Breads of Different Countries

[weavis]

Hot buttered crumpets with Marmite sort out the home grown 'uns from the rest

Its one of the few foods I craved in the years I lived in the USA........

[Prairie Chicken]

I do not believe the wheat is the problem. Canadian red spring wheat, for example, is shipped all over the world & is considered one of the very best available. I do believe the problem is the preservatives which are added to the breads commercially available. In North America breads last days if not weeks; in Europe they last hours. Thats those preservatives at work.

A previous poster also mentioned the fillers added into the flour, such as sawdust. Here is another ingredient you may not want to hear about:

(NaturalNews) If you read the ingredients label on a loaf of bread, you will usually find an ingredient listed there as L-cysteine. This is a non-essential amino acid added to many baked goods as a dough conditioner in order to speed industrial processing. It's usually not added directly to flour intended for home use, but you'll find it throughout commercial breads such as pizza dough, bread rolls and pastries.

While some L-cysteine is directly synthesized in laboratories, most of it is extracted from a cheap and abundant natural protein source: human hair. The hair is dissolved in acid and L-cysteine is isolated through a chemical process, then packaged and shipped off to commercial bread producers. Besides human hair, other sources of L-cysteine include chicken feathers, duck feathers, cow horns and petroleum byproducts.

Most of the hair used to make L-cysteine is gathered from the floors of barbershops and hair salons in China, by the way.

cysteine_commercial_bread.html#ixzz3KUKKNdPo]True fact: A common ingredient in commercial breads is derived from human hair harvested in China - NaturalNews.com[/url]

[weavis]

Completely off topic but in the spirit of additives.
Budweiser products USA seemed to always make me feel ill. Then I found out they use formaldehyde in the finings process. Im sensitive to it. Not good for a living person.
Off topic subject over. As you were.

[zengirl]

Originally Posted by weavis

Hot crumpets, butter and Marmite. A Slice of Cheddar on the side.

"
Yum, yum. I'm from NYC so have no problem with getting fabulous breads.
I have been baking bread since I was 10yrs old and now 70 yrs. I too, dislike American commerical breads. I also find that we Americans have been taught to knead the crap out of dough to get that "no holes" quality, which I also dislike. And yes, it is a combo of type of yeast and kind of flour
that makes the difference. One poster mentioned sour dough from San Fran. I have been all over America and live in NYC and San Fran still has the very best sour dough! Sometimes I just want to hop on a plane and fly there just to taste it again!

[boatman61]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

How interesting it seems to me, that with all the globalization going on, and convergence of everything, including cooking, that profound differences in breads continues so much unabated. I bet some of the culinarily inclined among us might shed some light on the reasons for this.

I've just had a midnight snack, on board, of crumpets and Golden Shred marmelade, and I can't quite get my mind around how the same people who produce the most ghastly bread in the world -- tied for worst with the bread of my own people, the Yankee nation -- soft and tasteless, no texture, no flavor, irrespective of whether white or brown -- could produce something as divine as the Crumpet.

This bread -- which I never quite realized was a real thing -- it always seemed like a joke, invented for the phrase "tea and crumpets" -- is like a small, thick pancake, made with lots of soda. I eat them on board with cream cheese and ham, with sour cream and caviar (when generous guests bring that), or simply with butter and marmelade, like tonight.

Why the English people, with access to such a delicious thing, would eat their own sawdust-like normal bread at all, is beyond my comprehension. My own people probably preserved, fiercely, their own traditions of hot, home-made bread on the table, because of the same problem. We had "Wonder Bread", of course, and Peppridge Farms Wheat Berry so-called Whole Wheat bread (hardly different from Wonder Bread in texture), but we consumed far more biscuits and cornbread, both, like Crumpets, heavily leavened, and full of texture and flavor (the guilty secret of delicious biscuits being -- lard). The only difference being that you had to make your own biscuits and cornbread, whereas Crumpets can be bought for 65p a package, at Sainsburys, or anywhere else in the UK.

Why cannot the English-speaking peoples produce edible bread? I am really puzzled by this. We are so ingenious at everything else. The first thing we do when tying up at Cherbourg is to rush off to the nearest boulangerie -- to buy the production there, which is made as if of an entirely different substance -- what, can't we buy the same flour over here? I don't understand. Is it the gluten content? Hard wheat? What's the difference, and why don't we have it? Even the stolid Germans have delicious bread -- adding different grains to the good, hard, flavorful wheat the French use. And the Russians make fabulous bread -- "black bread", dirt cheap, made from rye like many German breads, but with a different and incredibly pleasing flavor.

It must be the wheat. I remember the case when the U.S. and Canadians sold the Soviet Union a huge quantity of wheat at a knock-down price to help ease their latest production crisis -- must have been in the early '80s. I remember being shocked to read that the Soviets considered the delivered wheat to be inedible, and fed it to their cattle! What ingrates, I thought. But now I know better!!

Stop shopping at Tesco's..
That's the trouble with supermarket chains.. they kill off so many good local services.. but the excellent little bakeries are still out there if you look for them..
Oh.. and second you on the crumpets... Yummmm

[Azul]

For something unusual try Pao de Queijo (Allrecipes has a good recipe for this Brazilian cheese bread) with a bowl of moqueca. The flour is tapioca flour which can be found at Harris Teeters and is gluten free. For the cheese, use a combination of asiago or parmesan combined with queso fresco.

[belizesailor]

Originally Posted by weavis

Hot buttered crumpets with Marmite sort out the home grown 'uns from the rest

Its one of the few foods I craved in the years I lived in the USA........

Do you mean this in the same context as Atoll? ;-)

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=crumpet

[Azul]

Another favorite recipe is Puerto Rican Pan de agua (step by step instructions on latinfood.about.com) The only change I make is to use 1.5 tbsp of salt. The flour I use is King Arthur's bread flour, which is pretty good. It is even recommended in the book The Bread Baker's Apprentice. Note that yeast proofs best at about 115 degrees. Don't add salt to the yeast water mixture or otherwise kill the yeast with too high a temperature (ie 130 degrees.) You can use a Kitchen Aid mixer with a dough hook or hand knead the bread for about ten minutes. I don't know why people have abandoned making bread at home, it only takes about 20 minutes and fresh bread is such a pleasure.

[Azul]

No oven? No problem! Try Allrecipe's version (by Mic) of naan. Easy to make and you can cook it on a black iron skillet. Even better, when you divide the dough into little golf ball sized nuggets they keep in the frig for 10 days and you can have fresh bread every morning.

[weavis]

Originally Posted by belizesailor

Do you mean this in the same context as Atoll? ;-)

Urban Dictionary: crumpet

Once you have good crumpets there is nothing to beat them....... either varietal...

But Marmite maketh the crumpet...

[weavis]

MARMITE!!!

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by weavis

MARMITE!!!

* quietly gags *

[belizesailor]

Marmite...another interesting link between beer and bread. Marmite's main ingredient is denatured and concentrated yeast cells. The "husks" (thick cell walls) are filtered out...so basically its denatured yeast guts with nutrients added..yum!

Think I'll stick w hot butter on my crumpet. ;-)

[weavis]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

* quietly gags *

LOLOLOL

Like I said, its for the home grown brits.......

[mrlee]

ANNE T...AAAMEN to the bread/flour in Mexico! I have been living here for going on 8 years now and still miss a good loaf of bread or a hard roll out of N.Y.C. I am tortilla'ed OUT! But this is only one of the small sacrifices we make to live in a pleasurable atmosphere...I am moving to Cancun next year and maybe the GRINGO influence there will make for better bread availability...
Peace to you all...LOVE these forums.
Be safe and happy