Bread is something we all like to eat. Making it can be a lot of fun, too! With a bit of help from an adult, boys and girls even as young as four years old can bake bread.
.Seeds from the bread wheat plant , usually called grains, are the main part of bread. These grains are chuck-full of food - carbohydrates (sugars and starches), proteins and fats - which both people and many animals need to stay alive. Bread wheat plants are the most ancient and widely grown plants in the world. Archeologists found wheat grains while exploring 9000-year-old prehistoric villages in what are now Iraq and Iran. However, we need to thank Egyptians, who lived about 4,000 years ago, for discovering bread as we pretty much know it today.
When you look carefully at shelves of bread at the grocery store or in bakery windows, it is easy to see that there are many different kinds of bread. Plain wheat flour combined with other kinds of flours makes bread. The possible combinations of ingredients are enormous. There are loaves of white, whole wheat, rye, corn and pumpernickel bread.
If you look a little further, you will find that the variety of bread shapes, too, is almost endless. Bakers form dough into a number of shapes - loaves for sandwiches or toast, buns for hotdogs or hamburgers, braids of sweet challah, pizza crust, bagels and pretzels.
We really need only three things to make a very plain loaf of bread - milled grains (crushed or ground to remove the outer layers) of bread wheat, store-bought baking yeast and some warm water. Adding water to the yeast and wheat starts a unique partnership. Yeast is a one-cell (tiny unit that is the basic building block of living things) fungus-like life form that exists in a group. Nourished by carbohydrates and minerals in the mixture of water and crushed wheat grains, yeasts can live, thrive and multiply. As they go about their existence, they release carbon dioxide trapped in bubbles. Meanwhile, water helps protein in the crushed wheat grains to form tough elastic strands known as gluten. This gluten holds the dough together and makes it sticky. Gluten threads trap the carbon dioxide bubbles. This causes the dough to increase in size and rise.
Other ingredients that bread recipes often call for will improve the mixing bowl environment for the wheat flour and yeast partnership. Here are some common additions and how they work.
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