If you take a good long look at it, what you are getting is usually 80% air. And the rest is very basic stuff as well: water, flour, maybe a tad of sugar and a peck of salt, and that’s it. So it sort of staggers my mind that these very basic ingredients can form pitas, chapatis (Indian flatbread), bannocks, (Scottish oat cakes), shaobings (parchment thin Chinese wrappers), lavash (yummy Armenian bread), pretzels, pizza dough, baladi (Egyptian “pocket bread”), bagels and pumpernickel (rye bread), baguettes and mantou (Chinese steamed bread), all so very distinguishable from each other.
Especially since what happens inside the bread is always basically the same: the gigantic proteins in the flour are encouraged to sort themselves out by introducing air bubbles to break the protein strands into more manageable bits and kneading to align them. Then these bubbles are enlarged by the introduction of gases usually produced by a fungus (baker’s yeast or simply collecting the yeast that float around in the air by presenting an attractive watery-floury foodbowl for them, also known as a leaven). Eventually heat is used to get rid of the water that makes all this molecular stretching and sliding around possible, firming the bread, and there you have it, you have a tortilla, a kifli or a biscotti.
Yet maybe it is precisely this sparsity of ingredients that allows kitchen chemistry to be its most inventive: take two or maybe three ingredients and see what you can do with it.
So why don’t you try it? Waking up to the smell of baking bread wafting is something no-one should miss out on.
And if concocting your own experiment is not your thing, you can have the smell without the fuss by getting some par-baked bread you just have to pop in the oven. Some commercial versions are good (try Győri Sütöde’s ciabatta), but if you want a treat, go for the organic French croissants and München brezels, available for take-away at Intercontinental.
