Bread



Breads are a group of staple foods prepared by baking, steaming, or frying a dough consisting minimally of flour and water. Salt is necessary in most cases, and optionally a leavening agent is used. Some sorts of bread also contain spices (e.g. caraway seed) and grains (sesame, poppy seeds). Grains are also used for decoration purpose.

Bread may be eaten by itself, often with butter, peanut butter or other nut butter, or a sweet spread such as preserves, jam, jelly, marmalade, honey, or used as an enclosure for a sandwich. It may have been only baked, or subsequently toasted, and may be served anywhere from room temperature to hot.

In the kitchen you put bread in a breadbox to keep it fresh.

Etymology

The word itself, Old English bread, is common in various forms to many Germanic languages; cf. German Brot, Dutch brood, Swedish bröd, and Danish brød; it has been derived from the root of brew, but more probably is connected with the root of break, for its early uses are confined to broken pieces, or bits of bread, the Latin frustum, and it was not till the 12th century that it took the place -- as the generic name for bread -- of hlaf (modern English loaf), which appears to be the oldest Teutonic name, cf. Old High German hleib, and modern German Laib, or Finnish leipä, Estonian leib, and Russian khleb (all derived from Old Germanic).

Bread is a popular food in Western society. It is often made from a wheat-flour dough that is cultured with yeast, allowed to rise, and finally baked in an oven. Owing to its high levels of gluten (which give the dough sponginess and elasticity), wheat is the most common grain used for the preparation of bread, but bread is also made from the flour of rye, barley, maize (or corn), and oats, usually, but not always, in combination with wheat flour.

Leavening

Leavening is the process of adding gas to a dough before baking to produce a lighter, more easily chewed bread. Most bread consumed in the West is leavened. But there is also unleavened bread which has important symbolic use in Judaism (Matzo) and is used by some Christian churches.

Chemical leavening

A simple technique for leavening bread is the use of gas-producing chemicals. There are two common methods. The first is to use baking powder or a self-rising flour that includes baking powder. The second is to have an acidic ingredient such as buttermilk and add baking soda. The reaction of the acid with the soda produces gas.

Chemically-leavened breads are called called quick breads and soda breads. This technique is commonly used to make muffins and sweet breads such as banana bread.

Yeast leavening

Many breads are leavened by the fungus yeast. The yeast ferments carbohydrates in the flour and any sugar, producing carbon dioxide. Most commercial and home bakers in the U.S. leaven their doughs with baker's yeast. Baker's yeast produces uniform, quick and reliable results, but does so at the cost of losing the more complex flavors of sourdough breads. Sourdough breads also generally keep longer and have a better (less regular) texture. Many bakeries in Europe still bake sourdough breads, and in the U.S., there is an increasing number of artisan bakeries (as well as devoted hobbyists) that are rediscovering the art of baking sourdough breads. The sourdough method produces especially flavorful whole wheat and rye breads.

It is difficult to say when humans first discovered fermentation as a means to leaven doughs, but leavened breads seem to have originated in ancient Egypt. A popular theory is that Egyptian beer brewers must at some point have discovered that when the foam from the fermenting vessels is mixed into their doughs, it will result in a much lighter and airy flatbread. Beer brewing and bread baking are similar crafts in many ways.

Both the baker's yeast, and the sourdough method of baking bread follow the same pattern. Water is mixed with flour, salt and the leavening agent (baker's yeast or sourdough starter). Other additions (spices, herbs, fats, seeds, fruit, etc.) are not necessary to bake bread, but often used. The mixed dough is then allowed to rise once or more (a longer rising time results in more flavor, so bakers often punch down the dough and let it rise again), then loaves are formed and (after an optional final rising time) the bread is baked in an oven.

Many breads (such as the famous baguette) are made from a straight dough, which means that all of the ingredients are combined in one step, and the dough baked after the rising time. Alternatively, doughs can be made with the starter method, when some of the flour, water, and the leavening are combined a day or so ahead of baking, and let ferment overnight. On the day of the baking, the rest of the ingredients is added, and the rest of the process is the same as that for straight doughs. This produces a more flavorful bread with better texture. Many bakers see the starter method as a compromise between the highly reliable results of baker's yeast, and the flavor/complexity of a longer fermentation. It also allows the baker to use only a minimal amount of baker's yeast, which used to be scarce and expensive when it first became available.

The sour taste of sourdoughs actually comes not from the yeast, but from a lactobacillus, with which the yeast lives in symbiosis. The lactobacillus feeds on the byproducts of the yeast fermentation, and in turn makes the culture go sour by excreting lactic acid, which protects it from spoiling (since most mircobes are unable to survive in an acid encironment). All breads used to be sourdoughs, and the leavening process was not understood until the 19th century, when with the advance of microscopes, scientists were able to discover the microbes that make the dough rise. Then, strains of yeast have been selected and cultured mainly for reliability and quickness of fermentation. Billions of cells of these strains are then packaged and marketed as "Baker's Yeast". Bread made with baker's yeast is not sour because of the absence of the lactobacillus. Bakers around the world quickly embraced baker's yeast for it made baking simple and so allowed for more flexibility in the bakery's operations. It made baking quick as well, allowing bakeries to make fresh bread from scratch as often as three times a day. While European bakeries kept producing sourdough breads, in the U.S., sourdough baking was widely replaced by baker's yeast, and only recently has the country (or parts of it, at least) seen the rebirth of sourdough in artisan bakeries.

Sourdough breads are most often made with a sourdough starter (not to be confused with the starter method discussed above). A sourdough starter is a culture of yeast and lactobacillus. It is essentially a dough-like or pancake-like flour/water mixture in which the yeast and lactobacillus live. A starter can be maintained indefinitely by periodically discarding a part of it and refreshing it by adding fresh flour and water. (When refrigerated, a starter can go weeks without needing to be fed.) There are starters owned by bakeries and families that are several human generations old, much revered for creating a special taste or texture. Starters can be obtained by taking a piece of another starter (sourdough bakers usually are willing to give out pieces of their starters) and growing it, or they can be made from scratch. There are hobbyist groups on the web who will send their starter for a stamped, self-addressed envelope, and there are even mailorder companies that sell different starters from all over the world. An acquired starter has the advantage to be more proven and established (stable and reliable, resisting spoiling and behaving predictably) than from-scratch starters.

There are other ways of sourdough baking and culture maintenance, a more traditional one is the process that was followed by peasant families throghout Europe in past centuries. The family (usually the woman was in charge of breadmaking) would bake on a fixed schedule, perhaps once a week. The starter was saved from the previous week's dough. The starter was mixed with the new ingredients, the dough was left to rise, then a piece of it was saved (to be the starter for next week's bread). The rest was formed into loaves which were marked with the family sign (this is where today's decorative slashing of bread loaves originates from), and taken to the communal oven to bake. These communal ovens over time evolved into what we know today as bakeries, when certain people specialized in bread baking, and with time enhanced the process so far as to be able to mass produce cheap bread for everyone in the village.

The most famous sourdough bread made in the U.S. is the San Francisco Sourdough. It is a white bread, characterized by a pronounced sourness (not all sourdoughs are as sour as the San Francisco Soudrough), so much so that the dominant strain of lactobacillus in sourdough starters was named lactobacillus sanfrancisco.

History

Bread is one of the oldest prepared foods, dating back to the Neolithic era when cereal grains and water were mixed into a paste and cooked. In ancient Egypt bread-making became one of the most significant areas of food preparation, along with the making of beer; both had religious significance as well. It is thought that the Egyptians invented the first closed oven for use in baking. Bread was a primary staple of diet in much of European history, from at least 1000 BC into modern times.

Otto Frederick Rohwedder is considered to be the father of sliced bread. In 1912 Rohwedder started work on inventing a machine that sliced bread, but bakeries were reluctant to use it since they were concerned the sliced bread would go stale. It wasn't until 1928, when Rohwedder invented a machine that both sliced and wrapped the bread, that sliced bread caught on. A bakery in Battle Creek, Michigan was the first to use this machine to produce sliced bread.

For generations, white bread was considered the preferred bread of the rich while the poor ate dark bread. However, the connotations reversed in the 20th Century with dark bread becoming preferred as having superior nutritional value while white bread became associated with lower class ignorance of nutrition.

Recently, breadmakers that automate the process of making bread are becoming popular in the home.