Kneading Dough

History

People have been working dough for a very long time. The oldest bread yet found comes from a Natufian site in Jordan's north-eastern desert, around 14,500 years old, thousands of years before farming ². Wild yeast lives on grain, so any dough left to sit will start to rise on its own ².

Egypt gives us the best picture of early bread-making. Bakers used emmer wheat, a tough grain to turn into flour: it was moistened, pounded with a pestle, dried, winnowed, sieved and ground on a saddle quern before anyone could knead it ³. Small tomb figurines show servants making bread, and New Kingdom tomb pictures show loaves shaped like people, fish, animals and fans ³. Most bread was made at home, with any extra sold ³.

Then there's the feet. The Greek traveller Herodotus listed the ways Egyptians did things backwards from everyone else, and among them: "they knead dough with their feet and clay with their hands" ⁴. Whether it was everyday practice or a good travel story, it's a wonderful image.

The Bible carries kneading into one of its biggest scenes. As the Israelites fled Egypt, "the people took their dough before it was leavened, their kneadingtroughs being bound up in their clothes upon their shoulders" (Exodus 12:34) ⁹. The dough never rose, and that hurried bread became matzah ⁸.

Machines took over much of the work in the 20th century. Britain's Chorleywood process, developed in 1961, uses intense mechanical mixing to cut fermentation time right down, making bread faster and cheaper ². Then came the twist. In November 2006, Mark Bittman's "Minimalist" column in the New York Times shared baker Jim Lahey's no-knead loaf: a wet dough, a pinch of yeast, 12 to 18 hours of waiting, and a hot Dutch oven ¹⁰. Time lets the gluten line up without any elbow grease ¹⁰. The idea wasn't new. Eliza Smith printed a no-knead method in The Compleat Housewife in 1739, and Doris Grant championed a no-knead wholemeal loaf in wartime Britain in 1944 ¹⁰. But Bittman's column set off a global baking craze ¹⁰.