stupid but quick question

[kaigou]

vegetarian = no eggs = no bread ... correct?

is this generally a hard-and-fast rule, enough to consider it a pretty safe assumption?


ETA: apparently the unclear part above is my expectation that bread contains eggs. Yes, as a matter of fact, bread can contain eggs -- pretty much my entire repertoire of bread-recipes all contain at least one egg. (Some of them contain two eggs, even, and some even have milk.) This is not to say I've never made bread without eggs -- I have -- but I don't much care for the texture or the reluctant timbre of the bread when working with it. With eggs, the bread is considerably silkier/smoother, and just more pleasant and easy to work with; thus it's not a headache to let it rise six times and really become amazingly-melty. Or shorter version: bread can contain eggs.

ETA the 2nd: I suppose it might've been less confusing if I'd asked about, say, angel food cake... for which my grandmother's recipe uses the whites of like a dozen eggs. I rarely make it, though, because I hate wasting a dozen egg yolks, but I'm never quite sure what to do with them...

Comments

[nagasvoice]

Quick breads like cornbread, banana bread, muffins might perhaps meet the bready need?
My mom makes biscuits all the time using vegetable shortening, and they come out divine to my palate--very light, very flaky, an essence of breadness, but this does not match what everybody else expects. For instance, they do not reek of soda, or of bacon, or of salty stuff (such as would accompany redeye gravy and eggs for breakfast) or anything else that I have heard people expect from their "traditional" versions. They're very good, though. Recipe's on the baking powder can, I think.
When vegans talk about disliking the exploitation of milk cows or chickens, some of them are talking about avoiding factory farming risks and avoiding the whole system which breeds cows who give so much milk that it scours all the calcium out of their bones in spite of supplements. That is cruel and it ends their lives prematurely--totally aside from getting sent to slaughter when their productivity drops too low. And that's part of the argument why eating milk or cheese is just as ethically wrong as eating meat.
In addition, it's a tricky point whether calves "need" the milk as long as the cows are continuing to give it. Breastfeeding is subject to a lot of reasons why it might stop or reduce regardless of what the baby needs. We work very hard to breed and support cows we can milk much longer and in higher volumes than in the old days, while the calves can survive getting weaned younger. Vegans would argue that we artificially wean calves much sooner than is normal to "wild" cows.
I'm not sure we have enough wild cows left with which to get any research on this point, either; I know there's some in places like the scrubby woods in Spain.
Then there's the argument that supporting those cows costs tremendous amounts of ag resources and risky chemicals, to control pests in the fodder that keeps those high-powered animals productive. Plus, the wastes from things like the huge hog farms and chicken ranches are a major problem.
I still like bacon sometimes, darn it. No, I'm not vegetarian or vegan. I'm not terribly tolerant of legumes, or I might live on those more, just because it's cheaper, let alone for environmental reasons. But for practical economic reasons, a lot of us are eating a lot less meat than we used to. This may not be a bad thing, taken all together.

[kaigou]

In my experience, if you're using baking soda as a leavening and the bread has any taste of soda once cooked... it means you didn't let the soda do its full work. It should exhaust itself, in a sense, by the time baking is done (ergo, bread is fully risen). The soda flavor to me says that someone rushed the chemistry, or they didn't put in enough salt to offset/tamp the soda. I mean, I know it's a taste, but still. I have three family recipes for biscuits -- one with yeast, one using eggs to leaven, and another using baking soda. The last one tastes similar to the first and second, but it doesn't tend to layer-flake quite like the first, and is more like the second in terms of being a little cakey. But since I don't usually keep a gallon of crisco in the house these days, I rarely make biscuits.

There are various reasons for any diet -- political, personal, due to allergies or sensitivities, and sometimes it's just the taste. I don't mind red meat, but I was raised on chicken, fish, and sometimes pig, more than anything else... with a whole lot of vegetables. Usually far more vegetable than meat at the table, really, which was a way to make the table look full without having too much expensive meat.

[nagasvoice]

I've migrated quite a long way from the roast or steak and potatoes with sides that we lived on when I was a kid. To be fair, knowledge of Chinese-style and Thai-style and Indian-style cooking is a lot more prevalent now than it was back in those days before "Small Planet" came out.
My bunch have been heading toward using more veggies and faster cooking, feeling full while less expensive. Probably a lot healthier, too.