1) Dosa - Crepe made from fermented lentil & rice paste
2) Appam - Rice pancake
3) Iddiappam - Steamed rice noodles.
None of these are anywhere close to the traditional Bread as we know them.
Dosa, Appam, and Idiappam are breads, even though even in South India, if you ask for "bread" from your local grocer, they'd give you sliced loaves. We use the word bread to refer to these other staple breakfast dishes in an anglicized context, because it maps better than any other word to the meaning we want to convey. Which is why restaurant menus categorizes them under "Indian Breads", and if you accept that language is mutable and responds to how people use it, this is as good an alternative meaning as it can get.
Love it! Spoken like a true engineer :)
The process of Baking is what makes a Bread a bread. If it's not baked in an oven, it's not Bread. I didn't make that up, that what has defined a Bread since the beginning of time :)
Dosa is fried on a stovetop pan. Appam is cooked on a stovetop pan. Iddiappam is steamed on stovetop using water. None of these are baked at any time in the process.
Most people I know would call English muffins a bread product.
It's not. Americans have a strangely funny way of naming things. Only in America would you find "Orange Juice" that would say in the ingredients. "Contains no juice. Artifically flavored and coloured."
English muffins are baked goods, not breads.
Skillet bread, on the other hand, is bread, as are english muffins.
Edit: basically, India doesn't have a particularly big tradition of oven baking, so by a definition of "bread must be baked" you're gonna have a lot of things that aren't bread.
A bread is a solid stable foam created by heating a dough made primarily of milled plant matter and water. There are no breads that aren't foams, and there are no breads I'm aware of that made primarily of something that isn't plant matter or that hasn't been crushed or otherwise processed to create a homogenous dough with a water-based liquid.
Another engineer I'd bet :-)
The most common Indian bread, the roti, is not a foam. It's a very flat bread made of wheat flour and water with no internal structure.
The most obvious foam structure we think about with bread are the big bubbles inside a sourdough or tuscan loaf. But the foam that, say, Harold McGee is thinking about when he describes bread as foam is occurring at a smaller scale.
A communion wafer, for instance, is indisputably bread --- extremely thin, with no discernible internal structure --- but it's also basically a very thin slice of styrofoam.
(When you make roti, it usually expands like a balloon during the cooking process.)
So Matzo is what? It's unquestionably bread, yet is not a foam.
And your definition is too broad - what about a pancake?
Pancakes are quickbreads!
Because when I break off a piece and look at it it doesn't look like a foam. (Note I mean the handmade stuff, not the lightweight, cooked at a lower temperature, machine made version, which is admittedly kinda of foamy.)
But, if you consider that to be a foam, I have to ask: What cooked until mostly dry, flour/water product isn't a foam? i.e. saying "foam" doesn't actually add any additional info.
> Pancakes are quickbreads!
Well, in that case we can simplify the definition: Bread is flour plus liquid cooked until mostly dry. Flour is defined very broadly, as is liquid (for example shortening is a liquid by this definition).
As you can see, my definition of bread is functional --- it's about how the bread is constructed and how it behaves as a final product. But there are other valid definitions of bread that capture things like the setting in which they're consumed --- maybe the default for things consumed in a pastry setting shouldn't be "bread", even when the product is a culinary foam made of a dough (but then you run into trouble with sweetened breads eaten as desserts!).
I'm fine with those definitions too, but would note that they rule out none of these indian breads. I'm pushing the functional definition because the parent commenter tried to rule out dosas based on a functional definition, and that functional definition was incorrect.
(There are obviously exceptions for "cakes" that are really set custards and things like that. But birthday cake isn't such an exception.)
So, yes, a birthday cake is a special type of highly decorated, sweet "bread". Or you can take a leaf from the Swedish/Finnish book and have a savoury cake:
If you find it hard to believe, it helps to know there are many varieties of pizza in Italy that do not include tomato sauce (pizza bianca). For example, quatro formaggi is often without sauce. But the plainer pizze bianche are actually similar to focaccia, which is a cousin of the world famous pizza, and indisputably bread.
So at what point along the focaccia - pizza continuum does the dish become un-bread? At the addition of tomato sauce? Then how come is quatro formaggi so often served in pizzerias? At the addition of cheese? Marinara, one of the most classical of all pizzas, is defined by its lack of milk-based ingredients (which do not preserve at sea, hence the name.)
Clearly, pizza, too, is bread.
Stop looking for precision in words. If you want to talk about "things that are baked in an oven" then say that.
Says who? The dictionary? It can change. You forget that language is a social construct, and like it or not, India is a country of a billion people with a different cultural context and we're going to make words up, or overload new meanings to existing words. And there is nothing you can do about it. That's how language works. You could claim ownership over it and try to dictate and browbeat alternate usages, but come to India, and try telling them that Appam is not a Bread, they'll tell you "of course not, Appam is an Indian Bread".
ALWAYS thought of all these as Indian breads. So does everyone else. For example, look at the menu of a famous Indian restaurant: https://www.zomato.com/ncr/bukhara-itc-maurya-chanakyapuri-n...
There are countless other menus on that site that do the same.
The article gets it absolutely correct.
NEVER thought of dosas, idlis, idiyappam, uthappam, etc. as a "bread".
I would be very, very weirded out if someone handed me bread and it does not contain ground grain.
The only thing people use the English word "bread" in India for is the sliced white bread that you can find in any store in the US or Europe. All the other words are mentioned by the article. Also, as the article clearly states, the author, for the purposes of the article, counts the following things as breads:
> It would be virtually impossible to capture the full diversity of India’s breads ... or even to say what, in India, counts as bread. But here we’ve given it a go. I went about it like this: if it’s starchy and used as a utensil, it’s bread.
At this point, it's more of a question of "foamy thing", unrelated to the rich history of cooking flour with water (and maybe some salt).
And I make moong bean roti myself.
I feel this is all a bit "we call these things bread" is like "we call these things fruit and these things vegetables" and then someone says "but what about bananas and cucumbers and strawberries" so we have to introduce "culinary fruits vs botanical fruits vs berries"
Which is not to say that whatever people speak doesn't have a word that's a superset of "bread", but it's certainly a much less useful, descriptive, and precise word.
In fact, the ONLY alternative definition of "bread" in english is actually "sweetbread" which, ironically, seems to be meat-based rather than derived from the word "bread".
That description is at least somewhat subjective. I would say Indians in India tend to eat roti (tandoori roti) as much as naan, and plain roti and chapati even more (the latter two are considered home foods, so not seen much at restaurants). Naan tends to have a slightly higher-end image (IMO/IME) and I've seen foreigners in India tending to order naan more often than rotis (particularly garlic naan, which seems to be a favorite of many). My guess it that it has been marketed to them more than tandoori rotis in the glossy magazines. on planes, etc., plus it might be/look more close to some Western breads (e.g. garlic bread like garlic naan, also the shape of naan is a bit like a French bread, maybe), so a bit more familiar to them.
But in India plenty of people eat and relish tandoori rotis, plain rotis (which are roasted on a tava in the house, not an outdoor tandoor), and chapatis (thinner version of plain rotis, but also allowed to quickly puff up on the open flame after roasting on tava). IMO tandoori roti tastes better than naan, which is made of maida (refined wheat flour).
And all of the above taste pretty good in slightly differing ways (though all except naan are made of whole-wheat flour).
particularly with an alu matar or matar paneer or a dal tadka :)
Were you thinking of "flour, water, and leavening"? Flour is any grain processed so as to make breadmaking easier. All these recipes include water. There are hundreds of different unleavened breads, and many of these breads are yeast-leavened.
Crepes and pancakes are (usually) quickbreads. A Chinese scallion pancake might not fit that bill (and might not be a quickbread), but Dosas clearly do.
The article carefully explains why naan isn't included: it's not an Indian bread. Naan is a staple throughout central Asia, which is where India imported it from.
Lots of breads have no salt --- Tuscan, for instance --- but I think most Indian breads do.
All breads have some kind of "flour" (which again is just any plant substance processed to make it easy to make a dough out of) and some water-based liquid.
Not all breads are baked! Lots of them are griddled, including several Indian breads that nobody is contesting the bread-y-ness of, and lots of cultures have fried breads (bannock bread for instance). I think the only commonality of bread cooking techniques is that they're all dry-heat cooked... but then you get to Chinese bao and you have to wonder about that too.
Like I said, Americans like things 'dumbed down', so anything and everthing that is round and made with dough is called "____ Bread"
Pita is obviously bread. Even your definition, which requires "baking in an oven", covers pita. If pita isn't bread, neither is naan --- at which point we've reached a pretty silly place of defining one of the world's most popular breads as "not bread".
I'm mostly with you as to bread (and certainly as to "pita is bread"), but I feel like noodles are generally not considered bread, despite being made from dough.
* They're often made from dough that is identical to bread dough (perhaps minus the leavening)
* They're cooked wet (which is why they don't leaven themselves) --- but then so are bagels and pretzels!
I'm guessing the reason will go back to the original purpose of bread, which was to create a portable, palatable, readily accessible foodstuff from grain. Without bread, the only straightforward way to eat grains is porridge. So bread can (and I think maybe always is?) eaten out of hand, and is cooked often well in advance of consumption.
I tend to think that they're not considered "bread" for two reasons:
- Their form factor is not appropriate for the concept "bread".
- They don't contain perceptible air bubbles.
Really, it's mainly the first one.
Two categories can be, um, vocabularily distinguished for pretty arbitrary reasons. Noodles are just a case of the same thing from a nutritional perspective leaving the prototype for the "bread" concept far enough behind that they're perceived differently.
You're going to have a tough time explaining tyropita.
The Sean name was my Dad's idea and I thank him for it. He didn't want me to get ragged and bullied for having a long name like 'Apu Nahasapeemapetilon'.