hotels followed the example of foreign hotels and began to gradually reduce the staffing of their own bakeries and bakeries, and then bought some common products such as toast, Danish, croissants and egg tart shells from some bakeries and bakeries with certain production capacity in society to make up for the shortage caused by reducing labor costs. Large star-rated hotels with more guests in Europe and America celebrate Christmas, Easter, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day and Thanksgiving every year. At that time, the bakeries and bakeries in these hotels will cancel their vacations and start to build gingerbread houses to bake Christmas fruit bread, pudding, biscuits, meat pies and pumpkin pies. And they are very busy. These seasonal foods are needed for the banquet on the left and the party on the right. In addition to making bread and cakes for daily hotel guests, it is also necessary to deal with the large use of these foods in activities such as sending Christmas gift baskets (mainly composed of Christmas fruit bread, biscuits, wine, etc.). ), general manager's year-end appreciation meeting, secretary's day and so on. Moreover, these products are neither labor-saving nor time-consuming, and masters are often too tired to say anything. At this time, some cake houses and bakeries in the society (the owners or chefs of these cake houses and bakeries mostly have working experience in four-star and five-star hotels) launched these foods in time and promoted them to hotels, which relieved the pressure of these hotels and achieved good results. Nowadays, the European Phoenix is becoming more and more popular, and the festival of crossing the ocean has become a fashion, and its popularity tends to exceed that of China people's own festivals. Some restaurants and bars precede hotels, and they also hold celebrations of one kind or another in these foreign festivals, which have won a lot of popularity. Even some ordinary shops put stickers of Santa Claus on their windows and spray patterns such as stars and the moon. For China people, it has become common to eat Christmas dinner and send roses and chocolates on Valentine's Day. The demand for seasonal foods such as seasonal bread in these festivals contains huge business opportunities. In my opinion, it is far from meeting these needs by relying only on the production capacity of several cake shops and bakeries. It is said that a large well-known food factory in Beijing has invested heavily in introducing a bread production line from Europe. It's been a while, but so far it hasn't produced many styles of bread, but there are only a few kinds of toast bread on its sales counter, which makes people feel sad. In my opinion, domestic hotels will sooner or later cancel the bakery in the store like European hotels and buy products from the society instead. And large and medium-sized bread distribution centers with complete quality, good quality and low price and timely delivery will have a great future. With China's accession to the WTO and the approach of the 2008 Olympic Games, more and more foreigners come to China for sightseeing and work, and the business opportunities for bread production and consumption are also increasing. As a baker who makes bread, he will also be very popular, especially the baker who can make European bread. In China, bakers are generally divided into hotel bakers and bakery bakers. Although they are all bakers, the varieties of bread they make are quite different. The baker in the hotel makes bread for many foreigners who stay in the hotel every day, and most of the bread varieties are European. Many of them have even been to Germany, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands and other European countries to participate in professional training, with comprehensive technology and novel ideas; Most bakers in social bakeries mainly make Hong Kong and table-top sweet and soft bread suitable for China population, and have little communication with each other. However, in recent years, the bakery opened by the baker who used to work in the joint venture hotel mentioned above has appeared again. Most of them open bakeries in areas where there are many foreigners, and their varieties are very European and popular with foreigners. Some big food factories have also invited chefs from hotels at a high price, but it is often difficult for both sides to cooperate well. When making bread in a hotel, the chef of the hotel first considers the good materials and products, which are welcomed by the guests without much consideration of the cost (European and American guests have high spending power and are not afraid to spend money), but some domestic food enterprises have to deal with the high cost of raw materials first, instead of letting go of their hands and feet, and often end up in a bad mood. It seems that how to absorb hotel technology and products in state-owned food enterprises and how hotel chefs survive in these enterprises are topics that both sides need to explore. But in any case, our people call for real, more and more European bread to enter their market. With the increasing health awareness of Chinese people, the day when bread becomes the staple food is not far away. There will be bread and everything.