Why does bread taste sweet after a while?

Answer 1

The bread/chapati is made from flour which contains the polymer called starch. Starch is made up of chains of sugar molecules chemically linked together (it is the way plants store sugar).

In the saliva of the human mouth there is a protein, an enzyme, called Amylase. which breaks down the starch into its component sugar molecules. These sugars taste sweet in the mouth when this happens.

Answer 2

Bread contains loads and loads of starch, which is a polymer (i.e. a chemical chain) of glucose, a sugar. Your saliva contains an enzyme called amylase, which specifically breaks down starch molecules into its little glucose "building blocks", which aids our digestion. This process isn't immediate though, so it would take a few minutes in your mouth for this to occur properly.

However, I believe bread turning sweet in your mouth is a myth; glucose doesn't actually have a flavour, even though it's a sugar - at least, not a flavour that we can detect. As starch usually only contains glucose as it's monomers, I don't see how bread can start tasting sweet. If anything, I think the sweet flavour bread eventually gets is a placebo effect generated by an old wives tale!

Answer 3

Most commercial white bread is sweet because it contains a relatively high percentage of refined sugar or sugar syrup, added to make the bread soft and sweet, as well as to lengthen the time before the bread goes stale.

Other breads taste sweet because the starches in the bread are metabolized into sugar as the bread is eaten, by the saliva (spit) in the mouth.

Answer 4

amylase enzymes secreted by your salivary glands break down the starch from the bread into simple sugars, like glucose. Glucose in your mouth, makes you feel the bread is tasting sweet.

Answer 5

Enzymes in your mouth start to break the carbs down into sugars.