Bread is a staple food prepared from a dough of flour and water, usually by baking. Throughout recorded history and around the world, it has been an important part of many cultures' diet. It is one of the oldest human-made foods, having been of significance since the dawn of agriculture, and plays an essential role in both religious rituals and secular culture.
A croissant is a French pastry made from puff pastry in a crescent shape.
Sourdough or sourdough bread is a bread made by the fermentation of dough using wild lactobacillaceae and yeast. Lactic acid from fermentation imparts a sour taste and improves keeping qualities.
A baguette is a long, thin type of bread of French origin that is commonly made from basic lean dough. It is distinguishable by its length and crisp crust.
Brioche is a pastry of French origin whose high egg and butter content gives it a rich and tender crumb. The chef Joël Robuchon described it as "light and slightly puffy, more or less fine, according to the proportion of butter and eggs". It has a dark, golden, and flaky crust, frequently accentuated by an egg wash applied after proofing.
Dough is a thick, malleable, sometimes elastic paste made from grains or from leguminous or chestnut crops. Dough is typically made by mixing flour with a small amount of water or other liquid and sometimes includes yeast or other leavening agents, as well as ingredients such as fats or flavorings.
A rusk is a hard, dry biscuit or a twice-baked bread. It is sometimes used as a teether for babies. In some cultures, rusk is made of cake, rather than bread: this is sometimes referred to as cake rusk. In the UK, the name also refers to a wheat-based food additive.
A bread making machine or breadmaker is a home appliance for baking bread. It consists of a bread pan, at the bottom of which are one or more built-in paddles, mounted in the center of a small special-purpose oven. The machine is usually controlled by a built-in computer using settings input via a control panel. Most bread machines have different cycles for different kinds of dough—including white bread, whole grain, European-style, and dough-only. Many also have a timer to allow the bread machine to function without operator input, and some high-end models allow the user to program a custom cycle.
Kifli, kiflice, kifle, or kipferl is a traditional yeast bread roll that is rolled and formed into a crescent before baking.
Rye bread is a type of bread made with various proportions of flour from rye grain. It can be light or dark in color, depending on the type of flour used and the addition of coloring agents, and is typically denser than bread made from wheat flour. Compared to white bread, it is higher in fiber, darker in color, and stronger in flavor. The world's largest exporter of rye bread is Poland.
Pain de campagne, also called "French sourdough", is typically a large round loaf ("miche") made from either natural leavening or baker's yeast. Most traditional versions of this bread are made with a combination of white flour with whole wheat flour and/or rye flour, water, leavening and salt. For centuries, French villages had communal ovens where the townsfolk would bring their dough to be baked, and the loaves weighed from 1.5 to 5.5 kilograms (3–12 lb). Such large loaves would feed a family for days or weeks, until the next baking day.
In cooking, proofing is a step in the preparation of yeast bread and other baked goods in which the dough is allowed to rest and rise a final time before baking. During this rest period, yeast ferments the dough and produces gases, thereby leavening the dough.
Vienna bread is a type of bread that is produced from a process developed in Vienna, Austria, in the 19th century. The Vienna process used high milling of Hungarian grain, and cereal press-yeast for leavening.
Desem is both a type of sourdough starter made from whole wheat flour, spelt flour or other flours and water, and the resulting bread.
Viennoiseries are French baked goods made from a yeast-leavened dough in a manner similar to bread, or from puff pastry, but with added ingredients, which give them a richer, sweeter character that approaches that of pastry. The dough is often laminated.
Barm, also called ale yeast, is the foam or scum formed on the top of a fermenting liquid, such as beer, wine, or feedstock for spirits or industrial ethanol distillation. It is used to leaven bread, or set up fermentation in a new batch of liquor. Barm, as a leaven, has also been made from ground millet combined with must out of wine-tubs and is sometimes used in English baking as a synonym for a natural leaven (sourdough). Various cultures derived from barm, usually Saccharomyces cerevisiae, became ancestral to most forms of brewer's yeast and baker's yeast currently on the market.
Bread is a staple food of Finland. It is served with almost every meal and many different types are produced domestically.
Pain aux raisins, also called escargot or pain russe, is a spiral pastry often eaten for breakfast in France. Its names translate as "raisin bread", "snail" and "Russian bread" respectively. It is a member of the pâtisserieviennoise family of baked foods.
Bread is a staple food throughout Europe. Throughout the 20th century, there was a huge increase in global production, mainly due to a rise in available, developed land throughout Europe, North America and Africa.
Bread has a significance beyond mere nutrition in many cultures in the Western world and Asia because of its history and contemporary importance. Bread is also significant in Christianity as one of the elements of the Eucharist; see sacramental bread. The word companion comes from Latin com- "with" + panis "bread".
