73 articles
Bagel
Bagel (Yiddish beygel, Polish bajgiel): ring-shaped bread from Jewish communities in Poland, boiled before baking for a chewy crust; first documented in Kraków in 1610, brought to New York and Montreal by Jewish immigrants, and mass-marketed by Lender's frozen bagels from 1962.
Baguette
Baguette: long, slender French bread loaf of flour, water, salt and leaven or yeast; regulated by the 1993 French bread decree as baguette de tradition française and inscribed by UNESCO in 2022 as intangible cultural heritage.
Baozi (包子)
Baozi (包子), Chinese steamed stuffed bun: yeast-leavened dough wrapped around meat, vegetable, or sweet fillings and steamed; distinct from plain mantou, with northern, southern, and Guangdong styles, famous brands like Goubuli, and a large frozen-food industry.
Biscotti
Biscotti, plural of biscotto, are Italian cookies whose name means twice-baked; abroad the word means the hard Tuscan almond cookies called cantucci or biscotti di Prato, baked, sliced, and dried in a second oven pass for long shelf life.
Biscuit
Biscuit: from Latin panis biscoctus, twice-cooked ship bread. Means a crisp cookie-like item in British English and a soft scone-like quick bread in North America; biscuit products have 1–5% moisture.
Biscuit (bread)
Biscuit (bread): the North American quick bread, a chemically leavened round distinct from the British cookie-biscuit; Southern staple adopted for its buttermilk, lard, and soft wheat flour.
Börek
Börek (burek, byrek) is a family of filled yufka or phyllo pastries from the Ottoman culinary sphere, with cheese, meat, or spinach fillings; regional names and shapes differ across Turkey, the Balkans, and beyond.
Bread roll
Bread roll: small round or oblong yeast-dough bread, also called bun, bap, cob, barm, or teacake in Britain. Needs strong flour and careful shaping; faster to prove and bake than a loaf.
Breadfruit flour
Breadfruit flour, milled from dried Artocarpus altilis fruit flesh, is a gluten-free wheat flour substitute; FDA issued a no-questions GRAS letter (GRN 596) in February 2016.
Brioche
Brioche: French viennoiserie, a yeast-leavened enriched bread with high butter and egg content, soft stringy crumb. Word attested 15th century (1404); Cotgrave 1611; earliest recipe 1742; includes Brioche vendéenne PGI.
Brown bread
Brown bread: bread darker than white bread, made with whole wheat or rye flour, or sometimes just colored. Covers definitions, Boston and Irish brown bread, history, and nutrition versus white bread.
Challah
Challah (חלה) is the braided, egg-enriched ceremonial bread of Shabbat and Jewish holidays, served as two loaves recalling double manna; the name also denotes the dough portion separated as a biblical offering, adopted from South German Sabbath bread in the Middle Ages.
Chapati (चपाती)
Chapati (चपाती), also called roti or phulka, is an unleavened whole-wheat flatbread cooked on a tawa and puffed over flame; a staple of South Asia providing about 300 kcal per 100 g.
Chouquette
Chouquette: small French unfilled choux pastry puff, about 2-3 cm, topped with pearl sugar (sucre perlé) before baking; eaten at breakfast or le goûter; part of the pâte à choux family with éclairs and gougères.
Ciabatta
Ciabatta, Italian slipper bread invented 21 September 1982 by miller Arnaldo Cavallari in Adria, Veneto, as a sandwich rival to the French baguette; high-hydration (70–85%) lean dough, open irregular crumb, originally Ciabatta Polesana.
Cornbread
Cornbread is a quick bread of cornmeal, chemically leavened in the U.S., learned from Native American cooking and named pone; Southern versions are unsweetened skillet breads, Northern ones sweet, and it remains central to Southern and Appalachian foodways.
Cracker (food)
Cracker (food): a plain, unsweetened, dry, hard baked bread product named for the cracking sound it makes; also called savoury biscuit. Covers types (saltine, soda, common cracker), history from hardtack, nutrition, and the $10.6 billion US market.
Digestive biscuit
Digestive biscuit: semi-sweet British wheatmeal biscuit created by Alexander Grant at McVitie & Price in 1892 (1839 origin also claimed), named for baking soda once believed to aid digestion; chocolate version, nutrition, and comparative taste tests.
Eel pie
Eel pie, a traditional London dish of pastry filled with eel from the Thames, is the original filling of the city's eel, pie and mash shops, first recorded as an 1844 Southwark eel pie house and now served in around 30 surviving shops.
Eish baladi (عيش بلدي)
Eish baladi (عيش بلدي), Egyptian whole-wheat flatbread baked at high heat into a hollow pocket; Egypt's staple bread at about 70% of consumption, 248 kcal per 90 g loaf, and the backbone of the subsidized ration system.
English muffin
English muffin: a small flat yeast-leavened griddle bread, introduced in New York by Samuel Bath Thomas in 1880 as "toaster crumpets" and renamed in 1902; famous for nooks and crannies and the Egg McMuffin.
Everything bagel
Everything bagel: a bagel coated with sesame seeds, poppy seeds, dried onion, garlic, and salt, combining all classic bagel toppings. Emerged in the 1970s; David Gussin claims invention around 1980 in Queens, a disputed origin.
Filo (φύλλο)
Filo (φύλλο, phyllo, fillo), Greek for "leaf", is paper-thin unleavened dough layered with brushed butter or oil for baklava, spanakopita, and börek; unlike puff pastry, its fat is applied between sheets, not laminated into the dough.
Flatbread
Flatbread: thin, often unleavened bread such as chapati, tortilla, naan, and pita; the oldest bread type, with evidence from Jordan dating to 14,400 years ago, baked at 300–600 °C.
Focaccia
Focaccia, or fugassa in Genoa, is an Italian yeast-leavened olive-oil-rich pan flatbread with a dimpled crumb; Liguria is its heartland, focaccia di Recco holds IGP status, and its roots trace to Neolithic husking trays.
Frybread
Frybread (fry bread) is a Native American flatbread of flour, water, salt, and baking powder fried in lard or oil, traced to 1864 government rations at Bosque Redondo during the Navajo Long Walk; about 700 calories per plate-size piece.
Garlic bread
Garlic bread, or pane all'aglio, is bread spread with garlic butter and herbs and baked or broiled. An Italian-American invention, not Italian, descended from bruschetta; documented in US recipes by the 1930s.
Gruel
Gruel: a thin porridge of cereal boiled in water or milk, sipped rather than eaten; used historically as infant weaning food, Victorian sickroom and workhouse fare, and famine food.
Hardtack
Hardtack, also called ship's biscuit or pilot bread, is a hard flour-water-salt cracker baked dry for multi-year storage, used as naval and army rations from Roman bucellatum through the Civil War; modern Sailor Boy pilot bread ships 98% to Alaska.
Hot cross bun
Hot cross bun: a sweet spiced yeast bun with currants or raisins and a cross on top, eaten at Easter and Good Friday. First printed as "hot cross buns" in 1733; origins contested between pagan, Greek, and monastic traditions.