Bread
Yeasted loaves, flatbreads, steamed breads and quick breads raised with soda or baking powder. In almost every one, the first decision is whether to build gluten or avoid it. Basics to read first: Dough and Gluten: When to Build It and When to Avoid It
Pane Carasau (Flatbread Split in Two and Baked Again)
Sardinia's thin bread: a durum wheat dough rolled thin and put into a very hot oven, where it swells into a ball and parts into two layers. Those are cut apart into two sheets and baked again until crisp. Kept dry, it lasts up to a year.
Grissini (Turin Breadsticks)
The breadsticks of Turin. The dough is ordinary bread dough — flour, water, yeast and salt — but stretched pencil-thin and baked, it ends up as crust with no crumb at all. It was made in 1679 for a young prince who could not digest the crumb of bread, and it keeps for weeks.
Scaccia (Thin Dough Folded in Layers over Tomato and Cheese)
A flatbread from Ragusa in Sicily: a very thin rectangle of dough spread with thick tomato sauce and cheese, folded three or four times and baked. Cut open, dough and filling run in alternating layers. Eaten hot or cold.
Damper (Bush Bread Baked in a Covered Pot)
Australia's bush soda bread: flour and water, baked once the fire has burned down to coals, in a covered cast-iron pot or in the ashes themselves. Irish soda bread will not wait for its oven; this one uses baking powder, which brings its own acid, so the dough can sit while the fire gets ready. There is no reading the heat of a fire, so doneness is judged by knocking on the base. Served with butter and golden syrup.
Tunnbröd (Thin Flatbread Raised with Baker's Ammonia)
Northern Sweden's thin bread: a wheat-and-barley dough rolled to 2mm and baked for two or three minutes in the hottest oven you have. It is raised with yeast and with baker's ammonia, a salt that turns to gas on heat alone, with no acid, and leaves nothing behind in the bread — which is why the bread has to be thin enough for that gas to get out. Baked soft it is used as a wrap; dried out it is eaten crisp.
Puran Poli (Flatbread Rolled Thin Around a Sweet Lentil Paste)
A sweet flatbread from Maharashtra: split chickpeas cooked down with jaggery into a stiff paste, sealed inside a very soft dough and rolled out thin on top of that, then cooked on a griddle. Mauritius's dholl puri warns that a wet filling bursts under the pin and uses a dry crumb instead. Puran poli keeps the paste and changes the balance: the filling is cooked until it is as stiff as the dough, the dough is made soft with oil, and the two roll out as one.
Cocktail Bun (Sweet Bun Filled with Coconut, Butter and Day-Old Bread)
Hong Kong's bakery bun, filled with coconut, butter, sugar and ground day-old bread. It began in 1950s Hong Kong bakeries as a way to use unsold bread instead of throwing it out. Half the filling melts in the oven, so the stale crumbs and the dried coconut are there to soak up the melting butter and sugar and keep them inside.
Wotou (Steamed Cornmeal Cones)
Cornmeal mixed with boiling water, shaped by hand into hollow cones and steamed — the everyday bread of northern China. The name means "nest-shaped thing", and the hollow is the whole design. Corn has no gluten, so nothing rises and the dough cooks at the thickness you built it; a fist-sized lump never gets steam to its centre. Take the centre out and the inside becomes a second surface, so the same size cooks from two faces at once.
Piadina (Romagna Flatbread Made with Lard)
Flour worked with lard, no yeast, rolled to 3mm and cooked in about two minutes on a dry iron plate, then folded around a filling — the bread of Emilia-Romagna. The fat goes into the dough and not into the pan, and that combination is the character of the bread: the lard shortens the gluten strands so it breaks tenderly instead of stretching, while the dry plate keeps it from crisping, so it still folds in the hand.
Crumpet (Yeast Batter Cooked in a Ring, Holes Right Through)
An English bread of yeasted batter poured into a metal ring and cooked on one side only. The ring is the whole thing. Confined at the sides the batter cannot spread, so it stands thick, and the bubbles do not merely break at the surface and stop — they leave tunnels running from the base to the top. That is why melted butter poured over a crumpet ends up inside it rather than on the plate. And it is not finished in one go: a crumpet off the griddle is deliberately unfinished, and whoever eats it does the second cook, in a toaster, on the face that never met heat at all.
Cong You Bing (Layered Scallion Flatbread)
A Chinese flatbread: a rolled sheet smeared with a flour-and-oil paste, scattered with scallion, rolled into a rope, coiled, and then flattened again with a rolling pin before it is shallow-fried. Other layered breads treat the pin as forbidden, because it presses the layers back together. This one uses it and keeps them, because what holds its layers apart is not a film of liquid oil that a pin can squeeze out but a solid it cannot move — a flour paste and chopped scallion, whose own water turns to steam in the pan and pushes the layers up from the inside.
Chunbing (Thin Wheat Pancakes for Wrapping)
Wheat flour mixed with boiling water, two discs oiled and pressed together, rolled out as one, cooked as one and then peeled apart — the thin pancake of northern China. It began as the bread for the first day of spring, wrapped around new greens, and now it is the wrapper for stir-fried vegetables and meat. The boiling water is there to put some of the gluten out of action, and the doubling is there to reach a thinness you cannot roll on your own.
Bazlama (Thick Leavened Flatbread from the Griddle)
Flour, water, salt and yeast proved for two or three hours, pressed into rounds about 2cm thick and cooked on a dry iron griddle, turned as it goes — a Turkish bread with a crumb, made without an oven. Gozleme has to be rolled to a millimetre because its filling blocks the heat; here nothing is in the way, so the bread is allowed thickness and pays for it with a lower flame, more time and several turns.
Karjalanpiirakka (Rye Pastry with Rice Porridge)
A Finnish pastry: rye rolled paper-thin, topped with rice porridge, crimped by hand and baked in fifteen minutes at close to 300°C; it has had EU protected status since 2011. It is baked crisp, then brushed with butter and water and covered so that it softens again on purpose.
Salt-Rising Bread
The white loaf Appalachian settlers baked before commercial yeast, leavened by bacteria. Temperature picks the organism: the starter is held at 38-45°C, where wild yeast and lactic bacteria lose and Clostridium wins. Once that is settled, the dough rises at about 22°C. Hot to select, cool to rise.
Ftira (Ring Bread Stuffed with Tuna and Capers)
Malta's national bread; in 2020 UNESCO listed the craft of making it. A sourdough is pressed flat by hand with a hole in the middle and baked into two thick crusts with almost no crumb. The cut faces are rubbed with ripe tomato and soaked in olive oil, letting moisture into the bread on purpose.
Sopa Paraguaya (Baked Cornmeal and Cheese)
One of Paraguay's national dishes: the name means Paraguayan soup, but it is a cornbread you cut with a knife. Cornmeal has no gluten-forming protein; cornbread works around that with soda and buttermilk, this with fresh curd cheese and beaten egg. It is held by cheese and egg, not starch, so it sets moist and dense.
Dholl Puri (Split-Chickpea Stuffed Flatbread)
Mauritius's national dish and its commonest street food. Boiled chana dal is drained, seasoned and grated into a dry crumb, sealed inside a ball of dough, and then the sealed parcel is rolled out thin all over again. That last part is the whole dish. A wet paste would smear and burst under a rolling pin; a dry crumb only spreads. So the filling goes in as a thin layer rather than a pocket, and a finished dholl puri folds like a napkin. The dough is mixed with the water the dal was boiled in. Despite the name, nothing is deep fried.
Sangak (Whole-Wheat Flatbread Baked on Hot Pebbles)
The Iranian whole-wheat flatbread baked on a bed of hot pebbles in the oven floor. The name is the method: in Persian sang is stone and -ak makes it small, so sangak is "little stone". Heat arrives from below through hundreds of separate points rather than off a flat surface, so a dough that would seal against a griddle and balloon instead vents its steam between the points and bakes flat. The dimples left in the underside are the evidence.
Lefse (Thin Potato Flatbread)
Norway's paper-thin potato flatbread. There is one rule and it decides everything: the flour goes in only after the potato is completely cold. Worked into warm potato, whose starch is still holding its water, it takes about twice as much flour to come together — and that flour is what makes lefse tough. Potato riced and left overnight, with the least flour you can manage, rolls out thin enough to read newsprint through.
Pupusa (Stuffed Corn Flatbread Griddled on a Comal)
El Salvador's national dish: a thick corn flatbread stuffed with cheese and beans and griddled on a comal. Masa has no gluten. A seam that splits is usually answered with pleats, and masa cannot be pleated, since it tears rather than stretches. So a pupusa is closed as a ball and then flattened, leaving no seam to split.
Lavash (Paper-Thin Flatbread Dried for Storage)
An Armenian flatbread of flour, water and salt, rolled paper-thin and baked in under a minute against a clay oven wall. Most bread is best fresh; lavash is baked to be dried. Stacked until brittle, it is too dry for anything to grow in and keeps for months, then softens again under a sprinkle of water and a cloth.
Injera (Fermented Teff Flatbread with Open Eyes)
An Ethiopian flatbread: teff flour and water left to ferment on its own for three or four days, poured onto a hot plate in a spiral, covered, and cooked on one side only. Not turning it is the whole bread. The top never touches the plate, so the bubbles rising through the batter break at the surface and set open, leaving the honeycomb of holes called the eyes. Injera is also the plate and the spoon at an Ethiopian table, and those holes are where the stew goes.
Gözleme (Thin Filled Flatbread from the Griddle)
A Turkish flatbread: a dough of flour, water and salt with no yeast and no fat, rolled out to about a millimetre, filled with spinach and cheese, folded, and cooked in a few minutes on a dry iron griddle. Chapati is the same unleavened dough and its whole point is that steam balloons it into a sphere. A gözleme has a filling in the way, so that cannot happen at all. With nowhere to expand, the heat only gets through by conduction — which is why the dough has to be rolled to paper and why the filling has to be cooked already.
Shaobing (Layered Flatbread)
A layered Chinese flatbread baked against an oven wall. A croissant keeps its layers only while the butter stays cold; shaobing goes the other way, with flour and oil cooked first into a water-free paste spread warm. With no water there is no steam, so the layers shatter rather than puff, held apart by the flour.
Bara Brith (Welsh Tea-Soaked Fruit Loaf)
The Welsh "speckled bread": dried fruit steeped overnight in strong tea, and that one step is the whole loaf. Dried fruit is powerfully hygroscopic, so put it in dry and it spends the bake pulling water out of the crumb around it — you get a tight, dry loaf and fruit that is still leathery. Soaked first, the fruit arrives already full and takes nothing, and because the leftover tea goes into the batter as well, none of that water is lost. It is why a loaf with no butter in it at all comes out moist.
Cornbread (Southern Skillet Cornbread)
The bread of the American South, made from cornmeal. The batter does not go into a cold tin: a cast-iron skillet with fat in it is heated inside the oven until the fat smokes, and the batter goes into that. It has to sizzle the instant it lands, and that sizzle is nearly the whole dish. The base and sides fry rather than bake, into a thin crisp shell — and that shell is also why the loaf lets go of the pan by itself.
Shokupan (Milk Bread)
Japanese milk bread, whose softness comes from water rather than from butter. Cook a small part of the flour with milk to 65C and it turns to a paste: the starch gelatinises and takes hold of several times its own weight in water, and water held that way does not make a dough slack. So a 75 per cent dough handles like a 65 per cent one. It is also why the loaf is still pillowy days later, because bread going stale is not bread drying out — it is starch turning back into crystals.
Pumpernickel (Long-Baked Whole Rye Bread)
The black bread of Westphalia, made from whole rye and nothing else. Almost nothing you learned from wheat bread applies. Knead it as long as you like and no gluten appears; the sourdough is there for structure rather than flavour; and the colour comes from inside the loaf rather than from its surface. Sixteen hours in a covered tin at 110C is too cool for a crust to form, and in that time the sugars the rye makes with its own enzymes brown slowly right through. There is no sugar and no colouring in it.
Blini (Yeast-Raised Buckwheat Pancakes)
Russian pancakes from a buckwheat and wheat batter raised with yeast. What separates them from every other pancake is how they are leavened. Baking powder makes gas while the pan is hot; yeast spends an hour or two beforehand making gas and acid together. So blini come out faintly sour rather than merely fluffy, which is why they hold up under soured cream or smoked fish instead of being flattened by them.
Irish Soda Bread
An Irish loaf made from four things: flour, salt, bicarbonate of soda and buttermilk. No yeast, no rising time, no kneading. All of its lift is carbon dioxide from an acid meeting a base, and that reaction starts the instant the buttermilk touches the flour. What this bread is really built around is not time but the lack of it — mixed, gathered and into the oven inside two minutes.
Focaccia (Rosemary and Olive Oil Flatbread)
The flat Italian bread finished with olive oil, coarse salt and rosemary. It looks like thick pizza dough and is not made like it. The dough carries close to 80% of the flour weight in water, far too wet to knead by hand, so the gluten is built by folding it a few times instead. And just before it bakes you push your fingers right through to the bottom: those dimples hold the oil, which fries the bread from inside its own surface.
Chapati (Whole Wheat Flatbread)
Wholemeal flour, water and salt: the daily bread of the Indian subcontinent, made from three ingredients. There is no yeast and no baking powder in it, yet on the fire it balloons into a sphere — water in the dough flashing to steam and forcing the two surfaces apart. When that works the bread is hollow and pulls into two soft layers; when it does not, you have a hard biscuit.
Soboro-ppang (Peanut Streusel Bun)
The standard of every Korean bakery: a sweet bun under a peanut-butter streusel. The cracked surface is where the name comes from, and it is not decoration but the result of two doughs behaving differently in the oven — the bun rises, the topping cannot stretch, and it tears. Keeping that topping loose and crumbly is very nearly the whole recipe.
Roti Canai (Coiled, Griddled Flatbread with Curry)
Malaysian breakfast bread: dough rested for hours submerged in oil, pulled out paper-thin, coiled into a spiral, pressed flat and cooked on a griddle. There are three ways to build layers in dough and this is the third — a croissant folds butter in, an apple strudel stretches and wraps once, and roti canai coils a stretched sheet into a spiral. Then, once cooked, it is clapped between the hands to break those layers apart on purpose.
Kanelbulle (Cardamom Cinnamon Bun with Pearl Sugar)
Sweden's cinnamon bun, and a different thing from the iced American cinnamon roll. Cardamom is ground into the dough itself, the top gets coarse pearl sugar instead of cream-cheese frosting, and rather than being rolled into a spiral the strip is folded and tied into a knot. The result is far less sweet, with the spice in front. Sweden has a Kanelbullens dag on 4 October, and the bun sits at the centre of fika.
Pain au Chocolat (Laminated Pastry with Two Chocolate Batons)
Made from the same laminated dough as a croissant, but cut in rectangles rather than triangles and rolled around two batons of chocolate. In south-west France it is a chocolatine, and the argument over the name is not settled. The whole craft is one variable, butter temperature: too cold and the butter layer shatters, too warm and it soaks into the dough. Either way the layers are gone.
Babka (Twisted Chocolate Yeast Bread)
A heavily buttered yeast dough spread with chocolate, rolled, split lengthwise and twisted before baking. It comes from the Jewish communities of Poland and Ukraine. Two things separate a babka from a chocolate loaf: an overnight cold rest for the dough, and syrup brushed on the second it leaves the oven, while it is still hot.
Baguette (Four Ingredients, Time, and Steam)
French bread from four ingredients: flour, water, salt, yeast. With nothing else to add, the only variables left are time and steam — and those are almost always why a home baguette fails.
Brioche (Butter-Rich Enriched Bread)
The French bread that carries more than half its flour weight in butter. Success and failure are decided not by how much butter but by when it goes in and how warm the dough gets: the gluten has to be built first, the butter goes in cold and in stages, and past 24°C there is no way back.
Bagel (Boiled-Then-Baked Ring Bread)
Bread that is boiled before it is baked. Two things make the dense chew and the glossy crust: a dough with far less water than ordinary bread, and 45 seconds a side in boiling water before the oven. Skip the boil and you have a hard ring roll.
Cachapa (Sweet Corn Pancake with Cheese)
A Venezuelan corn pancake: fresh corn blended coarse, griddled thick, then folded over fresh cheese. The batter is essentially just corn, so tinned corn won't do — and because the corn is sweet, it has to be cooked slowly over medium-low heat.
Sel Roti (Sweet Rice Ring Bread)
A Nepali festival bread: rice soaked overnight, ground with sugar, banana and cardamom, then poured in a single stream into hot oil to fry as a ring. Made in quantity for Tihar and Dashain and eaten over several days. Crisp outside, chewy within — and it all comes down to the batter's consistency.
Arepas
A staple of Colombia and Venezuela — round corn cakes griddled until golden and crisp outside, soft inside. The dough is just three things: masarepa, water, and salt. Spread with butter, or split and stuffed with cheese, egg, or meat.
Naan
India's beloved leavened flatbread, made soft and chewy with yogurt in the dough. No tandoor needed — a screaming-hot skillet bakes it beautifully at home. Perfect for scooping up butter chicken and curries.
Khachapuri (Cheese Bread)
A boat of bread heaped with salty cheese and crowned with a runny egg and butter — Georgia's iconic Adjaruli khachapuri. Swirl the yolk, butter, and cheese together and tear off the bread to dip: as dramatic to look at as it is comforting to eat.
Pao de Queijo (Cheese Bread)
Crisp outside and chewy inside, these Brazilian cheese breads are made from tapioca starch and cheese. Naturally gluten-free with no wheat flour, you just mix, roll, and bake — a Brazilian breakfast and snack-time staple.
Scones
A quick British tea-time bake of flour, butter, and milk. Rubbing in cold butter and barely mixing gives the flaky lift — best served warm with jam and clotted cream.
Croissant (Laminated Pastry)
France's emblematic laminated pastry — shatteringly crisp on the outside, honeycomb-airy within. This viennoiserie takes time and patience, but a freshly baked one is worth every fold.