Bread forms an important part of a cosmonaut’s diet. In space, cosmonauts eat several types of bread, including Borodinsky bread, white bread made from high-quality wheat flour, Russian-style bread, Moscow-style rye bread, and honey gingerbread. 

Space bread is made in a special way, so as to prevent any crumbs, which, in conditions of weightlessness can be a danger to people and to the equipment on board the space station.

The first cosmonauts had to make do with food in tubes when they were in orbit, and complained about its lack of taste. There were therefore attempts - carried out in secrecy - to develop space food that was more like normal food. For example, on March 23 1965 the astronaut John Yang “smuggled” a corned beef sandwich on board the Gemini 3 spacecraft, and tried to eat it in orbit. The result was a lot of crumbs- which could have floated into the crew’s ears or eyes, or have got into the equipment and stopped it working. This incident, which almost brought an end to the NASA space program, went down in history as the sandwich incident.

In the USSR the work on the development of special space bread began in the early 1970s. The developers decided to try and solve the problem of crumbs by using a special culture to make the dough rise, and also by baking miniature loaves of bread — just 2×2.5 cm. This bread did not need to be cut while in orbit, and the cosmonaut could eat the mini-loaf in one bite. Each mini-loaf of space bread weighs just a few grams (3 g for wheat bread and 4.5 g for rye bread).

The bread for cosmonauts is baked in the workshop of the Bread Production Research Institute in Moscow. The bread is made entirely by hand. First of all the dough is made using normal flour, and it is put into baking forms. Once the dough has proved, the forms are put in an oven for 5-6 minutes at 300°С. The cooked bread is then put in special packs, each with ten mini-loaves. Two layers of film, made of heat-resistant polyethylene, polypropylene and PET, enable the bread to keep for up to 15 months. Once the bread is packaged it is sterilized at a temperature of 90-100°С.Part of each batch is sent to the ISS while the rest remains on Earth for quality control purposes.