Post History

Halachically, what is bread?

I was recently doing some baking, and it led to a household discussion: what makes bread bread, as opposed to *mezunot*?

I wondered if it might be about ingredients.  Bread, fundamentally, is made of grain, water, salt, and a leavening agent (setting aside the special case of *matzah*).  Bread can also contain sugar and sometimes contains eggs or fat.  Those same ingredients, in different proportions, are the fundamental elements of cake.  If it's about ingredients, is it about *proportions* somehow?

I then wondered if it might be about *dough* as opposed to *batter*.  Cakes and many cookies are made in a batter that is then poured into a pan or dropped onto a cookie sheet.  But there are shaped cookies, and cinnamon rolls are dough-like but aren't bread.

I then wondered if it might be about the role of the product in a meal.  Until modern times bread was central to most meals, while cakes and cookies are incidental.  But we say *motzi* even over a small piece of bread that accompanies a large meal, and we say *mezunot* at a breakfast consisting largely of pastries.

If I am unsure about a particular food I can look up the correct blessing.  My question is: what's the guiding principle?  How would we work out which blessing we should say on a particular grain product if we couldn't just look it up?