Breads of the World

Poststructural Pub
1

I was watching Levar Burton’s educational show, Reading Rainbow, and they were talking about breads from different parts of the world. I just thought, with the world wideness of the web and all, it might be an interesting subject… local breads. Here’s a few breads eaten in my home state.

Cornbread

Made from cornmeal batter, and cooked in various sorts of containers, such as cast-iron skillet, cake pan, or corn stick molds.

Hush Puppies

Made from cornbread batter, but with onions added, and deep fried.

Biscuits

Made from dough… usually non-sweet baking powder dough… and either rolled out and cut like cookies (I think my mother used to use a tuna can with both ends removed), or dropped from a spoon, and baked in a pan. Some people also make fried biscuits, by deep frying them, instead of baking.

Frybread

A deep-fried flatbread. Good by itself, or with honey, or as the base for Navajo tacos.

Rolls

White yeast bread dough rolled in balls and baked. My great grandmother’s specialty. She still makes great quantities, in her nineties.

Cinnamon Rolls

White yeast bread dough rolled out with a rolling pin, and topped with butter, and sprinkled with sugar and ground cinnamon, then rolled up into a cylinder shape, sliced into disks and baked in a pan.

Popovers

Egg batter (the same batter used for Yorkshire pudding), baked in muffin (cupcake) tins. They puff up, and are hollow inside.

Dumplings

Biscuit dough, or similar, in small pieces, and cooked with boilt chicken or blackberries. I don’t know how widespread the blackberry cobbler with dmplings is, but it’s definitely an old tradition in this region of Oklahoma.

2

My mother, from East Texas, made that whenever we lived around blackberries (Mississippi) or dewberries (Texas Gulf Coast). Of course, chickenendumplins was a staple. My wife learned to cook it from my mother when we first came to the States, but I haven’t had it in at least a decade.

My mother did something similar with peaches, too, but added a criss-cross crust to it. I can remember her cutting biscuits with a small glass.

Doughnuts, too. My mother used to hang them to cool on the arms of this aluminum indoor clothes rack that we had. In about 1979, I got involved in doughnut making with the wives of several of the Marines that I worked with at DLI. We also made bagels, which was my first experience with those–and ate them with cream cheese and strawberry jam.

How about unleavend breads? I grew up with corn tortillas. I was 19, in the Army in California when I saw my first wheat flour tortillas. I was 29 when my Arabic class had its big traditional Arabic picnic, and I had pita (“pocket bread”) for the first time.

I got very heavily into bread baking and, as a result, got very heavy, for a while.

3

I grew up out in Pennsylvania where my great aunt made (and I know I’m going to spell this wrong) faustnaughts for Fat Tuesday-- they’re just homemade doughnuts, but with the Pennsylvania Dutch twist. This was also the woman who made the best sticky-pecan rolls, a recipe for which I would kill.

Of course we also had your basic rolls, my mum (mvhplank) is quite the bread-maker in her own right. I know that she’s attempted bagles to great success, and, though it’s taken me years to come to appreciate it, she also does a very good cornbread (in the cast iron corn-shaped cornbread molds, too :slight_smile: ) and I think she even tried spoon-bread once, which is much more typical to where she grew up ‘down south.’

Now that I’ve moved out here to CA, I’ve also had the opportunity to be introduced to other breads and bread-like substances, including something known at Mitsuwa, the Japanese grocery, as ‘Okinawa Doughnuts.’ I have no idea of what they are comprised, save that they are deepfried, and sweet, but much more dense than your adverage doughnuts. Recently, I also got to try some cakes that were made for one of the festivals, I think they were ‘mooncakes,’ or something like that-- baked to a golden colour and glazed slightly, and filled with red bean paste. Very tasty.

L

4

I can’t really add anything to either Walden or Darwin’s list, except for regular old fashioned home-made bread that was kneaded by my grandmother’s hands and set aside in a bowl to rise, then baked in an old cast iron wood-burning stove. Served piping hot with that fresh bread aroma and topped with homemade strawberry jam. Mmmmmm. Man, I’m in heaven just thinking about it.

Being from Missouri, we also had the cornbread (baked in cast iron molds to look like individual little yellow ears of corn), biscuits and either dumplings or noodles (depending on whether they were sliced into strips or rolled into balls). My mom would also deep fry donuts, then we would put them in a brown paper sack of powdered sugar and shake them until thoroughly dusted with the white powder.

I still think that country cooking is the best.

Will O’Ban

5

Vollkornbrot (whole grain bread)

6

Some Minnesota Swedish breads:

Lefse (a potato-based thin flatbread)

Limpa (a rye bread with orange peel and candied fruit bits)

Svenskt Hvetebrod (basically a wheat bread with cardamom)

7

My grandmother (German) would also bake a bread very similar to that. Very filling with a lot of fiber.

Will O’Ban

8

This reminds me that the last place my paternal grandparents lived was the town of Rosenberg, Texas, southwest of Houston.

Rosenberg had a large Bohemian population, and one of the best of their deserts was [u]kolaches[/u] (AKA kolatches), a fruit- or cheese-filled sweet bread. Haven’t had those since leaving Texas, but I remember them well.

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Be sure to share it when you get it. :thumbsup:

Now that I’ve moved out here to CA, I’ve also had the opportunity to be introduced to other breads and bread-like substances, including something known at Mitsuwa, the Japanese grocery, as ‘Okinawa Doughnuts.’ I have no idea of what they are comprised, save that they are deepfried, and sweet, but much more dense than your adverage doughnuts.

Something like [u]this[/u]?

10

Das Brot fehlt mir am meisten.

11

Ich sehe sechs. Welches ein?

12

They’re big around here during Lent I believe, due to the large Polish population. The bakeries can’t bake them fast enough at that time of year to keep their shelves stocked. My favorite is the strawberry filled.

Will O’Ban

13

I’ll have the apricot, the almond, and the cream cheese, please.

14

Alle. Und Brezeln.

15

My PA Dutch grandmother, my mother and now my wife make pork loin boiled with saurkraut and dumplings. These are the drop dumplings that are formed into a ball on a spoon and then dropped into the boiling liquid. I think I have the recipe for the Philadelphia Stick Buns you are looking for. I will look it up and post it. It’s in my mothers recipes somewhere.

I make a lot of whole wheat bread. I start by grinding my wheat fresh.

Ron

16

Ah… it’s been ages since I’ve had a good saurkraut-- probably not since my own grandmother died, in fact, and I certainly miss having it for New Years.

If you find that recipe, post it by all means-- the closest we ever got to it from Aunt Katheryn was along the lines of “a pinch of this, a dash of that, and there you are.”

L

17

In my house, bread made with spent (or sometimes new) brewing grain is the rage. I make a normal white or whole-wheat bread and add 2 cups (for 2 loaves) of spent (or 1 cup of fresh) crystal malt, and if desired, sweeten it with malt extract.

Of course there are the various quick breads – banana, cranberry, apricot, etc. These are very popular with my 3-year-old.

Irish brown bread.

The various Indian breads made in tandoors. My favorite is naan, which is leavened with baking powder and yeast.

There are also the egg-risen group like Yorkshire pudding and its less-exciting relative, popovers. These aren’t exactly breads, but then neither are some that have been listed.

18

I just realized that I left out the Chinese mantou, a plain white yeast bread that’s formed into a ball about the size of a pool ball and steamed. There’s also baozi, which is the same dough, wrapped around a slightly sweet mixture of chopped pork, chopped green onion, and maybe a little fried, shredded cabbage, along with a bit of corn starch, and steamed the same way.

The Japanese do a small baked version of baozi, filled with something like sweetened red bean or chestnut paste, but call it “manjuu”, which is the Japanese pronunciation of “mantou”. Guess they got a bit confused at some point.

You could fake a pretty good baozi or mantou using dinner roll dough from one of those exploding cardboard tubes. Put them on top of a round of waxed paper or oiled parchment paper to keep them from sticking to the steamer. As you might imagine, steamed rolls tend to be very moist.

19

Bread pudding…very yummy. Courtesy of my Virginian ancestry.

20

My grandmother, of Jugoslavian extraction, makes a fabulous, wonderfully moist and flavorful bread using a “flour” entirely of ground nuts (walnuts, I think). It’s terrific warm. But what’s really on my mind right now is: Beignets. :wink: