Kneaded L.A.
Explore some of the appetizing nooks and cultural crannies of Los Angeles bread. (best viewed on desktop)
In all its shapes, sizes, and varieties, bread connects our present to history and culture. The delicious complexity of bread made by people in L.A. comes from our city’s greatest asset: the diversity of its people.
Explore some of the Los Angeles bread and bread makers featured in Kneaded L.A. below, and stay tuned for more delicious updates.
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Dulan's Soul Food Kitchen
Terry Dulan of Dulan's Soul Food Kitchen shares his family's roots in L.A., the power of entrepreneurship, and how cornbread is at the heart of soul food.
Dig in .
Just What I Kneaded
Treat yourself to community building over ooey-gooey vegan cinnamon rolls. Take a whiff !
Apron Strings Community Bake Shop
How do you connect with your ancestors and hold them in esteem? Karen Hirsch says: Make some bread !
Lucy Hale’s Indian Tacos & Frybread
Check in for some frybread, and check back here for a story!
San & Wolves Bakeshop
Catch their pop up when you can, and a story here in the not-too-distant future.
Kneadful Things
The relationship between bread and culture is circular, like a bagel. In all of its incredible flourings, bread is both the product of culture and the carbohydrate fuel that let culture bloom.
"Bread was the evolutionary spark that led to the development of state and large political units," says William Rubel, author of Bread: A Global History. "Bread allowed for the accumulation of surplus, and so the villages got bigger until you had actual cities."
Until around 10,000 years ago, humans were mostly hunting and gathering. One train of thought suggests it was the ability to reliably produce significant amounts of flour and grain that let us settle and for better or worse, create societies where different folks did different things. Flour—and bread—freed up people to work on things other than filling bellies.
Rise and Grind
How We Got that Bread
The precise origins of bread – when and where the first loaf got made and hopefully enjoyed – are almost impossible to pin down because the long and mysterious process of transforming what is basically grass into goodies happened over tens of thousands of years all over the world.
Copyright © 2016 Groman-Yaroslavski et al used under the Creative Commons Attribution License
Bread is a deceptively simple thing that really only needs two ingredients: water, some kind of grain ground into some kind of flour, then some kind of heat to cook it.
Tools like the sickles pictured on the left helped humans harvest the fibrous grass that would eventually become the cereals we love and domesticated, but the first step to creating bread started with grinding plant parts into powder.
Dig into the epic story of bread with some slices of history below.
Aboriginal Flourings at Cuddie Springs
Grinding stones found at this site suggest that Indigenous Australians were grinding up native plants like Themeda triandra, the kangaroo grass pictured above, for cooking purposes as long as 30,000 years ago. The flour produced was mixed with water and eaten as a paste, or cooked in the coals of a campfire and eaten as cakes or loaves.
Image Credit:
Photo by Bernard DUPONT used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic
Grinding It Out in Europe
A site in the Mugello Valley in Italy contains some of the earliest signs of flour-making, with researchers discovering remnants of cattails and ferns on grinding stones from three European sites from at least 30,000 years ago.
Source: https://www.pnas.org/content/107/44/18815
Image Credit:
Photo by Christianlorenz97 used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license
Pokrovsky Valley, Russia
Contemporaneously, at the Kostenki site complex in Russia’s Pokrovsky Valley, tools with traces of plant material have also been discovered. Processing starch grains seems to have been widespread throughout Europe, expanding the menu of prehistoric humans.
Source: https://www.pnas.org/content/107/44/18815
Image Credit:
Photo by GAlexandrova used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license
Pavlov Hills, Czech Republic
At this site in the Czech Republic, Paleolithic people ground a variety of local fibrous plants into flour to better feed themselves in leaner times. They enjoyed their plant-based food alongside megafauna meat mains, like mammoths, the remains of which were also found at this site.
Source: https://www.pnas.org/content/107/44/18815
Image Credit:
Photo by Ondřej Žváček used under GNU Free Documentation License .
Don’t Fear the Reaping
At an archaeological site in Israel, near Kinneret, scientists found the first recorded evidence of humans harvesting wild cereal grains, in the form of residue on ancient sickles.
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5120854/
Image Credit:
Copyright © 2016 Groman-Yaroslavski et al used under Creative Commons Attribution License
Things Get Hot in Paglicci Cave
Alongside tools and animal bones, this site in Southern Italy contains the earliest definitive thermal treatment applied to grains, specifically oats. Ancient Italians ground oats and other grains here 32,000 years ago and applied some kind of heat, prefiguring cooking needed to make bread.
Source: https://www.pnas.org/content/112/39/12075/tab-figures-data
Image Credit:
Photo by Thilo Parg used under Lizenz CC-BY-SA-4.0
Prehistoric Pita
The charred remains of a pita-like bread discovered in northeastern Jordan predate the emergence of agriculture by at least 4,000 years, complicating the link between bread making and agriculture. Found in a stone fireplace, the flatbread was made using flour from wild barley, oats and tubers.
Source: http://journals.ed.ac.uk/lithicstudies/article/view/1647/2309#:~:text=Shubayqa%201%20is%20a%20newly,collection%20of%20ground%20stone%20tools
Image Credit:
Photo courtesy of PNAS used under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND)
Night of the Living Bread
It takes living yeast to make the bread rise, and with loaves found in its pharaohs' tombs, Egypt is home to the earliest-known leavened bread as far back as 3,000 years ago. Egyptians of all stripes relied on the staff of life, prepared in brewery/bakery combos similar to the funerary model pictured above.
Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1631069110003057
Image Credit:
Photo by Keith Schengili-Roberts used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic
A-maize-ing Grains
Genetic analysis reveals that maize was domesticated as far back as 9,000 years ago, with the earliest evidence coming from the Balsas River Valley of southwestern Mexico. From the wild grass teosinte, maize’s unassuming ancestor, bloomed a distinct and still evolving tradition of bread making.
Source: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aba3245
Image Credit:
Photo by Mitrush used under GNU Free Documentation License
The difference between teosinte and maize is so stark that for many years maize’s precursor was thought to be extinct, lost to the ancient past.
Maize sustained the Mayan civilization, and one myth attributed maize’s origin to the god Hun Hunahpu, more specifically his severed head. After being tricked into the underworld, the gods there decapitated him and buried his head, planted it, and from that unlikely seed sprouted the first maize plant.
While this myth is only one of many and its provenance is still disputed by scholars, it is fitting that maize came from the head of a god. Like other grains domesticated from their wild ancestors, it's the product of humanity's collective genius for transforming wild plants into undeniably delicious human culture.
From the single-rowed, meager teosinte (pictured above), humans developed grainbows of maize (pictured below). Above photo by Matt Lavin used under CC BY-SA 2.0
Above photo by Mike Licht used under CC BY 2.0
On top of teosinte’s revolutionary evolution into maize, the grain requires a further transformation on the road to bread: nixtamalization.
Like so much of bread’s history, nixtamalization’s origins elude a precise date, but the earliest known equipment is more than 3,000 years old. Theories abound as to how Mesoamericans discovered the process, but as maize spread throughout the Americas so did nixtamalization and it continues into contemporary cuisines relying on maize. Today, home cooks and tortillerias like La Princesita cook dried kernels then steep them in an alkaline solution (like in the below video), making the maize softer and more flavorful so it can in turn be ground down to make masa – literally “dough flour” in Spanish– to then be mixed with water and turned into dough for tortillas and other corn-based delicacies.
Part of the nixtamalization process that turns corn kernels into tortillas
It’s a journey that’s both distinctly unique to maize and similar to bread making around the world, an expression of both the natural history of the plant ingredients and the cultural history of the people that shaped them into the bread we know and devour.
