So according to Merriam Webster bread is: a usually baked and leavened food made of a mixture whose basic constituent is flour or meal
And cake is: A: a breadlike food made from a dough or batter that is usually fried or baked in small flat shapes and is often unleavened B: a sweet baked food made from a dough or thick batter usually containing flour and sugar and often shortening, eggs, and a raising agent (such as baking powder)
And yet some people don’t think that cake is bread.
What’s your opinion?
Cake is just uppity bread. Acting all fancy and getting dressed up for special occasions. You changed, bro.
Whenever it comes down to definitions I like to go to expert definitions rather than common language. For food (are tomatoes a fruit?) I use FDA definitions, for which the definition of bread excludes what you’d mean by “cake”.
- Layman readable synopsis (bakerpedia)
- Sec. 136.110 Bread, rolls, and buns. (fda)
- Sec. 136.115 Enriched bread, rolls, and buns. (fda)
I don’t think the FDA defines cake, but it does specify how different types of cakes, brownies and such should be labeled (search for “cake” here).
I’ve never make a cake from dough. I’ve always make cake from batter.
As a general rule, I would see in a majority of cases that in a bread, gluten development is encouraged to provide a chewy texture. In a cake, you want to avoid gluten development to have a light and fluffy texture.
Special bread flours have high gluten content and cake flours have lower gluten for that reason.
Now we of course do have many exceptions, such as banana bread is low gluten and very sweet, while many biscuit recipes call for cake flour, but no one would call a biscuit a cake. In both those cases, I don’t think you would like a banana bread or biscuit that has the strong gluten structure that a proper baguette has.
Cakes (especially something like donuts) can be yeast risen, and some breads like matzo or tortillas have no leavening, or breads can use chemical leavening like Irish soda bread.
I wouldn’t consider banana bread a bread. It’s a cake and the bread part is just a name.
I personally agree with you on that. Anything much sweeter than raisin bread like muffins and cupcakes I count as cakes.
If gluten is required, then gf bread isn’t bread. But anyone who’s eaten gf bread would call it bread. Different but still bread.
I don’t know if I’ve ever had GF bread, so I had to look up how it’s made. I wondered how the bread would have the proper structure to rise without a gluten matrix, and it seems I was on to something. Reading up on it a bit, gums and starches are used to replace the function of the missing gluten. So while GF bread has no gluten, it’s still made with a gluten replacement, and the same function is required for proper results.
If we change my qualifier to bread typically having a deliberately developed structural matrix with high elasticity, it covers wheat and GF breads. It still is fairly universal we want chewy breads and non-chewy cakes.
Bread usually has yeast, a cake never does.
What about pancakes?
They aren’t a cake, and they don’t have yeast either
Lots of cakes in Germany for example are traditionally made from yeasted doughs
Never heard of fried cake. In my native language that’s sure a word not interchangeable with what I would translate cake to
You don’t need cake. You do knead bread.
You don’t need cake. You don’t need bread either.
Yes. Flour, water, heat. That’s it. Tortillas are bread. Cake is bread. Crackers are bread.
All words are made up, so if you would like to define cake as a bread then I see no problem with that personally.
I am unsure if others would agree with you, but they might given specific context.
Personally, I don’t care too much, all I know is that cake it delicious.
P.S. There are definitely cakes that are not at all bread like though, like ice cream cake or cheese cake etc.
cake is: A: a breadlike food
Why are you questioning the definition you’ve provided?
If you google the question, you’ll get lots of people saying that cake isn’t bread, despite being similar.
You asked the question, “is a cake a sort of bread” and the dictionary is explicitly stating “cake is a breadlike food”.
Are you instead asking if “lots of people” is a more reliable source than the dictionary?
Something can be breadlike without being bread, in a similar way to how whales are fishlike without being fish.
The dictionary doesn’t dictate how words should be used; it reports how people use them. Consulting a dictionary is a way to find out how “lots of people” use a word.
No but like something being bread like doesn’t mean that it is bread, just similar to bread.
I think it’s that people like certain levels of specificness. Like, bread, pizza, and broccoli are all foods, but if you said “I had a food for lunch” that’d sound weird.
It’s not necessarily that cake isn’t a type of bread or that the two aren’t closely related. It’s that we have a super-common and more specific word for it (cake) so it sounds awkward when you use a different word that might be technically accurate, but is a weird choice in practice.
Same for a lot of things. A hot dog and a sub are technically the same thing. But if a waiter dropped off your hot dog and said “here’s your pork sub”, you’d probably look at them funny.
whole category of cakes are called “quick bread” (ex. banana bread) because they’re baked in a loaf pan (they get the name from the shape rather than the ingredients)
they get the name from the shape rather than the ingredients
I was under the understanding that the main difference was that quick breads used chemical leavening agents (e.g. baking powder) instead of yeast. Hence the “quick” in “quick bread”. Wikipedia (always a source of unblemished truth /s) seems to agree with my understanding.
Yep, Irish soda bread is a quickbread made from a dough with baking soda as the rising agent, and it is absolutely a bread, not a cake.
It’s much closer to a cake, really; it’s a batter more than a dough. It’s not sweet though, which is a defining factor for a lot of people.
I’m not sure if you’ve tried making it but the recipes that I have tried all result in a dough that’s capable of standing on its own as a boule. If you do an image search you can see a lot of images of Irish soda bread with X score marks baked in to their tops, which you couldn’t make with a liquid batter.
When I make it it’s much wetter than that and definitely needs to to poured into a bread pan. This is for Irish Brown Bread, not for the white flour soda bread with currants and whatnot.
Here’s a picture of the dough from a similar recipe to what I use
If you do a search for “Irish soda bread” you’ll get almost all the same kind of pictures of X cut boules with some kind of add ins. Sounds like the brown bread is something different, but it’s probably still yummy.
i’d argue banana bread is cake, and is not bread, even though it has “bread” in its name
if you were offered a slice of banana bread but they were out so you got a slice of sandwich loaf instead, i suspect you’d be more annoyed than if you got a slice of chocolate cake
I guess going by this logic, bread is a calzone with bread filling. doesn’t make a lot of sense to me tbh.
This would technically only be true for cakes with filling - a normal cake doesn’t have 6 sides of carbs, it’s all the way through.
Wrong. Cake is a frosting sandwich.
A hotdog is a a taco, most certainly, but don’t calzones have stuff contained within?
I suppose jet thinks that brad is a calzone with bread/dough filling
Only if it has filling in the center specifically. Many cakes would actually be sandwiches by this definition, and those without filling would be toast.
Also, I take issue with all open-ended wraps being lumped in as sushi.
There is even at least one variety of cake literally called a sandwich, the Victoria Sandwich.
Cake does not encapsulate and is therefore toast.
vaguely threatening gesture You’re toast, cake.
Many cakes have some sort of filling between flat layers and are therefore sandwiches.
Charlotte royale is a calzone, tho.
Cake can also be in layers with ingredients inbetween, making a sandwich.
The speciality cakes with images in them when you cut them could be considered sushi
Maybe yeast is the thing?
In which case, cake isn’t bread.
And also bread isn’t bread, it’s just a really thick beer.
But it doesn’t have alcohol, so you’d need to add sugar.
Then beer is cake.
I once had a similar thought and reached the conclusion that based on dictionary definitions, everything can be categorized as either a soup or a salad.
Cake and bread are actually the same since they are both soups.
What is pizza?
Salad obviously
But the pizza base is bread, and bread is a soup.
