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The bread festival was an eye opener to `light healthy food', says R. KRISHNAMOORTHY.
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THE FAR-OFF venue did not dampen peoples' enthusiasm. Those with strong palates and an eye for detail for food preparation and display, could not simply keep themselves off from the State Institute of Hotel Management and Catering Institute (SIHMCI) located at the virtual end of the district last week.
Housewives, in particular, evinced keen interest in the week-long bread exhibition coinciding with the World Bread Day.
Eye opener
The festival turned out to be an eye opener to `light healthy food for a healthy living'.
Overwhelmed organisers later said the response was along "expected lines". Visitors went through the range of items displayed with immense interest. It gave them a glimpse of variety in bread from the world over.
The German Strollen, French bread and rye bread ... the bill had enormous choice making all realise that bread means more than just the food made with dough and yeast, fermented, kneaded and baked in oven.
The aesthetic display of varieties at the Institute's `Vandanam Restaurant' by the students also unveiled a refined combination of imagination and creativity. Their effort made the highly palatable stuff look even more attractive, although the shapes were perhaps unpalatable as they were in the form of reptiles and animals.
Visitors had every reason to be aghast at this unexpected sight of unusual forms as edible items.
But the students were at their beck and call to explain that "good bread has to be a little tough".
It was not easy for them to convince the onlookers to get over their likening of bread to cakes.
Interested visitors were also taught the preparation of brown bread at home to keep diabetes at bay.
Tribute to Egyptians
The bread celebration was, in fact, held as a tribute to Egyptians, the inventors of leavened bread. Egyptians had accidentally discovered fermentation when a piece of dough turned sour while cooking flat cakes made of millet and barley on heated stones.
The festival was also devoted to the Greeks, who cooked loaves made of rye or oats, or sometimes wheat, on a grid. The Romans were remembered for their bread flavoured with seeds of poppy, cumin or parsley. The festival helped in recalling the Italians' contribution to its spread across the Roman empire, and the Vietnamese for creating the first bakery in 1840 which produced long loaves or rolls that went on to become one of the classic French breads.
The exhibition also educated the visitors about different forms of `Indian Bread' like the roti/chappati, paratha, and puffy poori. And that `commercial bread' is just yet another manifestation.
And that sweetness and softness need not necessarily be the measure for good and tasty bread.
"Bread should not be soft, but hard with less sugar, and free from chemicals and additives usually found in `commercial bread'. Bread in its natural form, bereft of softness and sweetness, is preferred in the West," Institute Principal, L.V. Kumar, shared. He revealed that the Institute was on a mission to propagate consumption of bread, made of wheat flour, as an alternative to fried/junk food.
And to reinforce the concept of `light healthy food', bread made of wheat flour is also mixed with other millets and cereals, especially ragi. Simultaneously, it is also trying to popularise what is called `savoury bread' — slices of bread spiced up with garlic, onion and chilly. This can make a staple `breakfast food' for school children, feels Mr.Kumar.
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