Sometimes people want bread more than they want democracy. Some governments can’t deliver either.

All hail Adolf Ignaz Mautner von Markhof. And also Pope Leo IX, Michael Cerularius the Patriarch and assorted wise rabbis and scholars.

Perhaps there’s more to flour fermentation than the bubbles that lighten the loaf.

How Delwen Samuel, an archaeologist, replicated the bread of Egyptian workers of 3000 years ago. This is the episode that should have been called Bake Like an Egyptian.

Maybe you heard about the oldest crumbs of burnt toast in the world. But have you stopped to wonder how the archaeologists found those crumbs?

What more is there to say? Plenty, of course, but not this time. This is the final episode of this run of Our Daily Bread.

“I began to dream of a binding machine. I dreamed of it at night and I dreamed of it during the day.”

Eight wheat seeds of silver gets you 5 pounds 10 ounces of bread.

Nathan Myhrvold is right: “The best bread the world has ever had is being made today.”

If you are eating reasonably well, it probably doesn’t matter which you choose. You can get great white bread, and you can get awful brown bread.

It needn’t actually taste sour. In fact, except in a few countries, it need not even make use of a natural leaven.

There’s a fundamental tension between the time it takes to make a loaf of bread and the value of the final product.

A small bakery in Toronto, Canada, became a behemoth that bestrides global bread and beyond. Phew!

A large slave-driven mill could grind seven kilograms of flour an hour. A watermill multiplied that twenty times or more.

Bashing wheat with a hammer will not give you flour. What you need is a shearing force, which you get by grinding the grain between two stones.

Synthetic wheat; it isn’t natural, but it is a very good thing.

In all probability, the original source of Kamut was a market stall or a small farmer in Egypt, where it had survived as an obscure grain grown by peasant farmers.

How, and when, did modern wheat arise from its the wild ancestors?

Gathering enough wheat to eat probably wasn’t all that difficult.