48 Fun Facts About Bread

Which two by-products does yeast give off as it ferments the sugars in bread dough?

Carbon dioxide and ethanol. Bakers want only the gas, which inflates the dough, while brewers and winemakers using the same yeast are after the alcohol instead.

Which protein complex gives wheat dough its sponginess and elasticity?

Gluten. Kneading links two wheat proteins, glutenin and gliadin, into an elastic network that traps the gas from fermentation and stretches with it, which is why wheat loaves rise so well.

Which species of yeast, also used in brewing, is most commonly used to leaven bread?

Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Packaged baker's yeast is a pure culture of it, grown by methods that followed Louis Pasteur's work, which is why it acts faster and more predictably than a wild starter.

Besides wild yeast, which bacteria ferment a sourdough starter and give it its tang?

Lactobacilli. The lactic acid they produce gives the loaf its sour taste and also helps it keep, so a sourdough stays good for longer than an ordinary yeast bread.

Which ancient people are credited with discovering raised bread and developing baking ovens?

The Egyptians. Bread became so central that it worked as pay: labourers on royal projects such as the Giza pyramids drew daily rations of loaves from huge state bakeries.

Pliny wrote that the Gauls and Iberians leavened bread with foam skimmed from what?

Beer. The yeasty foam, known as barm, worked as a ready-made leaven, and Pliny noted that it gave those peoples a lighter bread than anyone else's.

The Chorleywood bread process swaps hours of fermentation for minutes of what?

High-speed mixing. About three minutes of intense mechanical working develops the dough, which let bakers use cheaper low-protein British wheat and brought down the price of a loaf.

Loaves raised with baking soda or baking powder rather than yeast are called what?

Quick breads. Baking soda and baking powder release their gas as soon as the batter is mixed and heated, so the hours of rising that yeast needs are skipped altogether.

Calcium propanoate, a common preservative in factory-baked bread, is added mainly to hold off what?

Mould. The additive sounds industrial, but it is a salt of propionic acid, the same compound that bacteria produce naturally in Swiss-type cheeses such as Emmental.

Besides adding flavour, what does salt do to the yeast in a bread dough?

Restricts its activity. Salt draws water out of the yeast cells, which slows fermentation, and it strengthens the dough as well: without it the dough turns slack and sticky and the bread tastes bland.

What browning process between sugars and amino acids colours a bread crust?

The Maillard reaction. Besides colour it creates hundreds of flavour compounds, which is why the crust tastes richer and more complex than the inside of the loaf.

Which unusual American loaf is leavened by Clostridium perfringens rather than yeast?

Salt-rising. The same bacterium is a common cause of food poisoning, yet no illness has ever been traced to this Appalachian bread, and despite the name it is not raised by salt.

Medieval English bakers are said to have added a 13th loaf to every dozen for fear of punishment for what?

Selling short weight. Laws tied a loaf's size to the price of wheat and punished cheats with fines or a flogging, so, the story goes, bakers threw in an extra loaf: the baker's dozen.

Which English title comes from the Old English hlafweard, literally "guardian of the loaves"?

Lord. The head of an Anglo-Saxon household controlled its bread, so his servants were called "loaf-eaters", and "lady" is thought to come from a word meaning "bread-kneader".

Which Roman poet coined "bread and circuses" to mock a public that cared for nothing else?

Juvenal. In his tenth Satire he complained that Romans who had once handed out commands and high office by vote now longed only for the free grain dole and the chariot races.

Which flour, milled from a tiny Ethiopian grain, is traditionally used for injera?

Teff. The batter is left to ferment for days before it is poured onto a hot griddle, which gives injera its sour tang and the bubbly holes that soak up the stews served on it.

In the famous tale, the Earl of Sandwich asked for meat between bread to avoid leaving what?

The gaming table. The tale about John Montagu, the 4th Earl, comes from a French travel book of his own day; his biographer thinks he more likely ate that way during long hours at his desk.

Which party won support in Russia in 1917 by promising "peace, land and bread"?

The Bolsheviks. The bread was meant literally: that year's revolution had begun with women in the capital marching to demand it after wartime shortages emptied the shops.

What reason did American officials give for briefly banning sliced bread in January 1943?

Wartime conservation of wrapping. Sliced loaves needed heavier wax paper to keep from drying out, but after a public outcry the ban was lifted within two months.

The 1830s Paris bakery that introduced the croissant's ancestor and the steam oven was named after which city?

Vienna. August Zang's Boulangerie Viennoise sold the crescent-shaped kipfel that became the croissant; he later gave up baking, went home and founded the daily newspaper Die Presse.

In October 1789, Parisian market women angry at the price of bread marched on which royal palace?

Versailles. What began as a bread riot ended the next day with the crowd escorting Louis XVI and his family back to Paris, which ended the king's independence.

Which bread roll is shaped into a ring, boiled briefly, then baked?

Bagel. The brief boil seals the dough before it bakes, which gives the roll its dense chew and shiny crust, and the hole once let sellers carry batches threaded on a pole.

In the best-known story of the pretzel's origin, an Italian monk twisted strips of dough to resemble what?

Hands folded in prayer. In the tale he gave the twists to pupils who had learned their prayers and called them pretiola, little rewards, though other accounts credit French monks or German bakers.

What gives traditional pretzels their dark, shiny skin?

A lye or washing-soda bath. The alkaline dip makes the surface brown faster and darker in the oven, and German bakers give the same treatment to lye rolls and even lye croissants.

Which American state, settled by German immigrants, is the birthplace of the hard-pretzel industry?

Pennsylvania. German-speaking settlers, later known as the Pennsylvania Dutch, brought the pretzel with them in the 1700s, and Julius Sturgis turned it into a business with his bakery in the town of Lititz.

Ciabatta was created in 1982 by an Italian baker in response to the popularity of what?

French baguettes. Miller Arnaldo Cavallari feared the imports were taking over Italy's lunch trade, so he spent weeks testing doughs and launched a rival loaf named after the slipper it resembles.

Which Italian flat oven bread takes its name from the Latin word for "hearth"?

Focaccia. The Romans baked their panis focacius under the ashes of the fire, and the same Latin word for hearth, focus, later gave English its word for a centre of attention.

Braided challah is served on the Sabbath and most Jewish festivals, but is off the table throughout which one?

Passover. All leavened food is forbidden for the whole festival, so flat, unleavened matzo takes the loaf's place at the table for about a week.

Which American city, where a French baker began using gold miners' starter in 1849, is famed for its sourdough?

San Francisco. Boudin Bakery says every loaf it bakes there is still raised with a piece of the same mother dough that its founder, Isidore Boudin, started in 1849.

Naan is traditionally slapped onto the inner wall of which oven?

A tandoor. Its clay walls can reach about 480 °C, so the dough sticks, puffs and bakes in a few minutes, which is how naan gets its scorched brown spots.

Traditional pumpernickel, the dense black bread of Westphalia in Germany, is made from which grain?

Rye. The loaf's name began as a German insult for a lout, built from words meaning "to break wind" and "goblin", before it stuck to Westphalia's heavy black bread.

Before the Spanish arrived, the tortillas of Mexico were made from which grain?

Maize. Cooks first boiled the kernels with lime, which softened them and loosened their hulls, and then ground them on a stone into a dough that could be patted flat.

Irish soda bread rises when baking soda reacts with the acid in which ingredient?

Buttermilk. Its lactic acid sets the soda fizzing the moment the two meet, so the dough is stirred together in moments, barely handled and put straight in to bake.

At a medieval feast, a "trencher" was a thick slice of stale bread that served as what?

A plate. The bread soaked up the juices of the meal, and when wooden boards took its place by the 14th century they kept the name trencher, from the French for "to cut".

Lavash, a thin flatbread that keeps for months when dried, is a staple of which country?

Armenia. Women bake it together in groups, and at weddings a sheet of lavash is laid over the shoulders of the newlyweds to bring them fertility and prosperity.

Panettone, the tall Christmas sweet bread, is associated with which Italian city?

Milan. The dough is raised like a bread with a fermented starter, and each loaf is hung upside down while it cools so that its tall, airy dome does not collapse.

Damper is a simple flour-and-water bread baked in campfire coals in which country?

Australia. Swagmen and drovers on the road carried flour rather than bulky baked loaves, mixed it with water wherever they camped and cooked the dough in the hot ashes.

The croissant's flaky layers come from which technique of folding butter into dough?

Laminating. Rolling and folding stacks up dozens of alternating sheets of dough and butter, and in the heat the water in the butter turns to steam and forces the layers apart.

Brioche owes its rich, tender texture to a high content of butter and what?

Eggs. Brioche is the real loaf behind "Let them eat cake": the French original says "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche", a line there is no evidence Marie-Antoinette ever spoke.

In the Christian Eucharist, the bread shared by worshippers is received as what?

The body of Christ. Churches still disagree over the recipe: Roman Catholics use thin unleavened wafers, most Eastern churches insist on leavened loaves, and each side once had an insulting name for the other.

Pita is also nicknamed what, for its hollow centre?

Pocket. In a very hot oven the water in the dough flashes to steam and puffs the loaf up like a ball; it sinks flat again as it cools, but the two layers stay apart.

Which American brand began selling sliced bread nationwide in 1930?

Wonder Bread. Buyers at first needed reassuring that a ready-cut loaf would not dry out, yet sliced bread soon became the yardstick for every great invention.

In bread-making, a poolish and a biga are both types of what?

Pre-ferments. Each is a portion of the flour, water and yeast mixed many hours ahead and left to ferment, which gives the finished loaf a deeper flavour and helps it keep longer.

British law requires vitamins and minerals to be added to most wheat flour, but which kind is exempt?

Wholemeal. It keeps the whole grain, so the iron and B vitamins that milling strips out of white flour are still naturally present and nothing has to be put back.

Mantou, the soft white buns of northern China, are cooked by which method rather than baking?

Steaming. The buns stay pale and soft, and they are the everyday staple of northern China because that is wheat country, while rice is the crop of the south.

Bakers state the water in a dough as a percentage of the flour's weight, a figure known as the dough's what?

Hydration. Flour always counts as 100, so 60% hydration means 60 grams of water for every 100 of flour; push it much higher, as bakers do for ciabatta, and the loaf opens up into large holes.

What is bread's internal porous structure called, as opposed to the crust?

The crumb. It hardens as bread goes stale, though not because it dries out: its starch slowly recrystallises, fastest of all in the fridge, so even a sealed loaf turns stale.

Hot cross buns, the spiced buns of British bakeries, are traditionally eaten on which day?

Good Friday. The cross on top stands for the Crucifixion, and the rich, spiced dough marks the end of the plain eating of Lent.