Grit City Baking Company

For millennia baking has been fundamental to our development into a modern civilized society. Early elements of baking tools, moulds, utensils, and equipment can be found in museums across the world, drawing from all cultures, civilizations, and peoples. The very first bakers blended wild grains, soaked in water, creating a paste that would be cooked on primitive flat hot rocks, creating what would become primordial bread. The earliest known oven dates back to 6500 B.C.E., in Croatia. What we would consider modern bread-baking found its earliest inception, however, in Ancient Greece in approximately 600 B.C.E. where enclosed ovens have been found. Throughout the ancient world, however, primitive ovens and worktables have been found in Turkey, Palestine, and notably, Rome. One of the earliest baker's guilds was established in Rome in 168 B.C.E., and by 1 C.E. there were nearly three hundred pastry chefs in Rome, baking, as Cato recounts an enormous variety of cakes, groats, cress, pretzels, tortes, and fritters. ​ Baking is so fundamental to our world that the smell of fresh baked bread permeates our consciousness and reminds us of the joy of life. Baking is almost alchemical in nature, and the entire process of growing seed and following it through to the final product as a tasty morsel for you to chew on demonstrates the full cyclic interconnectedness of the human condition and the planet as a whole. We hope you'll break bread with us.