Bread & Baking Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which long-handled flat paddle of wood or thin metal is used to slide loaves, pizzas and pastries into and out of a hot oven without the baker reaching in, with wood favoured for launching raw dough because it does not stick, and thin metal for retrieving the finished bake?

Question 2

Which bread-making technique, popularised across East Asian bakeries, cooks a small part of the recipe's flour with water or milk into a thick pudding-like paste before adding it to the main dough, so the pre-swollen starch locks in extra moisture and yields an exceptionally soft, fluffy, slow-staling loaf?

Question 3

Which term describes the sudden last burst of expansion a loaf makes in the first few minutes of baking, as trapped gas warms and expands, water flashes to steam, and the yeast has one final frantic surge before the heat kills it and the crust sets?

Question 4

Which Irish quick bread needs no yeast, no kneading and no rising time because it is leavened by bicarbonate of soda reacting with the acid in buttermilk to make gas the moment they meet, and is traditionally marked with a deep cross, said to be to 'let the fairies out' or to help it bake through?

Question 5

Which French bread is a large round or oval loaf of mostly white flour with a little wholemeal or rye, leavened with a mild natural starter, given a thick, dark, chewy crust and an open crumb, and made big precisely so it keeps well for several days?

Question 6

Which heavy, moist, dark German loaf is made entirely from wholegrain rye, including a large proportion of whole and coarsely cracked rye kernels soaked overnight, plus sunflower and other seeds, is baked long and slow in a tin, sold ready-sliced in vacuum packs, and stays edible for a week or more?

Question 7

Which pastry consists of sheets of a simple flour-and-water dough stretched or rolled until they are almost transparent, thin enough to read a newspaper through, then stacked with a brushing of melted butter or oil between each layer to bake up shatteringly crisp?

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About Bread & Baking

Bread is the oldest prepared food there is: a charred flatbread found in Jordan is around 14,000 years old, older than farming. This quiz covers about eighty things about bread and baking, the loaves of the world and the pastries and cakes that grew out of them, the science of what flour, water, salt, yeast and heat actually do, the tools and the vocabulary, and the odd corners of history where bread turns up.

Every question describes one, a bread, a pastry, a technique, a term, an ingredient's job, or a person, and asks you to name it from four choices. The explanation then fills in the detail: why rye bread needs a sour, what the Maillard reaction is and how it differs from caramelisation, why a bagel is boiled and a pretzel dipped in lye, what a poolish is for, and why bread staling is worst in the fridge.

The breads are picked to range widely and to avoid repeating the loaves already used elsewhere in this Food and Drink section: sourdough, ciabatta, focaccia, the baguette, pumpernickel, challah, cornbread, soda bread, the bialy, the crumpet, panettone, stollen, sangak, Borodinsky, damper, bannock, and pastries from the croissant and kouign-amann to the canele, the financier, choux, puff, filo and hot water crust.

The pastry and cake side gets a full section of its own: the twice-cooked magic of choux, the hundreds of steamed-apart leaves of puff, the tissue-thin stretch of filo and strudel, the sugar-laminated Breton kouign-amann. The small French cakes, the shell-shaped madeleine with its prized bump, the gold-bar financier of browned butter and egg white, the beeswax-moulded canele, the footed macaron. And the Christmas baking of half of Europe: panettone and pandoro, stollen, panforte, lebkuchen, speculaas, the pretzel-shaped kringle.

It gives real weight to the how and why, because that is where home bakers get stuck. What kneading does to gluten and how to test for it. The difference between bulk fermentation, proofing and retarding. Baker's percentage and hydration. Scoring, docking and blind baking. Pre-ferments, the tangzhong trick, autolyse. And the industrial side: the Chorleywood process behind most British bread, the man whose 1928 machine gave us 'the greatest thing since sliced bread'.

History threads through it too: the pretzel monk, ergot poisoning and Saint Anthony's Fire, matzo and the eighteen-minute rule, the 1993 French decree that defines a real baguette, the Earl who lent his name to the sandwich, the word 'companion' meaning one who shares bread. Where a photograph of a loaf, a pastry or a tool would not simply give the answer to someone who already knows it, it is shown; the instantly recognisable ones are left as text. Every claim has been checked against reliable sources, and the wording is kept plain.