Pandesal (Spanish: pan de sal salt bread) is a rounded bread made of flour, eggs, yeast, sugar, and salt. It has become a common food in the Philippines.[1]
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Pandesal is the most popular yeast-raised bread in the Philippines. Individual loaves are shaped like garrison caps due to its unique method of forming. The dough is rolled into long logs (baston) that are rolled in fine bread crumbs before being cut into individual portions with a dull dough cutter and then allowed to rise and baked on sheet pans. Its taste and texture closely resemble those of the Puerto Rican bread called Pan de Agua and Mexican Bolillos. These breads all use a lean type of dough and follow similar techniques that were learned from Spanish or Spanish-trained bakers early in their history. As in most commercially produced food items, they vary in quality to meet taste requirements and economic standards of various communities.
Despite the Spanish origins of its name, pandesal was introduced in the Philippines in the 16th century.[2] Pandesal originally started out as a plain roll, traditionally served for breakfast accompanied by such items as butter, cheese, scrambled eggs or filled omelets, sausages, bacon, Spanish sardines, jams, jellies and marmalade, coffee, tea or hot chocolate. Originally, pandesal was similar to the French baguette, as the only ingredients needed were hard wheat flour, water, yeast and salt. Over the years, since the quality of wheat flour available could no longer result in the ideal crusty exterior and chewy interior, pandesal gradually evolved into a sweeter and richer type of bread. The common quality though that the old style lean pandesal shares with the modern sweeter version is its coating of bread crumbs, giving its identifying flavor. Pandesal can be made from any type of dough and still resemble pandesal as long as the unbaked dough is rolled in fine breadcrumbs before baking. The softness of the new type of pandesal, that consumers unaware of the correct texture now find desirable, is due to its weak dough structure derived from inferior quality of flour used.
To mitigate the potential impact of white flour's increasing costs in 2008, the Food and Nutrition Research Institute (FNRI) of the Philippines presented an alternative dubbed the "yellow pandesal." Although tradition dictates that pandesal make use of white flour, the recipe substitutes about a third of the white flour with squash puree. The FNRI endorsed the yellow pandesal's nutritional value and potential remedy to the rising cost of flour imports. Despite the FNRI's endorsement through a pilot program in Zambales, the yellow pandesal failed to capture the attention of the market.