Bread & Baking Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which flat, brittle, unleavened bread is eaten during the Jewish festival of Passover as a reminder of a hurried departure with no time for dough to rise, and must, under religious law, go from the first contact of flour and water to out of the oven in under 18 minutes so that no fermentation can begin?

Question 2

Which chewy Polish-Jewish yeast roll resembles a bagel but is baked, not boiled, has no hole, and carries a pressed-down well in the centre filled with softened onion and sometimes poppy seed or garlic, and is named for the city of Bialystok, whose Jewish community that made it was destroyed in the Holocaust?

Question 3

Which baked good is formed by looping a rope of dough into a distinctive knot, then dipped in a bath of food-grade lye or strong baking-soda solution before baking, which gives it a dark, glossy, faintly bitter skin, and is finished with coarse salt?

Question 4

Which system of writing bread recipes expresses every ingredient as a percentage of the total flour weight, with the flour itself set at 100 percent, so that a formula can be scaled to any batch size and two recipes compared at a glance, and the water figure doubles as the dough's 'hydration'?

Question 5

Which technique pre-bakes an empty pastry case, usually lined with paper or foil and filled with dried beans, rice or ceramic weights to stop the sides slumping and the base bubbling up, so that the crust is cooked and crisp before a wet or no-bake filling goes in?

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 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?

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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.