The TOP 4 Ingredients in a basic "Bread" are a basic bread Flour, Water, Yeast and Salt. Granted the ones I called out have 3 of the 4, but the main characteristics of something that's called Bread is the process i.e. Baking. If it's not baked in an oven, it's not Bread. I didn't make that up, that what has defined a Bread since the beginning of time :)
Bro, I am full-blooded American-Indian (dots not feathers), born to 1st generation Indian Immigrants :)
The Sean name was my Dad's idea and I thank him for it. He didn't want me to get ragged and bullied for having a long name like 'Apu Nahasapeemapetilon'.
Not all breads are leavened at all, and not all leavened breads are leavened with yeast.
Lots of breads have no salt --- Tuscan, for instance --- but I think most Indian breads do.
All breads have some kind of "flour" (which again is just any plant substance processed to make it easy to make a dough out of) and some water-based liquid.
Not all breads are baked! Lots of them are griddled, including several Indian breads that nobody is contesting the bread-y-ness of, and lots of cultures have fried breads (bannock bread for instance). I think the only commonality of bread cooking techniques is that they're all dry-heat cooked... but then you get to Chinese bao and you have to wonder about that too.
51% of Wikipedians believe that the word "Pita" is literally derived from West Asian words (in several languages) for (wait for it) "bread".
Pita is obviously bread. Even your definition, which requires "baking in an oven", covers pita. If pita isn't bread, neither is naan --- at which point we've reached a pretty silly place of defining one of the world's most popular breads as "not bread".
etymonline (not infallible, but generally where I go for etymology questions) doesn't attempt to trace "pita" back beyond modern Greek or Hebrew. It doesn't give the impression that the origin of the word is well understood.
I'm mostly with you as to bread (and certainly as to "pita is bread"), but I feel like noodles are generally not considered bread, despite being made from dough.
Noodles are a great question. Why aren't noodles bread?
* They're often made from dough that is identical to bread dough (perhaps minus the leavening)
* They're cooked wet (which is why they don't leaven themselves) --- but then so are bagels and pretzels!
I'm guessing the reason will go back to the original purpose of bread, which was to create a portable, palatable, readily accessible foodstuff from grain. Without bread, the only straightforward way to eat grains is porridge. So bread can (and I think maybe always is?) eaten out of hand, and is cooked often well in advance of consumption.
I tend to think that they're not considered "bread" for two reasons:
- Their form factor is not appropriate for the concept "bread".
- They don't contain perceptible air bubbles.
Really, it's mainly the first one.
Two categories can be, um, vocabularily distinguished for pretty arbitrary reasons. Noodles are just a case of the same thing from a nutritional perspective leaving the prototype for the "bread" concept far enough behind that they're perceived differently.
