Something That Has Puzzled Me...

the same reason a saw cuts a piece of wood and a razor wont

I will disagree.

A saw when pushed forwards and downwards removes small parts of the material it is being used to saw/cut. It also has off-set teeth to make a slightly larger slot than the width of the saw blade to allow the blade to be moved without jamming.

The knife has no such small teeth and does not remove part of the bread.

Bread heated up in the microwave is usually tough and chewy, in my experience.

"It has to do with the nature of wheat starch, water content and microwaves.
When wet starch (i.e. dough) heats up (i.e. baked) it becomes partially gelatinized. That's the nice moist texture of fresh baked bread.
As the bread ages, it loses some of the moisture and the gelatinized starch starts hardening again and that is why a bread goes "stale" and hard.
When you put bread in the microwave oven, the microwaves cause the remaining water in the bread to heat up, and the warm water causes some of the hardened starches to re-gelatinized which makes the bread soft again. If you continue to heat the bread, the water in the bread starts boiling and cooking up the starch and as the starch boils it tightens up, which makes the bread feel rubbery. As you continue to heat the bread, all the water boils out of the bread, and all you left with is hardened, dried up starch. ."

https://www.quora.com/Cooking-science-why-does-bread-get-soft-then-rubbery-then-hard-after-being-microwaved

A serrated knife is more like a saw and breaks the rubbery starch.

Yes bread OVERHEATED in a microwave does get all hard and rock like.. however my re-heating skills are not my question.

As the bread is soft and warm - reheated to perfection, as if it has just been baked, trying to cut it with a flat non serrated knife doesn't work, yet a serrated one does.. All I'm asking is why!

Maybe your knife is dull?

I agree. If your kitchen knife without serrated edge will not cut bread or a tomato pulling the edge against either, then it isn't sharp.

Some good kitchen knives are made tougher; more resistant to chipping, fracture. These knives don'the hold an edge as well as more brittle steel, and so should be 'steeled' before or after (or both) each uses. Steeling realigns the edge material.

The kitchen knives in most houses are dangerously dull.

Do you mean you normally assault fresh bread with a non-serrated blade? Oh My God, the Humanity of it all!

If I took a loaf of bread just out of my mother's baking oven (not the other one, silly person), and attempted that, she would have "mauled" me. See said so on more than one occasion and I still have the scars just from the laser hot word: "maul".

So stop mauling the bread.

GA I think that's as good an explanation as any

Always look for the simple machines. This one is a lever or a ramp. The angle of the tooth on the blade is the key. Think of how a chisel cuts wood.

Drew K

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-SLjl2XWOk

That's why we have a set of knives that have all different shapes and sizes...

http://www.knifeart.com/plainbyjoeta.html

I also use a serrated blade for slicing tomatoes -- now that I think about it, the average tomato and the average bread roll are comparably soft.

So what's the deal with Santoku knives, with the odd dimple things? What's the principle behind them? Mr. Best in Show loves his.

Dimples break the surface tension. Similar to the groove placed in bayonets that allows you to pull it out of the body.

All comparisons of cheddar cheese and the bodies of enemy soldiers are against the Geneva convention!

Has anyone ever tried heating a nice dinner roll in a microwave until ignition?

Yes.

Groan

I see you are doing your part for the "groaning" of England!

Four-loaf cleavers indeed. I suppose you have another one involving oatmeal?

I know I will regret asking, but what is the oatmeal connection?

Probably something to do with cleaving a Haggis. I am not as cleaver a wordsmith as you, so I will leave it right there on the table.

Doesn't one need a Claymore for that? On the other hand, slicing one's oatmeal rarely requires any degree of sharpness in my household. In such a case, I suppose a butter knife might work better than a steak knife.

A sidebar: I was totally shocked by the behavior of Poldark in this and last week's episodes. Kudos to Dimelza.

LOL!!

Then he started selling Razors.

Here's the commercial.

My design has 21 blades on a rotating drum. Motorized, of course.

I see.

I recall a cartoon of a giant shaving his face with a reel lawnmower.

Most knife sets contain a bread knife, the bread knife is serrated.

It's a matter of pressure, a non-serrated knife spreads the down force over a much greater area. A serrated knife divides the down force over several very small points, thus the psi is higher even though the down force applied is the same.

Stated simply, the little points on the serrations poke through the crust easier and without flattening the loaf.

That's why bread knives are serrated.

Sir robin has some good answers. But it also goes further than that and it has to do with food science.

Different types of binders used such as gluten will get different effects for texture, body and aesthetics

Bread and a bun are actually different recipes, depended on what is needed. A bun has to be more robust to be able to handle juices as well as bulk such as a Hamburger.

Where bread may be used more for bulk.

Food science is pretty in depth. Which started with French chemist Louis-Camille Maillard discovering the Maillard Reaction. Which amounts to browning effects.

Bad link: your Maillard Reaction link.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maillard_reaction

above link works just fine.

So that is why I hate a burned up dinner roll, whereas I would neither enjoy one without being fully

baked to its golden brown perfection. I am drooling already for my Thanksgiving dinner.

Dam it Jim!

you're too dam quick, I already fixed that. But here's to ya anyways.

Well just give that to the green-eyed goblin! It is illogical to do otherwise.

Get the away team ready, almost time to beam down for the weekend!

I got the away team assembled Jim..... Here's your Red Shirt.

Nooooooooooo....not the infamous red shirt. Isn't that the away team member that gets vaporized?

Its OK Jim, I'm a doctor. Just a sec.... let me turn the fan on to blow the smoke away so I can see you.

Jim, Where'd you go?

McCoy what in the name of Regulus are you doing? Are you playing mid-wife to the tribbles again? I know Scottie said he was giving her all he's got, but now you too?

I can tell you all that using a microwave for this is a huge failure.

A month ago I bought a Halogen Oven, that does bread beautifully!! and not just bread!

Jacket potatoes are fast and very tasty, as are roasts, whole chickens on a spit, Fries with either no oil or fat or just a light spray!!!

I have not exhausted its repertoire yet, but it is in use daily.

I do those partly cooked rolls for breakfast, hot (far hotter than the ones you buy and bring home!) and really tasty.....

The oven was really cheap and although it uses 1000W against the microwave's 750W, I find it far better and much faster. Depending upon rolls, between 7 and 11 minutes....

I wish I had seen them before I bought a conventional oven 10 years ago.....which uses 3KW if I remember correctly!!! and takes 5 minutes to heat up, whereas the Halogen Oven is almost instant!!

In the shipyard, we made an oven to heat our dinner with a industrial 200 Watt incandescent Light Bulb oven.

the slow cook even made leftover hotdogs and brats taste better.

I missed that oven...

I made a small test oven with a really small computer fan to circulate the air in it for ascertaining the output of my phonon cells I was fabricating...home research.

The oven use incandescent bulbs, and a light dimmer to control the setting, a bit crude but quite effective up to about 150 °C. Various wattage bulbs allowed finer tuning of the upper temperature and the ramp rate, so as to make the test series easy to evaluate. I tried using polystyrene foam - aluminum backed insulation, but found this to be inadequate at the high end, as it would tend to start to melt. Fiberfrax wool insulation works much better. I never tried warming up a hot dog in this, as (1) I didn't want the salts from the phonon cells or metals contamination in my food, and (2) I didn't want grease from food getting all over the inside of this oven to contaminate my experiments.

Mineral wool would work.

We didn't have insulation in ours, we just fabbed it out of aluminum, when we cam into work, for a big meal we'd put it in right away, smaller meals we put it in on our first break for lunch... It was surprisingly good,

if you had left over steak from the night before that was tough, you just wrap it in aluminium foil, and butter It was turned into a gourmet meal.

or a Brat do the same with butter... yum.

Or dried out hamburger you grilled that weekend,... heat it with butter wrapped in foil,,, wait..... maybe its has nothing to do with the oven.... maybe its the butter. ....

never mind

I suspect if you wrapped it in bacon the result would be as good as with butter. Everything tastes better with butter, or bacon, right?