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| November 2010 |
| Billie Silvey |
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| BREAD |
| Bread is one of the oldest prepared foods. It has been a staple food around the world since the Neolithic era. Prepared by baking a dough of flour and water, it can be unleavened or leavened with yeast, produced from whole-wheat flour, rye, corn, barley, cassava, oats, or a combination of two or more grains. Today, in specialized bakeries, you can buy 11-grain bread. You can also buy breads infused with herbs, olives, dried fruits or onion. Bread is versatile. It can be dunked or dipped into a liquid (such as beef gravy, olive oil, or sardine pâté), topped with various spreads, either sweet or savory, or served as the enclosure for the ubiquitous sandwich made with any number of meats, cheeses, vegetables or condiments. Despite modern methods, the essentials of bread production have remained the same. Bread is made by combining flour, water, salt and yeast. Today's commercial sandwich bread is highly refined and contains a lot of air, but it has a prolonged shelf life. I much prefer denser, whole grain loaves, which have more flavor and texture and better nutritional value. Bread is a relatively inexpensive source of calories and includes some proteins. Millions of people survive on bread, cheese or olives, teas or wine, and little else. You can use mashed acorns, ground beans, crushed tree barks, nuts, or chestnut flour, but most bakers use finely milled wheat, rye, corn, barley, millet, kamut, spelt or other grains. Many prefer wheat flour because of its gluten content. For centuries, highly-refined white bread was a sign of affluence and privilege. Poor people ate coarse-grained brown breads. More recently, whole grain dark breads have become more popular due to their high fiber content and their richer taste and texture. Bread is powerful. In antiquity, Egyptian governments controlled it, from production to distribution, as a means of controlling the populace. A shortage of bread was one of the causes of the French Revolution of 1789. Even today in many Middle Eastern countries, at least one type of bread is government controlled. These controls apply to the quality, quantity and price of the loaf, though they are not rigidly enforced. Bread made with baker's yeast is not sour because of the absence of the lactobacillus. It is a staple part of a healthy eating pattern as it is low in fat and one of the best sources of fiber. Bread, both leavened and unleavened, is mentioned frequently in the Bible. For a Middle Easterner, a meal without bread is unthinkable. Yet many nations use rice instead of bread, and indigenous peoples in the Americas ate corn until the first conquistadors arrived in the 15th century. To this day, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Indonesians and other Asians use rice as their basic starch. In fact, rice is the most efficient and prolific crop in the world. North America is such a melting pot of cultures and has a landmass large enough and a climate sufficiently varied that almost any type of grain can grown somewhere on the continent. In large cities, bakeries cater to specific cultures and huge grocery stores offer a wide range of breads, including French baguettes, pita, Arabic flat bread, dark rye, German rye, pumpernickel, Russian black, wholemeal, rye with caraway seeds, Danish or American sourdough, cornbread, croissants, lavash, knaecke or Calabrese. In Indian bakeries, you can buy pappadam, chapatti, and roti (plain or butter-rubbed). Organic bakeries offer a multitude of breads made from organically grown grain. Specialty bakeries churn out breads for those who cannot digest gluten. Others offer herb-infused breads or blend pitted black olives, chopped nuts or even dried fruits into their dough. In Armenian homes, women still mix flour; water and salt to make dough and roll it out thin enough to see through. This is then baked briefly on a hot flat surface. Stacks of this thin bread can be stored for months, then revived by sprinkling with water and reheating. East Indians make their roti, chapatti and naan every day and eat it immediately after cooking, but German dark pumpernickel bread keeps for months if properly stored. Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish flatbreads called knaeckebred keep indefinitely. Latin American tortillas are traditionally baked and eaten immediately, although today’s manufactured tortillas keep for a long time. Pizza is actually a leavened, flavored open-faced sandwich that is baked and served hot. French bakers enjoy such a worldwide reputation for their refined breads that at least one Toronto restaurant flies in bread from the Polaine bakery in Paris twice weekly. Parisians value good bread so much that they'll cross the city to buy specialty breads from their favorite baker who uses wood fired ovens. German bakers think their breads are more imaginative and more nutritious. The fact is that they are heavy, nutritious, and take longer to digest, but keep longer. Restaurants that offer an imaginative breadbasket attract guests who value good food and are prepared to pay for it. A large breadbasket is attractive, but may reduce sales, as guests may indulge so extensively in bread and butter that they lose interest in dessert. Restaurateurs must consider the wisdom of baking bread, buying it semi-baked, or buying it daily from one or several bakeries. Obviously, large remotely located resort hotels and cruise ships have no alternative to installing in-house bakeries, but restaurant and city hotel managers must carefully consider the best and most practical alternatives without jeopardizing quality. The owner of a busy sandwich shop or delicatessen must consider quality, variety and availability, while a Chinese restaurant owner has no reason to consider bread quality. |
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