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I bake various types of bread on a weekly basis, and have never seen a recipe that doesn't require sugar or honey. I'm pretty confident it's needed to fuel the
by Damorian 6y ago
I bake various types of bread on a weekly basis, and have never seen a recipe that doesn't require sugar or honey. I'm pretty confident it's needed to fuel the yeast for the rising process vs the flour alone.
- woofyman 6y agoFrench bread is water, flour, yeast, and salt.
- Damorian 6y agoI make french bread almost weekly and all the recipes I've used require sugar.
- lexpar 6y agoI'm afraid that's just not true. I've made sourdough bread for years, and never added any sweeteners. There are plenty of bread recipes that require no sweetener, and it's definitely not needed for yeast to develop.
- dnhz 6y agoThat's empirically not true. Yeast do just fine with the starches in the flour. Here's a simple recipe without sugar (and the oil is optional too): http://www.thebreadkitchen.com/recipes/simple-whole-wheat-bread-recipe/ http://www.thebreadkitchen.com/recipes/simple-whole-wheat-br...
- likpok 6y agoYeast will do just fine on the carbohydrates in the flour. I find that whole-grain flour tends to lead to more yeast activity, which is sort of the opposite direction. A lot of the packaged supermarket bread has additives to keep it fresher longer, one of which is sugar. Go either a little upmarket or to the baked-in-store section and you'll find some without it.
- Scheherazade 6y agoIt’s quite frightening that you’ve never heard of sourdough bread given your baking experience. And as the other replies allude to, it’s quite common historically and in other places. Are baking books edited to exclude that knowledge in America? It really brings to mind the possibility.
- ptcampbell 6y agoI started baking bread when I moved to the US cos it was so hard to find any without sugar.
- inglor_cz 6y agoWhen I was a kid, my grandma baked home bread (1930s rural style, she was born in 1926 in eastern Slovakia) and never used any sugar for that. Bread has been staple food for millennia. For most of that time, sugar was rare, expensive or totally unavailable.