Is cake a sort of bread?
Is cake a sort of bread?
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?
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whole category of cakes are called “quick bread” (ex. banana bread) because they’re baked in a loaf pan (they get the name from the shape rather than the ingredients)
they get the name from the shape rather than the ingredients
I was under the understanding that the main difference was that quick breads used chemical leavening agents (e.g. baking powder) instead of yeast. Hence the "quick" in "quick bread". Wikipedia (always a source of unblemished truth /s) seems to agree with my understanding.
Yep, Irish soda bread is a quickbread made from a dough with baking soda as the rising agent, and it is absolutely a bread, not a cake.
It's much closer to a cake, really; it's a batter more than a dough. It's not sweet though, which is a defining factor for a lot of people.
I'm not sure if you've tried making it but the recipes that I have tried all result in a dough that's capable of standing on its own as a boule. If you do an image search you can see a lot of images of Irish soda bread with X score marks baked in to their tops, which you couldn't make with a liquid batter.
When I make it it's much wetter than that and definitely needs to to poured into a bread pan. This is for Irish Brown Bread, not for the white flour soda bread with currants and whatnot.
Here's a picture of the dough from a similar recipe to what I use
If you do a search for "Irish soda bread" you'll get almost all the same kind of pictures of X cut boules with some kind of add ins. Sounds like the brown bread is something different, but it's probably still yummy.
Yeah, that's much different than the brown bread my family calls Irish soda bread. Here's the recipe:
- ½ lb./225g whole wheat flour (1-3/4 c.)
- 3 oz./75g unbleached white flour (2/3 c.)
- 1½ oz./40g porridge oatlets (3 heaping Tbsp.) (steel cut oatmeal or John McCann--in a tin)
- 1½ oz./40g wheat bran (1 c.)
- 1½ oz./40g wheat germ (1/2 c.)
- ½ tsp. baking soda
- ½ tsp. salt
- 1 pint/600 ml buttermilk (2-1/8 to 2-1/3 c.)
- Preheat a cool oven, 300ºF/150ºC/Gas mark 2.
- Grease and flour a 2 lb./900g loaf tin (I use an 8-1/2 x 4-1/2 x 2-5/8 inch bread pan).
- Mix all the dry ingredients together thoroughly. Then, add them to the buttermilk and mix quickly to make a wet dough (I have found it better to use only 500 ml or 2-1/8 c. buttermilk). Turn into loaf pan and bake in the preheated oven on the very bottom shelf for 2 to 2-1/4 hrs. When cooked, the bread will shrink from the pan slightly and sound hollow when rapped on the bottom with the knuckles.
i'd argue banana bread is cake, and is not bread, even though it has "bread" in its name
if you were offered a slice of banana bread but they were out so you got a slice of sandwich loaf instead, i suspect you'd be more annoyed than if you got a slice of chocolate cake
And the texture of actual sweet breads is way different than the texture of banana bread. Breads are chewy, cakes are crumbly.