A short history of bread baking (and why sourdough is the original)

The first breads, more than 10,000 years ago, were flat: ground grain and water, baked on a hot stone. Leavened bread arrived by accident. Around 3000 BC in ancient Egypt, a bowl of flour-and-water dough left out long enough caught wild yeast and bacteria from the air and the grain, started to ferment, and rose. Someone baked it anyway - and discovered that fermented dough makes a lighter, tastier, longer-keeping loaf. That wild ferment is sourdough. There was no other way to raise bread, so for thousands of years every risen loaf on earth was a sourdough loaf.

How old is the habit? Oetzi, the 5,300-year-old iceman found in the Alps, had einkorn and traces of bread in his gut - a snapshot of grain-eating in the Copper Age. By Roman times, professional bakers ran sourdough operations at scale, keeping back a piece of dough from each batch to start the next. That piece - what German bakers still call the Anstellgut - is the same trick you use at home today. A starter is, quite literally, a living chain that can stretch back generations.

Northern Europe's cool, damp climate favoured rye, and rye essentially demands sourdough - its starches only hold a loaf together when acidified by a sour. Out of that necessity grew an enormous regional variety: rye breads, mixed breads, farmhouse loaves, hundreds of named local styles. German bread culture is now so distinctive that it was added to the national list of UNESCO intangible cultural heritage, with over 3,000 registered bread specialities. The sour wasn't a trend there; it was the only way the daily loaf worked.

The break came in the 19th century. Once microbiologists understood yeast as a single organism, it could be cultivated and sold on its own. From the 1860s, commercial baker's yeast spread fast: it was fast, predictable and needed no living culture to maintain. Bread could be made in hours instead of a day, which suited factories perfectly. Within a few generations, sourdough went from being all bread to being a speciality - and much supermarket 'sourdough' today is yeast-raised with a little added acid for the tang. (More on that in what's really in bread and sourdough vs yeast.)

Sourdough never disappeared, and over the last decade it has come roaring back: bakers chasing flavour, eaters chasing digestibility and fewer additives, and a whole community sharing starters with names and stories. When you start a jar of flour and water on your counter, you're not following a fad - you're rejoining a 6,000-year-old practice that predates writing. That's a surprisingly good reason to keep it alive. If you want to start your own link in the chain, here's how to begin a starter; Sourdough Tracker just helps you remember to feed it.