Why did flatbread dominate the Middle East but Europe adopted raised breads?

chef_carol

This may be a history question so please move it if appropriate. Culturally, local ingredients dominate cooking recipes and national dishes (e.g., soy in SE Asia), but why do Europeans add a raising agent to bread items to make loaf bread whilst people from the Middle East still favour flat breads? Were raising agents discovered in Europe and...

Originally asked by Venture2099 on Stack Exchange (cooking) (CC BY-SA 4.0).

uphilltech

Good cooking question — answering as the UphillTech team:

I'm going to agree with Szczerzo about this being an anthropologic question, but I'm going to disagree about the cause. While nomadic lifestyles was an influence, it's not causative. I'm also going to ignore the distinction made about raising agents in the OP, because it's factually incorrect; most Arab/Levantine/Turkish/Kurdish breads use yeast. Instead, I'm going to answer the distinction between loaf bread and flatbread. Specifically: loaf bread is an aberration, not flatbread. You find flatbreads around the world in every society that has access to any kind of grain anywhere. Europe,...

Full answer by FuzzyChef: https://cooking.stackexchange.com/a/90658 (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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