Asklemmy

44119 readers

860 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Is cake a sort of bread? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

91 comments fedilink hide all child comments

So according to Merriam Webster bread is: a usually baked and leavened food made of a mixture whose basic constituent is flour or meal

And cake is: A: a breadlike food made from a dough or batter that is usually fried or baked in small flat shapes and is often unleavened B: a sweet baked food made from a dough or thick batter usually containing flour and sugar and often shortening, eggs, and a raising agent (such as baking powder)

And yet some people don't think that cake is bread.

What's your opinion?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] anon6789 11 points 5 months ago (2 children)

As a general rule, I would see in a majority of cases that in a bread, gluten development is encouraged to provide a chewy texture. In a cake, you want to avoid gluten development to have a light and fluffy texture.

Special bread flours have high gluten content and cake flours have lower gluten for that reason.

Now we of course do have many exceptions, such as banana bread is low gluten and very sweet, while many biscuit recipes call for cake flour, but no one would call a biscuit a cake. In both those cases, I don't think you would like a banana bread or biscuit that has the strong gluten structure that a proper baguette has.

Cakes (especially something like donuts) can be yeast risen, and some breads like matzo or tortillas have no leavening, or breads can use chemical leavening like Irish soda bread.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I wouldn't consider banana bread a bread. It's a cake and the bread part is just a name.

[–] anon6789 2 points 5 months ago

I personally agree with you on that. Anything much sweeter than raisin bread like muffins and cupcakes I count as cakes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

If gluten is required, then gf bread isn't bread. But anyone who's eaten gf bread would call it bread. Different but still bread.

[–] anon6789 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I don't know if I've ever had GF bread, so I had to look up how it's made. I wondered how the bread would have the proper structure to rise without a gluten matrix, and it seems I was on to something. Reading up on it a bit, gums and starches are used to replace the function of the missing gluten. So while GF bread has no gluten, it's still made with a gluten replacement, and the same function is required for proper results.

If we change my qualifier to bread typically having a deliberately developed structural matrix with high elasticity, it covers wheat and GF breads. It still is fairly universal we want chewy breads and non-chewy cakes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

bread typically having a deliberately developed structural matrix with high elasticity,

Cake fits into this, I'd say.