I love bread. All bread. Every loaf, crêpe, dumpling, bun, cracker, cob, pancake, muffin, bap, braid, stick, galette, twist, swirl, cake, biscuit, fritter, roll, wafer, ring, and wrap.
Breads, sprouted, soda, crisp-, flat-, quick-, -corn. Sweet, savoury, saltless. Texas toast or taboon.
Paratha, pane, pain, pão, pav, pretzel, pita, pizza, pistolet, pan, puri, pumpernickel, piadina. Pandoro or papadum.
I also love peeling back surface levels, and burrowing deeper into already-existing rabbit holes. For example, I've long wondered what defines “bread,” trudging through thought experiments that are difficult to answer. Like:
Are noodles boiled bread?
Is beer brewed bread?
Is rice bread?
Is tempeh soy bread?
These questions may seem silly to most, but they aren't to me. I take them seriously. Not to the point of scholarly rigour. There's no theodolites or callipers here, no chalkboards congested with homological algebra. I don't even consider myself a “scientific” person, or mathematical. Or logical. But I spend a lot of time in my skull, where, as its sole resident, I almost always trod on shitty questions like these. They litter my mental landscape.
Spending some time answering them helped me understand what is and what is not bread.
Take noodles. Why isn't pasta considered boiled bread? Nobody actually thinks this, but noodles admittedly have breadlike character. They're made from the same starchy building material as bread. There are plenty of examples of fermented noodles—in Italy, in southeast Asia—and breads that are unleavened. There's pasta that's baked (lasagna) and bread that's boiled (bagels). It has nothing to do with batter or dough moisture content, which, for noodles, varies from 30% to over 100%. Nor does its processing, which gives different noodles their characteristic shape (extrusion, sheeting, stretching and folding, slicing, and so on).
I think what disqualifies noodles as bread is their physical state when eaten. Bread loses water during heat treatment—approximately 15% to 20% its weight—whereas pasta gains. Substantially so, between 130% to 150% its weight for al dente.1 Dough becomes shelf-stable as bread, and dried noodles lose theirs when cooked. They transform from a vitreous, brittle material into a floppy, sauce-catching one that easily slithers up a twisting fork. There's immediacy to it. After preparation, noodles needs to be eaten, stat. Bread can wait. It has a solidity; it keeps; we take it with us. This even applies to softer, bendable breads. Materials science would say pasta is a viscous liquid, bread an amorphous solid.
Next up, beer, which is said to be liquid bread. As biotechnologies, the two have an intertwined history, tradition, raw-material composition, and processing. Beer has one obvious strike against it; it's liquid. Unlike noodles, though, it's shelf-stable, thanks to its storage medium and to its anti-microbial compounds (alcohol and acids).
What truly precludes beer is its sugar and assimilable amino-acid levels during biotransformation. Nearly every traditional beer in the world increases the availability of both, through either a dextrinisation, malting or microbial saccharification step. Soluble sugar levels in bread doughs or batters are exceedingly low, e.g., malted cereal grain contain 5 times as much maltose, sucrose, glucose, and frucose, and 3 times as much available amino acids.2 As a result, fermented bread doughs or batters contain less than 1% ethanol, as most its raw material, although denatured to some degree by mechanical processing steps that reduce its particle size, exists in an insoluble polymeric form.
Bread's principal ingredient is the starchy, growth-storage organs of plants, which exist as biologically-inert, high-molecular weight compounds reserved for future growth (i.e., for germinating offspring in annuals, or for vegetative or clonal reproduction in perennials). Increasing the molecular weight and decreasing the moisture content of storage nutrients lowers their energy state and hence their chemical reactivity. These changes in molecular structure and conformation “lock” growth nutrients away for safekeeping, making them inaccessible to any chemical reaction or predator that might degrade or loot the investment coffers.
Next, consider a bowl of cooked rice. Intuitively, I know it's not bread. But why? Particle size does not mean sudden ineligibility, as there are many traditional breads (e.g., in central Europe) which use whole, cut or polished seed, like rice. Similarly, its moisture content after cooking is much closer to bread than noodles. Depending upon processing temperature, cooked rice swells and absorbs one-third to three-fourths its weight in water.3 The difference is cohesiveness. Yes, cooked rice can be sticky or clumpy, but its functional unit remains at the exact same length scale after processing. Bread's functional scale length, on the other hand, increases after processing, going from a disperse, particulate system to unity. It exists as a functional whole, a “loaf” or “piece” that corresponds to the dimensions of its final, complete form that is orders of magnitude greater than its constituent material. As for rice, Mitch Hedberg said it best: It's great when you're hungry and want to eat two thousand of something.
Lastly, tempeh. I admit, its overall case is solid; in terms of cohesiveness, literally so. Tempeh fulfills all the criteria our previous examples failed. We could resort to outright dismissal, appealing to our innate, long-held ideas of bread. I mean, we all know it's not bread, but why? Using counterfactual thought experiments allows us to explore the limits of our understanding, and, if used correctly, to arrive at novel conclusions we may not have known beforehand. So, why isn't tempeh bread?
We could rely on technicalities. It's made of soybean, a legume seed that has absurdly low levels of starch (< 1%) compared to cereal grains (60 – 80%) or even other legume seeds (34 – 55%).4 Or focus on its microbial agents, filamentous fungi, organisms not found in any bread fermentations, although they are the most common spoilers of baked products. But neither quibble is entirely satisfactory. Tempeh-like products can be made from any similarly-processed (soaked, dehulled, and boiled) legume or cereal seed, and most filamentous fungal isolates in fermented foods (Rhizopus, Mucor, Aspergillus ssp.) possess fermentative pathways in their genomes. In fact, traditional tempeh production uses a backslopping process (using a piece of the previous batch to inoculate the next), similar to sourdough.5
The biggest case against tempeh is placement of the solubilisation (boiling or steaming) step during processing. It occurs before fermentation, whereas bread occurs after. Fresh tempeh has a shelf-life measured in days, orders of magnitude greater than any baguette I've eaten in Paris. The difference between the two products, though, is that, although the latter turns rock hard from staling, it remains microbially-stable. Tempeh does not, unless dried or deep-fried afterward.
In a way, I'm glad tempeh almost makes the cutoff. By being bread-adjacent, it, along with the other examples, taught me more about my favourite food than I ever anticipated. In fact, it was my head-first jump into gluten-free breadmaking that taught me more about the structure and rheology of wheat breads than everything that came before. Why? Because it caused me to think in a way about breads I hadn't considered. The functional properties of bread doughs, pastes and batters are directly related to the raw plant material from which it is constructed. By understanding how these structural elements “fit” into the plant's lifestyle, ecology, and physiology led me to a more fundamental, unifying perspective.
I arrived at the following definition of bread by thinking outside the bread box and deciding what goes inside.
Bread is a fabricated, ready-to-eat food made from a mixture of water and the comminuted starchy, growth-storage organs of plants (seeds, tubers, roots, corms, or rhizomes). Its preparation involves a mechanical shear flow step that forms a starchy paste, dough or batter of desired consistency or structure; an optional biochemical processing step that utilises microbial and enzymatic conversions to aerate, acidify, and/or modify the plant material matrix; and, lastly, a heat treatment step that gelatinises the plant starches (by baking, griddling, boiling, steaming or frying), removes excess water from the system, and solidifies it via the formation of a rigid starch and/or thermoset protein gel.
Pagani, M. Ambrogina; Resmini, Plerpaolo; and Dalbon, Gerardo (1989) "Influence of the Extrusion Process on Characteristics and Structure of Pasta," Food Structure: Vol. 8 : No. 2 , Article 2. Available at: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/foodmicrostructure/vol8/iss2/2
DOI: 10.1006/fstl.1993.1057
DOI: 10.1270/jsbbs.60.160
DOI: 10.3109/10408419309113527
anyone still here?