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.
Flour is a powder made by grinding raw grains, roots, beans, nuts, or seeds. Flours are used to make many different foods. Cereal flour, particularly wheat flour, is the main ingredient of bread, which is a staple food for many cultures. Corn flour has been important in Mesoamerican cuisine since ancient times and remains a staple in the Americas. Rye flour is a constituent of bread in both Central Europe and Northern Europe.
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 baker is a tradesperson who bakes and sometimes sells breads and other products made of flour by using an oven or other concentrated heat source. The place where a baker works is called a bakery.
A digestive biscuit, sometimes described as a sweet-meal biscuit, is a semi-sweet biscuit that originated in Scotland. The digestive was first developed in 1839 by two Scottish doctors to aid digestion. The term digestive is derived from the belief that they had antacid properties around the time the biscuit was first introduced due to the use of sodium bicarbonate as an ingredient. Historically, some producers used diastatic malt extract to "digest" some of the starch that existed in flour prior to baking.
Durum wheat, also called pasta wheat or macaroni wheat, is a tetraploid species of wheat. It is the second most cultivated species of wheat after common wheat, although it represents only 5% to 8% of global wheat production. It was developed by artificial selection of the domesticated emmer wheat strains formerly grown in Central Europe and the Near East around 7000 BC, which developed a naked, free-threshing form. Like emmer, durum wheat is awned. It is the predominant wheat that grows in the Middle East.
Soda bread is a variety of quick bread traditionally made in a variety of cuisines in which sodium bicarbonate is used as a leavening agent instead of the traditional yeast. The ingredients of traditional soda bread are flour, baking soda, salt, and buttermilk. The buttermilk in the dough contains lactic acid, which reacts with the baking soda to form tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide. Other ingredients can be added, such as butter, egg, raisins, or nuts. An advantage of quick breads is their ability to be prepared quickly and reliably, without requiring the time-consuming skilled labor and temperature control needed for traditional yeast breads.
Wheat flour is a powder made from the grinding of wheat used for human consumption. Wheat varieties are called "soft" or "weak" if gluten content is low, and are called "hard" or "strong" if they have high gluten content. Hard flour, or bread flour, is high in gluten, with 12% to 14% gluten content, and its dough has elastic toughness that holds its shape well once baked. Soft flour is comparatively low in gluten and thus results in a loaf with a finer, crumbly texture. Soft flour is usually divided into cake flour, which is the lowest in gluten, and pastry flour, which has slightly more gluten than cake flour.
Baker's percentage is a notation method indicating the proportion of an ingredient relative to the flour used in a recipe when making breads, cakes, muffins, and other baked goods. It is also referred to as baker's math, and may be indicated by a phrase such as based on flour weight. It is sometimes called formula percentage, a phrase that refers to the sum of a set of baker's percentages. Baker's percentage expresses a ratio in percentages of each ingredient's weight to the total flour weight:
Raisin bread is a type of bread made with raisins and flavored with cinnamon. It is "usually a white flour or egg dough bread". Aside from white flour, raisin bread is also made with other flours, such as all-purpose flour, oat flour, or whole wheat flour. Some recipes include honey, brown sugar, eggs, or butter. Variations of the recipe include the addition of walnuts, hazelnuts, pecans or, for a dessert, rum or whisky.
Brown bread is bread made with significant amounts of whole grain flour, usually wheat, and sometimes dark-coloured ingredients such as molasses or coffee. In Canada, Ireland and South Africa, it is whole wheat bread; in the Maritimes and New England, it is bread made with molasses. In some regions of the US, brown bread is called wheat bread to complement white bread.
Thomas Richard Allinson was an English physician, dietetic reformer, businessman, journalist and vegetarianism activist. He was a proponent of wholemeal bread consumption. His name is still used today for a bread popular in Europe, Allinson bread.
Brown bread is bread made with significant amounts of whole grain flour.
An oatcake is a type of flatbread similar to a cracker or biscuit, or in some versions takes the form of a pancake. They are prepared with oatmeal as the primary ingredient, and sometimes include plain or wholemeal flour as well. Oatcakes are cooked on a griddle or baked in an oven.
The 1951 Pont-Saint-Esprit mass poisoning, known in French as Le Pain Maudit, took place on 15 August 1951, in the small town of Pont-Saint-Esprit in Southern France. More than 250 people were involved, including 50 people interned in asylums, and there were seven deaths. A foodborne illness was suspected; among these it was originally believed to be a case of "cursed bread".
No-knead bread is a method of bread baking that uses a very long fermentation (rising) time instead of kneading to form the gluten strands that give the bread its texture. It is characterized by a low yeast content and a very wet dough. Some recipes improve the quality of the crust by baking the bread in a Dutch oven or other covered vessel.
The Making of Bread Act 1757 was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain, which aimed to protect the making of bread and punish those that adulterated it, for the purposes of protecting public health. It was introduced after a report accused bakers of using alum, chalk and powdered bones to keep bread white.
