They knew about boiling water for salt since the Bronze age at least.
Salt price was largely determined by transport cost and it was just not worth the effort to gather the firewood instead of trading for it in many places.
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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Ancient people were just as smart as modern people, they just weren't as educated.
Humans are really good at figuring things out and tweaking things based off of previous results.
They also had more free time to figure things out.
They also didn't have televisions, computers or phones to distract them. So they'd watch the stars or nature for entertainment and eventually, naturally see patterns and wonder what would happen if they applied those patterns for their own gain.
And less things to work with, so had to get creative to avoid diet fatigue (which is lethal) and only those creative enough people survived to create the people today.
A lot of fermented stuff like bread, cheese, wine and beer most likely started as "stuff forgotten in a pot" - not very complicated. In case of bread you need: two stones for milling the grain, a pot to mix it with water and store it, and then a fire to bake it. Not medieval tech, but way earlier.
Beer has been known since at least the bronze age, there are recipes known today, but the initial stage was, yet again, mill some grain, mix with water, forget in a pot.
Wine: forget some fruit in a pot.
Source: Reading history, plus my ADHD brain keeps forgetting stuff in the kitchen. I accidentally invented soda one of these days, because sometimes the forgotten stuff gets fizzy, too (you do need to invent the hermetically closing jar for that though, open clay pot doesn't work in that case)!
Btw one of my crazier theories (although I'm not the only person considering it) is that it wasn't us domesticating the world, but that we were domesticated by yeast. So it was inevitable that we kept producing vessels and feeding the fungus with sugar in ever more refined ways. Fungus wants to grow.
I always heard it was wheat that domesticated us
It was probably a range of plants and fungi seeking interaction with a species that could care for them and bring them to new places. Maybe wheat and yeast ganged up to control the apes? However the first plant humans propagated were fig trees, and apparently the first plant we grew in a gardening context was the bottle gourd (pot to ferment stuff in!) Maybe we find out one day which of those fuckers are responsible for us having credit scores and 9-5 now!!
My favorite "oops" story... Guy went camping and wanted to keep the food in the cooler REALLY cold so he used dry ice instead of ice.
Accidentally created carbonated grapes. People have duplicated the effect with home soda machines.
Google "Fizzy Grapes".
I've done this a bunch of times when camping.
Good, crisp apples are the best. A carbonated honeycrisp apple is amazing!!!
I really want to know what was going on in the head of the first person to eat yogurt. "Hey mark, you know that milk we were trying to turn into cheese? Well it's not milk anymore, and it's not cheese either. I'm going to try it with some berries or something."
Probably some variation of "fuck I'm hungry"
It's a great motivator.
Beer and bread share a common ancestor: gruel. Put grain in water to soften. Works better if you also heat the mixture. Now you have a carb-rich slurry or paste in which bacteria have been killed off, suitable for staying alive.
Don't eat it all right away. Let it sit around for a bit, and wild yeasts will grow in it first, before bacteria start colonizing it.
Pour off the liquid: that's a primitive beer. Let the remaining mash dry out a bit; that's a primitive bread.
Actual beer and actual bread are just evolutions along the same lines.
You have fallen for the myth that salt was rare and expensive in ancient times. Medieval people did know how to make salt out of seawater. There were salt works all over the coasts of Britanny and Normandy during medieval times. Salt was not rare or expensive, except that they did need a lot of it because it was one of their prime preservation ingredients, so they needed barrels and barrels of the stuff, and that could drive prices up. But it was not because they didn't know how to produce salt in enormous quantities.
Same goes for Roman times. The myth that salt was so rare and precious that it constituted part of the pay for a Roman soldier is wrong. It was because salt was such an important part of the diet and for preservation that it was given this way. They got grain and oil as well.
It’s also because salt is heavy as fuck, so transporting it from coasts and places with salt mines was expensive.
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you don't have to boil seawater to make salt. you let it evaporate in the sun.
Not in northern Europe you don’t, unless you want your salt diluted even more.
Medieval people totally knew how to boil water and leave salt behind, and the most basic bread was probably an accidebtal discover when people used to put hard grains in water to soften them, someone had the idea to ambush them first
People back then were just as smart as people now. Knowledge accumulates slowly over time and that's that limits progress. We discover things slowly but once we know them we discover even bigger things I'm a feedback loop.
They knew you could, but mostly didn't because it takes a ton of energy to boil off water. There was no petroleum, no coal, so you would need a bunch of wood. So you use a bunch of wood to boil a liter of ocean water and you would get about 35 grams of salt. It just wasn't worth it.
But why not let a bucket of water vaporise by it self? There are plenty of hot days during a year, and you don't need salt immediately.
We're cooking on the shoulders of giants.
What really blows my mind is the dude that mixed oil and eggs and decided to beat the bejesus out of the mix for half an hour by hand and got mayonnaise.
When you got nothing else to do except wait for GTA 6 you might as well beat the shit out of some mayonnaise
Cooking must've been very exciting before all the recipes were discovered. It must've been like culinary alchemy.
yeah it's too bad every possible food has already been invented
Short as it is on the cosmic scale, history's been a pretty long time. Nobody found wheat and started making bread the next day. It was an incredibly long process that probably started with soaking the grains they were eating to make them more palatable and easier to consume. Then somebody thought to heat the wet grains. Then someone decided to crush the grains and you had porridge or gruel. A few iterations later someone comes up with a simple unleavened bread. Naturally-occurring yeast and dough left alone for a few hours could probably lead to rudimentary rising dough from there, and eventually we have brioche and marble rye.
Check out the Wikipedia page on salt pools in the Camargue region of France. https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salins_d%27Aigues-Mortes
This dates back to antiquity.
How Bread Built Civilization: From the First Farmers to the Modern Factory [1 hour documentary]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=892yaBEwtbM
How Salt Shaped Society: From the Roman Empire to the French Revolution [53 minutes documentary]
These people, they had the same brains we have now. But they largely got by on a lot of physical labor so they had a lot of time to think. And they didn't have a lot of exterior lighting to go around and do things in the dark so they had a lot of time to experiment inside.
I think it's easier to consider that probably every combination of everything to eat and ways to cook things has been explored in depth. Every single seed of every weed out there has been ground and tried.
You ever just boil some wheat then leave your leftovers in a jar too long?
All the f-ing time!
Nah dude just read about the earliest versions of beer and bread and it all makes sense. The earliest version of beer was more like a fermented porridge of malted barley, and the earliest version of bread was like a rough corn bread. Over time people improved both products but it was slow going. The key is knowing that dough and wort will just naturally ferment on their own if left out in the air and that both of those things can be made way more simply than a modern bread made with white all purpose flour or wort made with malt syrup.
People needed beer because the water was not always safe to drink. The alcohol in beer kills parasites and bacteria that might make you sick. Even kids drank light beer in medieval times for this reason.
I believe that the the claim that medieval people needed to drink beer because water wasn't safe to drink is a bit of a myth. They built aquaducts, dug wells, etc.
As far as I understand it, it was more to do with preference (beer is great!) and calories. Beer was a good way to turn grains into easily quaffed liquid meals.
To be fair, wells and aquaducts are fairly clean ways to get water (read: animals haven't shit or died in it yet). Rivers and other surface water were as bad as today, if not worse because it was a de facto village sewage system. Water quality issues were also mitigated by a diet very heavy in stews and soups, so less extra hydration was needed.
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The first step with bread is grinding the corn. This a basic way to make it edible for the tribe. Have you ever tried to bite on a corn of wheat or rye?
Mix it with water and cook it to make it softer, and you get a kind of porrige. Leave it warm over night, and you have a sourdough. Rekindle the fire on the next day, and you'll have a proto bread.
From there to the white bread made with a dozen chemical stabilizers, acid regulators and raising agents as they are sold in the supermarket is just the result of refining the process.
From there to the white bread made with a dozen chemical stabilizers, acid regulators and raising agents as they are sold in the supermarket is just the result of refining the process
Or there's just, you know normal bread, flour, water, yeast and salt. You don't need all that extra crap.
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People already explained that salt was relatively easy to get, steps to make bread are not that complicated and probably occured through trial and error, and for ale, it's quite probably just cereals left to soak in water too long + natural yeast and you get an accidental alcohol. The trickiest part is to finetune the process to make it a bit consistent, but finding it out is very easy
Also once you have yeast going, keep that shit. It's easy enough to do for yogurt, beer, wine, and bread with some extra steps.
Shit once wine is fermenting you can usually just take some of it say 1/10th, sit it aside mash more grapes and throw it in and that fermentation will take hold on the new sugars and keep going. Beer shouldn't have been much different there. Bread starters you have to feed, but if you are making bread daily or a few times a week it'd be easy to keep.
Want to make yogurt, the easiest way it to buy yogurt, and use the end of it to start your batch.
Clearly it's some kind of [perpetual stew] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew?wprov=sfla1) of yeast, which would make a good name for an obscure local band of extreme metal
I have to rack a bunch of hooch tonight and start a new batch and i'm going to try this thanks for the advice. i have looked into washing the yeast but it never occurred to me to just toss the few extra cups i get after racking into the next batch.
i switched to raw sugar and made invert sugar with that and it's the most active batch of yeast i have seen yet so i think it should work well!
Let me know how it goes!
it's looking good! I poured my juice and some invert cane sugar right into the lees in the primary and about 12 hours on i can see bubbles so it looks like it started! Pretty cool if it takes this will be the first alcohol I have made without directly tearing a yeast packet.
i wonder how many times i can do this before the primary needs to be sanitized.
Awesome to hear! You should be able to just poor a bit out, clean your equipment and put it back in and keep going
"Modern commercial brewers reuse yeast for several fermentations, often up to 40 or 50 batches, usually by pumping yeast directly from the bottom of one cylindroconical fermenter into the next. "
https://www.seriouseats.com/homebrewing-reusing-yeast-how-to-reuse-yeast-for-brewing-beer
oh that's pretty neat! This is going to cut my cost per gallon by a decent chunk that Côte des Blancs champagne yeast is not cheap but i'm also lazy so bought more instead of washing. Being able to stretch it even a few batches is cool. I checked it again just now and it's going strong, too!
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