Bread is baked dough. Dough is the name for the soft mixture which is produced when you mix flour with water. It is a kind of basic recipe.
Normally other ingredients are added, such as yeast, eggs, sugar and a fat, such as butter or suet.
The kind of dough you make decides whether you will end up with a cake, a suet pudding, a loaf of bread or a tortilla.
In most cases you add water very sparingly, or you will end up with the sticky mess shown in the main picture. It’s the beginner’s most common mistake.
A dough should be easy to mold in the hands, but not be sticky. The smaller picture shows what it should look like.
Bread-style dough can be dense and flat, or it can be light and full of air holes. A flatbread is made without yeast. It is called unleavened bread .
One of the common kinds of flatbread is called a chapati. It is found across Asia and Africa. Chapatis (also called rotlis) are made from a firm dough made from just flour and water with perhaps a little oil and salt.
Pieces are pulled off the dough and rolled out into very thin discs. The disc can be thrown onto a heated stone (as shown here from Africa). When it is done on one side, it is turned over.
Leavened bread (which most of us think of as ordinary bread), whether as loaves or rolls, is made by baking a dough of about three parts flour, one part water plus yeast, fat and salt. Many sliced breads are steamed, not baked, and in these loaves the amount of water is much higher, which is why baked loaves feel and taste so different from many sliced loaves.
Bread is an important part of many people’s diets, perhaps as toast for breakfast, perhaps as sandwiches for lunch. It is very difficult to stop bread from going hard, which we call going stale, and getting moldy in less than a week. In some countries, the kind of bread made has to be eaten within a couple of hours of baking (for example, baguettes). Because it is so hard to keep, small bakeries are still an important shop in some countries. Bread does not keep well in a fridge, but it can be frozen, so that you can buy a loaf, cut it in two and put one half away in the freezer.
