What is the best way, and best knife to use, to minimise crumbs when slicing bread, particularly wholemeal?
Mark Wareing
Ashbourne, Derbyshire, UK
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Wholemeal bread can be quite crumbly because the protein structure (formed from gluten) is weakened by the fibre and husk in the wholemeal flour.
This crumbling can be reduced by using wholemeal flour with a high gluten content (so-called strong wholemeal flour) or by including a small amount of very strong white flour or pure, 鈥渧ital鈥� wheat gluten.
The design of the knife needs to be able to penetrate the relatively hard crust without the bread being squashed during cutting, as this spoils the texture. The best knife for doing this is one that is serrated or that has small teeth, and the bread should be cut with a sawing action to avoid squashing it. The blade should be straight and the handle ideally angled upwards a little so that the user鈥檚 knuckles don鈥檛 hit the kitchen surface at the bottom of the cut.
Freshly baked bread is less likely to be crumbly.
Anthea Fleming
Melbourne, Australia
I have the world鈥檚 best possible bread knife, a family heirloom, which probably dates from before the second world war.
It has a thin, flexible steel blade about 20 centimetres long and 2.5 centimetres high, with a finely serrated edge. The turned wooden handle is about 10 centimetres long and was originally painted green, as were many kitchen knives of that era.
My bread-cutting technique is simply to cut across with a gentle sawing action from the top until close to the bottom, then I turn the loaf on its side to complete the cut.
The slice can be thick for toast or thin for sandwiches, just as you please. Not many crumbs result on the bread board 鈥� a traditional wooden type. My relatives complain that they can鈥檛 buy a bread knife like mine these days.
Richard Miller
London, UK
In the absence of any constraints on affordability, practicality or edibility, an industrial laser cutter seems hard to beat.
The beam can be tightly focused (so that no more material is removed than necessary), no shear force is exerted on the loaf that might cause crumbs to be torn away from it and the laser provides the added benefit of cauterising as it goes, fusing potential crumbs to either side of the cut.
An excellent demonstration of this is available online at bitly.ws/3eAaM.
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