KEY POINTS:
French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said that to invite someone to eat with you is to take responsibility for their happiness during the whole time they are under your roof. Considering the table is the only place where one never gets bored during the first hour, the way you start and end the meal should be designed to make your friends stay faithful to you forever. One of the best ways to do that is with good bread.
Only four main ingredients are required to make good bread - strong flour, salt, yeast and water; the rest is down to skill.
Bread has always been hugely important and symbolic in history. Muslims used to be unable to sell bread, only trade or give it away, so much was it considered a gift from Allah. Christians use bread to represent the body of Christ and believe it symbolises the nourishment of the soul.
The workers who built the pyramids were paid in bread. Today, we still use such words as "bread", "earn a crust" and "dough" to describe money.
Bread provides us with more energy value, more protein, more iron, more nicotinic acid and more vitamin B1 than any other basic food. Bread is one of the finest foods and it isn't an exaggeration to say we cannot live without it. As proof, New Zealanders eat more than one million loaves of bread every day, seven days a week. That costs us $340 million a year, which breaks down to an average weekly spend per household of about $6.
Breadmaking was introduced to this country in the early 1800s by our first missionary settlers, who arrived dragging sacks of wheat and a steel hand-mill for grinding with them from the home country. If you were out digging gold or felling trees, you cooked unleavened damper on the camp fire, thanked God you were alive and never dreamed that your descendants would later write about how romantic it all was.
Yeast was commonly made from scalded malt and boiled hops, which fermented together for a few days before mashed potatoes were added. If you had a bakery near a brewery, you not only had those two major food groups provided, you could use the brewer's yeast.
Home cooks mixed mashed potatoes, brewer's yeast and water together to make a ferment. They let it sit around for 30 minutes then added some flour to create a thick spongy mixture, which was left overnight to grow.
Hippies in the 1960s helped revive the art of breadmaking at home. They also saved lots of other cooking basics such as making yoghurt, butter, cheese, cereals and oils. Making your own bread is a form of therapy because it is so relaxing to knead.
Olive oil bread is almost pillowy and deliciously perfumed.
As children, we were given a medicinal tablespoon of olive oil bought from the chemist. Back then, who would have thought we'd end up living on the stuff and thinking we were Mediterraneans?
- Detours, HoS