Scientists have found an historic bread recipe in Turkey—and now the native bakery that recreated it might’t sustain with demand.
Some 5,000 years in the past, somebody buried a chunk of charred bread beneath the edge of a home in what’s now Eskisehir in central Turkey. Archaeologists unearthed it in September 2024 throughout an excavation at Kulluoba Hoyuk, a Bronze Age settlement that has been underneath investigation for many years. The remarkably preserved bread has been on show on the Eskişehir Archaeological Museum since March 28.
“That is the oldest baked bread to have come to mild throughout an excavation, and it has largely preserved its form,” stated Murat Turkteki, archaeologist and director of the excavation, in an interview with AFP.
Evaluation revealed that the bread was constituted of coarsely floor emmer flour—an historic wheat selection—together with lentil seeds and a plant leaf used as a pure leavening agent. Flat like a pancake and disc-shaped, the bread measures about 5 inches (12.7 centimeters) in diameter.
Curious to see if the recipe might be recreated, native officers contacted Halk Ekmek, a bakery in Eskisehir. Since historic emmer seeds are now not out there in Turkey, the bakers used Kavilca wheat—a carefully associated selection—together with bulgur and lentils to approximate the unique elements.
And apparently, it’s scrumptious. The primary batch bought out inside hours, and the bakery has been promoting round 300 loaves of “Kulluoba bread” every day ever since. With municipal subsidies, the bread is bought for simply 50 Turkish lira (about $1.30).
One other compelling side of the bread is that it’s constituted of drought-resistant crops. This has caught the eye of each archaeologists and native officers. Turkey presently cultivates water-intensive crops like corn and sunflowers, however Kavilca wheat is immune to each drought and illness.
“Our ancestors are educating us a lesson. Like them, we must be shifting towards much less thirsty crops,” Ayse Unluce, the mayor of Eskisehir, instructed AFP.
