Some words fascinate me on account of unusual or specialized ways they can be used. “Crumb” is such a word.
Singular, not plural. I’m not especially interested in crumbs (plural), the little shards of bread, cake, pie crust, and the like that break off and make a mess that needs to be cleaned up so it won’t attract ants.
But crumb (singular) has another meaning that’s pretty important to me.
Crumb in this sense refers to the soft, inner part of a loaf of bread. As in “crust and crumb”, the two components of a standard loaf.
Bread’s crust is of course the outer layer, typically darker and more chewy than the inside. Some people (especially young kids, I’ve noticed) don’t like crust: They tear it off their lunch sandwiches and throw it away.
To each her own: The crust is my favorite part, especially when it’s deeply browned and richly caramelized. Even better when it’s toasted a bit short of burning.
I’m in that group that likes crust so much that I prefer the heel to any other slice. But I’m drifting off=topic, as I tend to do when rhapsodizing about food.
Back to crumb.
It had never occurred to me that the inner part of bread even had its own name. But it does. “Crumb” (singular) is a baker’s specialized term that I learned only by becoming obsessed with bread’s characteristics.
Some years ago, I vowed to master the art of baking bread. Not just any old sandwich-slice loaf-pan bread: I wanted to create the kind of loaves known as “artisan” or “artisanal”.
Artisan bread comes in funny shapes and sizes: It may be long and skinny, like a French baguette. It may come in a round, domed loaf, or be braided, or shaped like a giant mutant donut-bagel.
The crust is generally chewy and crackly; that’s what non-bakers usually think of when they think of artisan bread. It startled me to learn that a steamy oven, during baking, is one of the secrets of a fabulous crust.
Well, I learned to make loaves with great crust. (That isn’t difficult.) They usually were delicious and nicely risen. But there was a problem – a code I couldn’t crack.
Like other bakers, I had noticed two things about really great artisan bread:
✦ It has big holes on the inside, a profusion of baked-in bubbles; and
✦ Bread with big holes tastes better. (It just does.)
Bread with lots of big holes has what bakers call an “open crumb”. How best to achieve that is always a live-wire debate among dedicated bakers.
Early on, I became perturbed by the fact that my bread didn’t have big holes. There were air pockets galore, but these were tiny and uniformly distributed. My crumb was soft and tasty enough, but it wasn’t spectacular.
For about 20 years, I struggled to bake bread with a consistently open crumb. Time and again I thought I had learned the secret: I’d make a few great loaves; but then my new technique would stop working.
Eventually, I learned how to bake bread with a bubbly, delightful crumb. There’s no single trick – what I had to find were the ways that work for me, subject to my equipment, time constraints, and baking temperament. I’m planning to write these up soon, time permitting.
Baking techniques aren’t the topic here. This essay is about the word “crumb”, as it’s used in baking. I’m relating this history only to explain why the word itself – as a word one speaks or writes, not something one eats – fascinates me.
P.S.: I said above that crumbs (plural) don’t much interest me. There’s one exception: After most of a cake has disappeared, there usually remains a pile of leftover crumbs all mixed with flecks of icing.
By scraping these up, I often get what amounts to a whole extra slice of cake. These crumbs typically constitute the most exquisitely caramelized part. Because they’re “just crumbs”, I can pretend they have no calories.
But crumbs (plural) still are just crumbs. Crumb (singular) is manna from heaven. That’s why the word – as distinct from the food alone – gets to me.
(This article is part of my series on words that are #worth1000pictures.)