I know there are questions here already about Quick bread vs cake, or muffins vs cupcakes. But I'm not asking about the sugar, fat ratio thing. I'm more interested in the "bread" part of it. To me whether it is American white bread, or Italian or French bread, it is a sugarless loaf used to make a sandwich. Even biscuits and rolls that can be made with baking powder instead of yeast can be used for breakfast or lunch sandwiches with sausage and eggs. But you can't make a sandwich with banana or pumpkin bread, you treat them as a cake. so why "bread"?
Bread – Why do we use the term Quick “Bread”
languagequickbread
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I'm not going to accept this as an answer, but as Community has decided to give it a nudge.
I wrote up my little 'experiment' after I did it.
Although culinarily, a pancake would be something from a batter that is self-leveling, there seem to be a few other categories that many people may not consider 'pancakes' based on their upbringing :
Items made from shredded vegetables, with starch or an egg as a binder : latkes (Jewish; aka 'potato pancakes'), okonomiyaki (Japan), jeon (Korea), kartoffelpuffer (Germany)
Dough that is rolled out very thin and then cooked on a griddle or in a pan: roti (India), some varieties of bing (China, eg. 'scallion pancakes' (cong you bing) and 'mandarin pancakes' (bao bing)). Note that this would also include South American tortillas and many flatbreads. (although not classic preparations of naan (India) which is made in a tandoor)
Batter or gruel that is spread out, rather than self-leveling: crêpes (France), dosa (India), matafan (France), some styles of jonnycakes (USA), some styles of hoecakes (USA)
For the self-leveling batter-based pancakes, we can still divide them up into a few categories, as not everyone considered all of them pancakes:
large, thin, and unleavened: pancakes (England), pannekoeken (Netherlands), pannkakor (Sweden), pannekaken (Norway), pfannkuchen (Germany)
Leavened, cooked in a depression (not a flat griddle or pan), may be rotated during cooking: poffertjes (Netherlands), æbleskiver (Denmark), takoyaki (Japan)
Unleavened (other than whipped air & steam) cooked in a vessel in the oven: Dutch babies (USA), pannukakku (Finland), Yorkshire pudding (England). May include other popovers.
Leavened, cooked on a pan or griddle: drop scone (UK), pancakes (USA; aka flapjacks, griddlecakes), pancakes (Scotland; aka 'Scotch pancake'), pikelet (Australia), some styles of jonnycakes (USA), some styles of hoecakes (USA)
I'm not sure how to classify the following:
- injera (Ethiopia); might be self-leveling, but is poured in a spiral (so either pancake variety 4 or non-pancake variety 3). Also not flipped, which is abnormal for griddle-cooked pancakes.
- kanom krok (Thailand); cooked in a depression like pancake variety 3, but assembled like a sandwich rather than being individually flipped.
- kaiserschmarrn (Austria); either mixed during cooking or cut up after making a pancake of variety 4.
This question has become blown out of proportion. I was just curious- then I started getting answers that quickbreads and cake are the same thing- which they "obviously" aren't. So I started doing my own research.
Wikipedia says that the term quickbread was probably invented in the US after the discovery of chemical leavening. The Wikipedia references and some dictionaries corroborate this definition. Basically anything leavened with soda is quickbread.
This doesn't work. There are a great many things leavened with soda that can't be called quickbread. A good example is plain old white cake. Obviously this is a semantic issue but one that needed solving.
Two American cookbooks that I consider canonical recipe resources, The Joy of Cooking, and the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, both have a separate quickbread section. In it are a variety of fruit breads as well as some biscuits and scones.
On Food and Cooking muddied the water a bit by differentiating between quick breads such as biscuits and batter breads such as banana bread. These were grouped together, however, and contrasted against cakes. This book says that cakes are higher in fat and sugar and have a more delicate texture.
Ratio, as linked in this answer, confused the terms a bit more also including a term "quick cake" but it differentiated between the different products with distinct ratios for the flour, fat, and sugar.
With several competing definitions I decided to take an unscientific poll. I called 6 friends in Washington, Utah, Georgia, and Texas. I tried to find a variety of American cultures. Obviously it is biased by the fact that I know all of them.
When asked "What is quickbread to you?" without exception all of them replied "banana bread"
When I followed up with: "What is the difference between that and cake" I received the following answers:
"It is eaten at breakfast"
"It has less sugar"
"It is loaf shaped"
"It is more dense"
"It has a more open texture"
My conclusion is that the historical definition of "anything with soda" is no longer useful. In cookbooks it seems to now be applied to chemically risen baked goods that:
- have as a rule of thumb a particular ratio of flour, fat, and sugar
- have less sugar than cake
- refers in particular to fruit breads, biscuits, and scones
- generally has an irregular vs uniform texture
The popular definition (among my extremely limited, unrandom sampling) adds:
- tends to be loaf shaped
And now I can sleep easily again.
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Best Answer
Cooking terminology is vague and has evolved to suit the avilable ingredients in various places at various times. This means that the categories are not clearly defined. Here are some examples to indicate the continuum between bread and cake.
There's a whole range of unsweetened soda breads (note: most yeast bread isn't completely sugarless). Many cornbreads fall into this category (though the one I make has some honey in it).
Teabreads, banana bread etc. are usually baked in a loaf tin and sliced like bread. They may be buttered; similar loaves are even served with cheese in case you're not confused enough.
But teacakes are bread, in that they're yeast-based. Not all have much sugar in the dough, though the recipe I've linked does. Chelsea buns are an unsweetened yeast dough with a sweet filling rolled and baked in.
Brioche is undoubtedly a bread (yeast), but is often sweet.