I sometimes rolled the loaves in sesame seeds before they baked to add a crunchy coating. When we first lived the USA, Haakon used to make bread for us – a quick, yeasted half white-half wheat everyday bread that filled the hole and was infinitely better than anything you could get at the store. No other bread would do for the price, and I still think about how my teeth made drag marks in the thin white bread. Īt home in Australia, at our monthly market in Candelo, the primary school still sells fat sausages on a stick and hamburgers with grilled onions, sliced tomato and shredded iceberg lettuce sandwiched between buttered white bread, which they’ve done since the early eighties. Soft white bread is popular in Australia too – and sometimes it’s the best bread for the job, as it is in the case of fairy bread. Of course, there is a time and a place for pappy white bread. Rye bread often has a tiny percentage of actual rye flour, and is not even made brown with the traditional sweetener – molasses – but is coloured with caramel dye. “We have wheat, white, sourdough, English muffins, bagels, rye, marbled rye …”īut the bread all tastes the same. Visit any diner and order a breakfast plate and the waitress will drill you with options for your accompanying toast: It’s ironic that there is at face value so much choice around bread in this country. What makes Americans so fond of pappy white bread? is it a history of dental problems that make chewing a crust too difficult? a love of commercialisation? or is it just that when Columbus’ sourdough was abandoned, people forgot what good bread tastes like and they’ve never remembered? Trips to two huge supermarkets and a natural grocer also yielded zero loaves of crusty bread, and we were content with an organic, seeded loaf which somehow still had the same texture as soft white bread.Īpparently, Christopher Columbus brought sourdough culture with him on the boat in 1492 – but the American bread situation has gone steadily downhill since then, to arrive at this: But I knew at first glance that the bakery stall was baking quick yeasted bread – puffy oversized croissants with no visible layers and fat white “French” loaves prevailed. Recent trips to Denver, Colorado and Seattle, Washington showed me that finding good bread is not a rural problem.Īt the farmer’s market in Arvada, Denver, there were superb fresh peaches and melons whose stems were still dripping from where they had been pulled from the vine.
Sumac, leaf gelatin, nigella seeds and Korean chilli can be ordered online, while fresh bread is a purely local delicacy.
There’s a casual assumption that such bread can be found in the US – a food mag I subscribe to, Bon Appetit, often ends a recipe with “serve with crusty bread,” as though such a thing is easy to find.īut crusty bread is harder to find than other hard-to-find ingredients. I needed a dry, open-crumbed bread – the type of bread for which breaded foods were invented to use up, along with the classic old bread dishes like Panzanella, Fattoush, bread pudding and that Spanish soup with bread and almonds. Good bread like that crusty Italian loaf has been hard to come by in Troy, Montana until recently, with several local bakers at the farmers market now selling excellent loaves.īut the market is only on Fridays, so I went to the store and stared for a while, trying not to breathe in the sweet chemically smell of the bread aisle.Ī sea of soft white and brown bread looked back at me, bread I knew would turn to a gummy paste in the food processor. Yesterday, I needed to make some breadcrumbs for a chicken parmigiana I was making for a catering gig with a local fly fishing outfitter On my fourteenth birthday, mum took me to Canberra for a shopping trip and we stayed in a little hotel and I spent all morning toasting slices of bread and eating them with sliced ham. The first bread I remember well was a huge round white Italian loaf that came in a paper bag and was bought at the Ainslie shops in Canberra, the city where I was born.
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