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→Early History of Bread
Already, with the development of the earliest breads, new technologies arose to help with the baking process. This included enclosed ovens and open ovens that used mud or brick to make a hot surface that flat breads could be prepared from a dough mix. Bread and earlier agricultural foods affected the development of many food preparation technologies, including mortar, pestles, querns, and mills. The production of bread led to many major changes in society, where production and processing of wheat and barely for bread and other foods transformed economies and social structures. Initially, the grinding of grain to flour would have been done by hand, often resulting in coarse grains. However, mills and large flat stones were used by early historical periods, perhaps by the 3rd millennium BCE, to make more refined flour. This helped bread to become less coarse.
Millet was another grain used to make bread, particularly in India and China, where a form of flat bread made of millet is still a main food type in India. In China Sorghum and rice were used as varieties for making bread, which made the consistency and quality very different from wheat and barley based bread. This also likely explains why bread developed into different levels of significance in Chinese foods and often did not always accompany Chinese food. In the New World, corn was pounded and used to make bread, which was mostly a flat, unleavend bread that is similar to the modern tortilla.
==Bread and Society==