Generate a random bread from 171 around the world -- loaves, flatbreads, enriched doughs, rolls and the steamed and fried ones -- each with what makes it work.
Gas trapped in a network of gluten. Yeast eats the sugars in the flour and gives off carbon dioxide; the gluten formed when water meets wheat protein is elastic enough to hold the bubbles rather than let them escape. That is why wheat makes light bread and rye largely does not -- rye has very little usable gluten, so its loaves depend on pentosans and an acidic sourdough starter to hold any structure at all, and come out dense by nature rather than by mistake. There are three ways to get the gas. Commercial yeast is fast and predictable; a sourdough starter is a wild culture of yeasts and lactobacilli that works slowly and contributes flavour and acidity as it goes; and chemical leavening -- bicarbonate reacting with something sour, usually buttermilk -- is instant, needs no proving, and is why Irish soda bread can go from bowl to oven in five minutes. Flatbreads mostly skip the question: cooked fast against something very hot, they puff from steam rather than from fermentation.
This generator draws from 171 breads from around the world, grouped by how they are made rather than by where they come from -- leavened loaves, flatbreads, enriched and sweet doughs, rolls and buns, and the ones cooked by steaming or frying instead of baking. Method is the more useful grouping: a ciabatta and a San Francisco sourdough have far more in common with each other than either has with focaccia.
Every result here is drawn using crypto.getRandomValues() -- the Web Crypto API's cryptographically secure randomness -- instead of Math.random(), so it's genuinely unpredictable, not just statistically random. Learn more.
Deciding what to bake this weekend, working through a bread book systematically, menu planning, food quizzes, and travelling by way of what is on the table.
Generate draws one bread at random from 171 using cryptographically secure randomness, and never repeats the one showing. Filter to a method -- flatbreads if you have no oven, enriched doughs for a weekend project -- and raise the amount to plan a month of baking in one press.
A sample of what this generator can draw, spread evenly across the full list:
Because the method is what determines the result. Focaccia and ciabatta are both Italian and almost nothing alike, while ciabatta and a San Francisco sourdough are made half a world apart and behave the same way in the oven. Grouping by technique also makes the filter useful: it tells you what equipment and how much time a draw will need.
Flatbread, by a very long way -- charred remains found in Jordan predate agriculture by several thousand years. Sourdough is the oldest leavening method, since it requires only flour, water and time; commercial yeast is a nineteenth-century invention.
Several are naturally gluten free rather than adapted: injera from teff, pão de queijo from cassava starch, corn tortillas, arepas, dosa and idli from fermented rice and lentils. They are in their normal groups rather than a separate one, because that is where they belong.
Yes -- that is the most common use. Filter to a method you have the time and equipment for, set the amount to four or five with No Duplicates on, and you have a month of weekends decided by something other than habit.