Bread & Baking Quiz — 10 Free Questions

Question 1

Which process is the main reason bread goes stale: the starch that swelled and gelatinised in baking slowly recrystallises as the loaf cools and sits, turning the crumb firm and dry and pushing out moisture, and it happens fastest at fridge temperature, not room temperature?

Question 2

Which long-handled flat paddle of wood or thin metal is used to slide loaves, pizzas and pastries into and out of a hot oven without the baker reaching in, with wood favoured for launching raw dough because it does not stick, and thin metal for retrieving the finished bake?

Question 3

Which hands-on step in bread making stretches, folds and works the dough to line up and strengthen the gluten strands into a smooth, elastic sheet, with readiness judged by pulling off a piece and stretching it thin enough to see light through without tearing, the 'windowpane' test?

Question 4

Which round Middle Eastern flatbread puffs up into a balloon in a very hot oven as steam gathers between its layers, then deflates on cooling to leave a hollow pocket that can be split and stuffed with falafel, shawarma or salad?

Question 5

Which Central European pastry is built from a single piece of low-fat dough worked and then stretched by hand over a floured cloth until it is thin enough to read print through, then spread with a filling such as spiced apple, sour cherry, sweet cheese or poppy seed, rolled up with the cloth and baked?

Question 6

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 7

Which 18th-century English aristocrat gave his title to a way of eating that he supposedly asked for, meat between two slices of bread, so that he could carry on at the gaming table, or according to kinder accounts at his desk, without greasy fingers or stopping for a proper meal?

Question 8

Which chemical raising agent is a ready-made mix of an alkali, an acid salt or two, and a little starch to keep it dry, so that unlike bare bicarbonate of soda it needs no acidic ingredient in the recipe and, if 'double-acting', gives off gas both when wetted and again when heated?

Question 9

Which quick action, done to a shaped loaf with a razor blade on a handle called a 'lame' just before it goes in the oven, opens a controlled path for the loaf to expand along, instead of tearing itself apart at a random weak spot, and can raise a crisp lifted flap called an 'ear'?

Question 10

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'?

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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.