The Fresh Loaf

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If there were such a thing as the five essental breads, what would they be?

The Roadside Pie King's picture
The Roadside Pi...

If there were such a thing as the five essental breads, what would they be?

Hello, friends.

 I was hanging around the FB cooking pages and learned a new term. The five mother sauces.

Abe's picture
Abe (not verified)

Five of the best tasting breads? Well that's personal. Essential doesn't have to mean the 5 most preferred to any given person. I'm going to interpret it as 5 different kinds of bread. Meaning I'd like to preserve 5 ways in which breads can be made. 

  1. Unleavened. So any one of the different types of unleavened flat breads. 
  2. Sourdough. The next stage in breads evolution. 
  3. Barm Bread. And so on...
  4. Yeasted. 
  5. Chemically risen bread. Like soda bread. 

I see this as essential as it's bread throughout history. Not necessarily my 5 favourites.

The Roadside Pie King's picture
The Roadside Pi...

What I was getting at is like the base sauces. What are the five base bread formulas that other, bread

are built on? 

Abe's picture
Abe (not verified)

The 5 base [sauces] breads are built upon. Great minds think alike. 

Mini Oven's picture
Mini Oven

flatbreads

leavened breads

quick breads

bread puddings

steamed breads

Abe's picture
Abe (not verified)

With a shared theme. A twist at the end with the last two. You've managed to bunch together the leavened breads and get two extra. I like it! Although technically one needs to make the bread before making bread pudding. 

Mini Oven's picture
Mini Oven

I was trying to represent bread as an ingredient.  There is a long list of finished foods that include bread dried or crumbled or cubed or rebaked or bread used as a thickener.  What about breakfast cereals?  Is a corn flake a tiny bread?  

One more...fried breads

Abe's picture
Abe (not verified)

Does any other country, other than the UK, have bread sauce as a condiment for Christmas dinner? 

Mini Oven's picture
Mini Oven

 Austria has a bread horseradish sauce 

What about the egg/flour group?  

Abe's picture
Abe (not verified)

Sounds like bread sauce with horseradish. 

Egg and flour, Let me see....

Well not for Christmas but over Passover we have Chremzels which is egg, matzah meal, oil and sugar (possibly milk but I've never made it myself) made into a thick batter and fried in oil. It's delicious. 

I'll try find a traditional recipe. 

Edit: it's basically a pancake made with matzah meal. All a variation on the same theme but what I had at home looked similar to this https://toriavey.com/toris-kitchen/bubaleh/ except we never added any raising agent. They have a few names but we called them chremzels. Hot out of the frying pan and sprinkled with sugar. Delicious. I think the baked matzah made into meal gave them a dimension that isn't in normal pancakes. Like using bread in a recipe. 

Ilya Flyamer's picture
Ilya Flyamer

Oh the world of matzah meal food! Such ingenuity. I've never had pancakes though. We have chremslach, similar name, but a different dish.

Abe's picture
Abe (not verified)

And chremzels are two variations of the same word. What kind of food is chremslach?

Oh yes, and then there's matzah bri which is matzah soaked in egg and fried. Similar to French bread but not sweet and not all the egg is completely soaked up. 

Ilya Flyamer's picture
Ilya Flyamer

Yeah, the name sounded too familiar, that's why I remembered about chremslach. It's is however not pancaky, at least not in our family tradition. The picture here is the closest I could find: https://maxpark.com/community/retzept-babushek/content/814070

It's more of a fried sweet dough pieces, made with matzah meal and eggs, my grandma always adds a lot of dried fruit. 

The Roadside Pie King's picture
The Roadside Pi...

This is a North African fried dough (sfinge) that can be either dreaded in sugar or sever as a savory meal. What we have here is, a lean dough proofed to the point of being very extensible. 

Isand66's picture
Isand66

This looks yummy

 

The Roadside Pie King's picture
The Roadside Pi...

Basically fried pizza dough.

The Roadside Pie King's picture
The Roadside Pi...

In hindsight, I should have used the term, mother breads.

1. Commercial yeasted

2. sourdough

3. enriched

4. lean

5. Chemically leavened

Ilya Flyamer's picture
Ilya Flyamer

Well, you can have CY lean and CY enriched, or SD lean and SD enriched... You are using two orthogonal properties for a single classification.

Colin2's picture
Colin2

Speaking of orthogonal, I think in terms of five distinctions:

1. leavening: idy versus levain

2. hydration: low to high

3. flours: entirely white flour to mostly whole wheat and/or rye

4. fat: lean to enriched

5. role of other stuff: plain bread to focaccia to pizza

Which would in theory give you 32 slots, not counting intermediates, though some of those slots go unfilled for good reasons.

 

Colin2's picture
Colin2

apologies for duplicate

The Roadside Pie King's picture
The Roadside Pi...

Speaking "orthogonally, I see the "Mother doughs" on a straight line, with the sub-doughs perpendicular to that mainline. 

The Roadside Pie King's picture
The Roadside Pi...

When I get confused (often) I go back to the beginning. This all started with the traditional French cooking term 

"The five mother sauces"

What exactly is a "mother sauce" first let us answer that then we can proceed to name the five, or so mother doughs.

From: The Spruce Eats: 

In the culinary arts, the term "mother sauce" refers to any one of five basic sauces, which are the starting points for making various secondary sauces or "small sauces." ... A sauce is essentially a liquid plus some sort of thickening agent along with other flavoring ingredients.

Now let us begin,

I submit:

1. Unleavened Dough

Subcategories:

A. flatbreads

B.  crackers

C. Pasta

D. Short pastry (Pie dough)

E. Laminated Pastry

2. leavened Dough

Subcategories:

A. Lean doughs

a1 - Pizza, 

a2 -  Focaccia

a3 - Ciabatta

a4 -  pretzels

a5 - Baguettes

(The list goes on)

Enriched doughs

Subcategories:

 A. - Vienna Dough

a1 light

a2 Medium

a3 Heavy

B. -  brioche

C. -  pastries 

3. Quick Bread

Subcategories:

 

 

 

 

 

Mini Oven's picture
Mini Oven

Leavened breads (using yeast and/or bacteria)

Unleavened breads 

Quick breads

The Roadside Pie King's picture
The Roadside Pi...

In the opinion a blue-collar, no training on which to base anything noob! That being said, once I open a legendry micro-bakery, and become a huge success, I think I will explore "The Mother doughs" in my first book. I envision my first book being two books in one, not unlike the double albums of the Mid '60s and '70s. (Yes I did smoke much too much herb, in the '70s) Anyway once you're a success and have proved your metal in the real world, formal education becomes less important. That being said, reaching the pinnacle of one's chosen field, without formal education, is like trying to fit a camel through the eye of a needle!  

 Book1 as it will be:

La maison de Falzon

Book 2

La casa di Falzon

With a bonus section separating the two main sections:

Pies of the world