Whole wheat bread or wholemeal bread is a type of bread made using flour that is partly or entirely milled from whole or almost-whole wheat grains, see

whole-wheat flour Whole-wheat flour (in the US) or wholemeal flour (in the UK) is a powdery substance, a basic food ingredient, derived by grinding or mashing the whole grain of wheat, also known as the wheatberry. Whole-wheat flour is used in baking of breads ...

and

whole grain A whole grain is a grain of any cereal and pseudocereal that contains the endosperm, germ, and bran, in contrast to refined grains, which retain only the endosperm. As part of a general healthy diet, consumption of whole grains is associated ...

. It is one kind of

brown bread Brown bread is bread made with significant amounts of whole grain flour, usually wheat, and sometimes dark-coloured ingredients such as molasses or coffee. In Canada, Ireland and South Africa, it is whole wheat bread; in the Maritimes and Ne ...

. Synonyms or near-synonyms for whole-wheat bread outside the United States (e.g., the UK) are whole grain bread or

wholemeal A whole grain is a grain of any cereal and pseudocereal that contains the endosperm, germ, and bran, in contrast to refined grains, which retain only the endosperm. As part of a general healthy diet, consumption of whole grains is associated wi ...

bread. Some regions of the US simply called the bread wheat bread, a comparison to ''white bread''. Some varieties of whole-wheat bread are traditionally coated with whole or cracked grains of wheat, though this is mostly decorative compared to the nutritional value of a good quality

loaf A loaf ( : loaves) is a (usually) rounded or oblong mass of food, typically and originally of bread. It is common to bake bread in a rectangular bread pan, also called a loaf pan, because some kinds of bread dough tend to collapse and spread ...

itself.

Etymology

''Meal'' in the sense of "flour" is derived from

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th c ...

''melu'' and is cognate with modern English "mill", and with Dutch ''meel'' (flour), German ''Mehl'' (flour) and

Old Norse Old Norse, Old Nordic, or Old Scandinavian, is a stage of development of North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and their overseas settlemen ...

''mjǫl'' (flour).

Overview

The exact composition of products legally marketable as "whole wheat bread" varies from country to country and even within one country. In some cases, the bread is made with whole-grain flour that contains all of the component parts of the grain in the same ratios as they occur in nature, whereas in other cases the bread may include only representative amounts of bran or wheat germ. In

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

, for example, a proportion of the

wheat germ Cereal germ or Wheat germ: The germ of a cereal is the reproductive part that germinates to grow into a plant; it is the embryo of the seed. Along with bran, germ is often a by-product of the milling that produces refined grain products ...

may be removed from the flour to reduce the risk of

rancidity Rancidification is the process of complete or incomplete autoxidation or hydrolysis of fats and oils when exposed to air, light, moisture, or bacterial action, producing short-chain aldehydes, ketones and free fatty acids. When these processes o ...

, but the term "whole-wheat bread" is still used. The common term for whole-wheat bread in Canada is "brown bread". The term "wheat bread" is sometimes used as a marketing tactic to give the impression of a product being whole-wheat bread, but this is at best an ambiguous term and potentially deceptive because most

white bread White bread typically refers to breads made from wheat flour from which the bran and the germ layers have been removed from the whole wheatberry as part of the flour grinding or milling process, producing a light-colored flour. This milling p ...

is made from wheat flour, and thus could legitimately be called "wheat bread". The majority of what is marketed in the USA under the name "wheat bread" has very little whole grain content, and is made primarily of white flour, with caramel coloring added to them to give an illusion of a higher whole wheat content.

References

{{Wheat * Breads

Etymology

Overview

See also

References