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Comment by jasim | Hacker News Reader

Only if you believe that there is a canonical definition of bread, which refers to the things made out of wheat flour, whose only acceptable meaning is what the western hemisphere thinks of as bread.

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.

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> canonical definition of bread.

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.

Cornbread, traditionally cooked in a skillet, isn't a bread?

Most people I know would call English muffins a bread product.

> Cornbread, traditionally cooked in a skillet, isn't a bread?

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.

Source for the "orange juice" claim? You're thinking of products like "Sunny Delight Beverages Orange", which you should note does not call itself "orange juice". Even in the US, that's not allowed.

Skillet bread, on the other hand, is bread, as are english muffins.

Bhatura are deep fried, roti are pan-fried.

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.

Correct. Bhatura is fried dough.

So is bannock bread!

The process of baking is almost definitely not what makes a bread a bread. We had breads long before we had ovens, and we have things that are indisputably breads today that aren't cooked inside ovens. Even today, we can readily cook breads that are typically cooked in an oven over a suitably large open fire or uncovered grill.

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.

>A bread is a solid stable foam

Another engineer I'd bet :-)

ROFL.

It's not my idea; it's Harold McGee's.

>A bread is a solid stable foam created by heating a dough made primarily of milled plant matter and water.

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.

I'm pretty sure it is; it's just a foam of very small bubbles. It's the little pockets of air in bread (usually made by escaping steam, from the water in the dough) that make it tender and palatable.

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.

If you define a foam as "a substance that is formed by trapping pockets of gas in a liquid or solid", a roti is absolutely a foam. Or, a foam subunit.

(When you make roti, it usually expands like a balloon during the cooking process.)

> A bread is a solid stable foam .... There are no breads that aren't foams

So Matzo is what? It's unquestionably bread, yet is not a foam.

And your definition is too broad - what about a pancake?

Help me understand why you believe Matzo isn't a culinary foam. Foams aren't created solely by leavening --- or rather, all breads are intrinsically leavened somewhat by consisting of large amounts of water and being cooked, which converts bound-up water into steam that leaves bubbles behind as it evacuates the product.

Pancakes are quickbreads!

> Help me understand why you believe Matzo isn't a culinary foam.

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).

So would you call a birthday cake a bread then?

Most cakes are quickbreads. We don't eat them the way we eat other breads (as a utilitarian cuisine staple), just like we no longer really eat biscuits as a staple bread --- but for a long time, biscuits were the staple bread for lots of people.

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.)

It's common in the West to equate "bread" with things that are savoury, but a visit to your local Asian bakery will quickly demolish that notion.

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sm%C3%B6rg%C3%A5st%C3%A5rta

That, and birthday cake, are as bread as pizza is bread (and yes, pizza is bread.)

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.

Well, pizza crust is bread. Pizza is only bread in the same sense that a sandwich "is" bread.

I've always wondered where scones fit in. They taste like bread but typically come with cream and jam like cake.

Nit: Dosas don't need to be fried. They are often just made on a non-stick pan without oil. Sometimes with a touch of ghee on top for flavor, but again, not for frying.

So roti isn't bread? That's a strange definition.

That is not how words work. First of all, bread has existed for much longer than the word "bread". And any translation into another (perhaps earlier) language is bound to be imperfect. Things called "bread" don't line up perfectly with things called "pan" in Spanish.

Stop looking for precision in words. If you want to talk about "things that are baked in an oven" then say that.

> The process of Baking is what makes a Bread a bread.

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".

English-speaking Indian living in India here, been eating rotis, naans, parathas, bhatirey, dosa, appams every day for half a century.

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.

English-speaking South Indian (Tamil) living in Canada & India here.

NEVER thought of dosas, idlis, idiyappam, uthappam, etc. as a "bread".

Either people in India use the english word "bread" or they have different meaning.

I would be very, very weirded out if someone handed me bread and it does not contain ground grain.

> Either people in India use the english word "bread" or they have different meaning.

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.

Rice is a grain

True. But—to my understanding—the rice to which you're referring is soaked with lentils, not ground into a flour, and you aren't going to find ANY gluten in rice (which gives bread its characteristic texture with wheat, barley, oat, rye, etc etc).

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).

Well, I can add Besan Ki Roti the the list of things that seem to be bread which is made from chickpea flour.

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"

Well, in the English world, bread has roughly the same definition; people mostly argue about whether it includes a leavening agent or not. (I'm of the opinion it shouldn't require a leavening agent). If you handed someone a generic food sponge when they asked for bread, they would become very angry at you because they explicitly asked for a certain type of food that you did not give them.

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".

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