Bread in Spain


Bread in Spain has an ancient tradition with various preparations in each region. Bread is a staple food that accompanies daily meals year round. The Iberian Peninsula is one of the European regions with the greatest diversity of breads. The Spanish food writer José Carlos Capel estimates a total of 315 varieties in Spain. The most popular variety, the barra, makes up 75% of bread consumption in Spain. Beyond being consumed, bread in Spain serves historical, cultural, religious, and mythological purposes.
Wheat is the most cultivated cereal in the country, as it can withstand the dry climate of the interior. While brown bread is preferred in northern Europe, white flour is preferred in southern Europe for its spongier and lighter texture. North of the Pyrenees, it is more common to mix in rye flour and other grains, as well as whole-wheat flour. In Spain, whole-wheat bread has only recently become popular due to an increased interest in healthier eating. Throughout Spain's history, rye, barley, buckwheat, or whole wheat breads were considered "food for the poor".
Candeal, bregado or sobado bread has a long tradition in Castile, Andalusia, Leon, Extremadura, Araba, Valencia, and Zaragoza. This bread is made with flour, a prized variety of durum wheat endemic to Iberia and the Balearic Islands where it is called xeixa. The dough for the bread is flattened with a rolling pin or with a two-cylinder machine called . Similar hard-dough bread can also be found in Portugal and Italy.
Bread is an ingredient used in a wide variety of Spanish recipes, such as ajoblanco, preñaos, migas, pa amb tomàquet, salmorejo, and torrijas. Traditional Spanish cuisine arose over the centuries from the need to make the most of few ingredients. Bread is one of these ingredients, especially in inland Spain. Historically, the Spanish have been known to be high consumers of bread. However, the country has experienced a decline in bread consumption, and reorientation of the Spanish bakery is noticeable. People eat less and lower-quality bread, while the baker's job is becoming mechanized and tradition is simplifying, according to Capel and author Ibán Yarza.

History

Bread was produced in the Iberian Peninsula before the arrival of the Romans. The Iberian people cultivated wheat, and possibly other cereals such as einkorn wheat and barley. They mastered the fermentation process. The institution of bakeries as a public establishment is due to the Greeks, and the Romans introduced significant improvements in structures such as the mill and the oven. Numerous have been found throughout Hispania, such as in Córdoba or Ibiza. These were used by the Romans to "mark" bread for religious reasons. The marked pieces found in central Europe allude more to the imperial cult, while in Iberia more to Roman mythology.
In Rome, fermentation was done by reusing leftover dough from previous days. However, in Hispania, the natives had the custom of using beer foam as yeast, which resulted in lighter and fluffier bread. The writer and soldier Pliny the Elder, a Roman originally from northern Italy, served as a procurator for a while in the Iberian Peninsula and commented: "Hispania's bread is very light and very pleasing to the palate even for a refined man from Rome".
The cultivation of cereals was the dominant job during the Andalusian period. Bread was a popular daily staple. In Al-Andalus, white bread was made from wheat flour, and a coarser and less expensive bread called "red bread" contained bran. On the Christian side of the border, the baker's trade was established as a relevant and respected profession within medieval society. After the 12th century, bakers began to form unions to regulate the market. In Spain, especially in the Mediterranean area, there have been bakers' guilds for more than 750 years. For example, the Guild of Bakers of Barcelona is referenced in a document from 1395.
The Spanish conquest of America led to the importation of a new cereal from which flour could be made: maize. Maize has a presence in the bakery of "Green Spain". An example of bread with maize flour is boroña, brona or broa, a typical bread from Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria, and the Basque Country.

List of Spanish breads

This is an incomplete list of the most popular breads in Spain.Pan de payés, from CataloniaPan gallego, from GaliciaPan de Alfacar, in AndalusiaPan de Manganeses, in ZamoraPan cateto, in Southern Andalusia
Bread with toppings:
Bread with fillings:Hornazo
Sweet breads:Roscón de ReyesJallulla, from GranadaPan de cañada, from AragónTorta de ArandaEnsaimada, from MallorcaToña, tonya, fogaza, fogassa, mona or panquemao

Bread and culture

In addition to being a basic food, bread has a ritual function and a religious burden in Spain. In Christianity, bread embodies the body of Christ, and wine represents his blood. Together they make up the Eucharist in all Christian churches. Even before the appearance of Christianity, the pagan traditions considered bread as a symbol of fertility. For example, in Ancient Rome, pieces of bread were offered to Ceres, goddess of crops and fertility. In fact, Christianity absorbed many of these pagan traditions and also many traditions of Judaism, in which bread has a leading position.

Bread and fertility rites

The egg is another food that many ancient cultures have associated with fertility. Many ancestral traditions have survived to this day that, during spring, embed whole eggs into the bread dough. This is the case of the Catalan monas, the Basque opillas, or the Castilian San Marcos hornazo. The egg is tied to the bread with two intertwined strips of dough in the shape of a cross, definitively linking a pagan custom to Christian mythology.

Bread and death rites

Bread has been present in funeral rites since ancient times. As a votive or mortuary offering, bread has embodied death in most cultures of the Mediterranean and beyond. Formerly, it was common at funerals to distribute loaves. According to anthropologist Joan Amades, "At funerals it was customary to offer rolls that the attendees gave to the priest, along with a candle". When a loved one died, "there should be bread in the house to facilitate the transit".
In Spain, when the dead visit their families on All Souls' Day, they are offered a votive bread called pan de ánimas, although nowadays panets and panellets are more typical. This tradition can be found in Mexico under the name "bread of the dead". In addition, in some Catalan towns, bread with a cross in the middle is served at supper after a funeral, dedicated with a prayer to the deceased. The breads of the dead can be found throughout Spain and the Mediterranean, such as the pan de ''finado'' from the Canary Islands, the "saint's bones" from Madrid, or the anthropomorphic breads from Sicily and the south of the Italian peninsula.

Bread on the table

In Spain, Christian families bless bread before beginning a meal, thanking God for "giving us our daily bread" while a cross is marked on the crust. Capel adds: "The first slice was not distributed, a gesture that would have meant the annulment of the rite." The good Christian gave the first piece of the loaf to the guests. The relevance of bread at the Christian table is reflected in the marks that are stamped on the loaves:,,, etc. Wasting or throwing away a piece of bread was equivalent to despising or rejecting the food of the Lord.

Cultural loss and recovery policy

Undoubtedly, bread has been the most consumed food in Spain throughout its history. Its prominence was overshadowed by the abundance of food that came to the country in the 1960s and 1970s, when agriculture was mechanized and the country opened up to the world. The reduction of its consumption has led to a loss of its quality, tradition, and culture. According to culinary researcher –who toured the 50 provinces collecting information on the country's baking tradition–: "Bread has lost prestige or, better said, it has been demystified, in the sense that it was sacred because it was what was eaten the most Never has less bread been eaten than now." It goes hand in hand with a drastic reduction of the Mediterranean culinary tradition, just like in neighboring Italy.
Starting in the 2010s, a movement of renewed interest in traditional Spanish bakery began to take shape in the country. Although recent, this movement has already given rise to names such as Beatriz Echeverría from El Horno de Babette in Madrid, which has one of the YouTube channels on baking with the most subscriptions and is author of the book The Elements of Bread, or also the Turris bakery chain in Barcelona, run by Xavier Barriga, author of several bakery books. Since 2017, Panàtics has organized the "Route through Spain of good bread", an annual selection of one hundred artisan bakeries from all over Spain. Spanish law first approved a standard for bread quality on April 26, 2019.

Influence of the Spanish bakery in the world

In Europe

The candeal, bregado, or sobado bread, originating in what is now Castile and León, would be taken to the south of the peninsula and to Portugal, where it has also been practiced since time immemorial; in Portuguese, it is known as pão sovado in the north or pão de calo in the south.
The sobado bread was given to the soldiers because it has the exceptional characteristic of lasting for days or even weeks. It arrived in French Normandy through the Kingdom of Navarre in the times of Charles II 'the Bad', married to Joan of France. It gave rise to the so-called Norman pain brié, very similar to candeal. Later, the Spanish Tercios brought sobado bread to France, Italy, Flanders, and other parts of Europe. The Italian bakers adopted Spanish sobado bread and created their own delicacies, such as coppia ferrarese. Even in the Maghreb, there is a bread derived from candeal called pain espagnole. Instead, what in Italy is called pan di Spagna refers to the sponge cake, which according to Italian tradition was made by a baker in Spain. The name has passed into Greek as pantespani and into Turkish as pandispanya.

In the Americas

The Spanish bakery is the basis of the current Hispanic-American bakery, which later adapted the recipes to its climate, its ingredients, and its own tastes.
Wheat was one of the first foods to be imported into the New World, and the culture of bread was one of the first that the Spanish colonization introduced into the diet of the natives, despite the fact that this food and nutritional niche was already occupied by sweetcorn. The massive cultivation of wheat in America also had a political reason, since the Spanish controlled in one way or another the production, distribution, and sale of the product. The rejection of its cultivation was manifested as a form of resistance against Spanish rule. In Mesoamerica, for example, Antonio de Mendoza denounced that the indigenous people ignored the cultivation of wheat, among other things, because they used the same techniques for planting corn and wheat did not prosper. Even so, the culture of bread ended up adapting to America, hand in hand with Evangelization.
Today, the Hispanic bakery is spread throughout the Americas, and bread is a common food, with different variants depending on the country and region. For example:
  • Spanish torrijas are also eaten in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Costa Rica, among other countries.
  • In Mexico, a bread called telera has its remote origin in the telera that the Andalusian workers ate. There is also a telera in the Dominican Republic, which is typical at Christmas.
  • In Venezuela, bread is made with a pre-ferment called talvina. This comes from the Spanish talvinas, liquid masses that are cooked and consumed in different ways depending on the region. Ultimately, the term comes from the Andalusian Arabic التلبينة talbina, a liquid mass of milk and barley. It is not very different from the Roman puls. The pan andino or pan camaleón, made with talvina, has a great reputation in Venezuela.
  • Bread of the dead is a bread that was formerly offered to deceased loved ones during All Saints' Day. This tradition is recorded in several places in Europe, and in Spain it is known as pan de ánimas. The Spanish settlers spread the custom in America, and today pan de muerto is one of the most typical preparations of the Mexican Day of the Dead. In the Andes of Bolivia and Peru, All Saints is known as "the Festival of Bread" because they are produced in large quantities, in the form of a human, a dove, a snake, a fish, or other animals.
  • In Colombia, almojábana is a very popular cheese bun throughout the country, which is served for breakfast or snack. It comes from the Spanish almojábana. Its name comes from the Arabic المُجَبَّنة al-mujabbana, which means cheese bread. Most Spanish recipes lost the cheese in the dough, but curiously it is maintained in American recipes: from Colombia, and also from Panama, Puerto Rico and Costa Rica.
  • The Spanish bread known as mollete is so called because of the sponginess of its crumb, which is achieved thanks to a very hydrated dough. Today, molletes can be found in different variants in Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Honduras, or Guatemala.
  • The acemita was a bread eaten in Spain and considered of low quality because it was prepared with wheat bran. The mixture itself was called , and with it the "poor man's bread" was made. Due to seseo, the term evolved to semita, which is what a wide variety of typical breads from different states of Mexico, as well as Honduras, Argentina, or El Salvador, are called.
  • Another low-quality bread is pan bazo, which has several current derivatives in both Spain and Mexico.
  • American pan sobao comes from Spanish sobao or sobado bread.
  • The Mexican bolillo is considered a derivative of the Sevillian bollo.

In the Philippines

The technology of baking bread in a kiln or oven was brought to the Philippines by the Spanish in the 16th century. In 1625, a royal bakery was established in Intramuros. Aside from providing bread for Spanish settlers, it was also necessary for the production of the pan nava, a type of very hard long-lasting bread eaten by the crews of the Manila galleons, as well as sacramental bread for Spanish missionaries. They originally had a monopoly on bread production due to the necessity of importing wheat flour from China and Japan. But baking eventually spread to private households among the local aristocracy, and finally to bakeries for the common people.
Though nativized over the centuries, a few staple breads of the Philippines have Spanish origins. These include the pan de sal, the ensaymada, and the pan de monja. Other breads have Spanish names but have local origins with no counterparts in Spain, like the pan de coco, the pan de regla, pan de caña, and the Spanish bread.