The Egyptian government has long subsidized bread as part of its social support program. This subsidized bread, known as baladi bread, is eaten daily by most Egyptians. Drawing on archival research and interviews with range of people involved in the subsidy program, this paper traces the evolution of baladi bread since the subsidy’s inception in the 1940s. I show how the becoming of baladi bread has been shaped by two key concerns: the maintenance of a sufficient, unfailing supply of bread and the production of a bread that the general public deems acceptable. I look, first, at the bread’s price and size. For millions of Egyptians, this cheap staple food is a lifeline. Yet for the government, which covers the difference between what the consumer pays and the actual cost of producing that bread, the program is extremely expensive. Over the years, successive governments have struggled with setting a bread price that their budget can cover and which is acceptable to the public. They have also deployed changes in the size of the loaf as a way of trimming the costs of the program. Official size regulations do not always translate, though, into the size of the loaves that bakeries, which are government-licensed but privately-owned, produce. Second, I look at the bread’s composition, which is key both to the bread’s taste and the cost of its production. Different governments have experimented with mixing other grains (namely corn) into the bread, changing the level of refinement of the wheat flour that constitutes the bread’s chief ingredient, and fortifying it with vitamins. In the process, officials have weighed various taste parameters with the necessity of ensuring the ongoing production of a huge quantity of bread. I argue that these changing specifications for baladi bread are illustrative of a broader set of practices that I term “staple security.” In Egypt, the possibility that there might not be decent bread to eat is an existential threat – a threat both to Egyptians’ sense of wellbeing and to the stability of the state. Staple security, therefore, refers to the everyday ways in which people go about countering this threat and ensuring the continuous supply of a quality staple at an individual, household, or national scale. This paper demonstrates how this process plays out at the national level through government efforts to ensure that the population has affordable, decent bread to eat.