Bread! Bread now!

[Pietro Paolo Virdis]

Good bread is very difficult to come by in Sweden. They love their factory baked shite. Similar to the UK, really.

Even the chains, Wily's, ICA, where they have a a big selection of fresh baked and warm brought out from the back, it's the light kind with more air than flour in it. I've taken a serious look at baking machines several times but am yet to hear from anyone I know who has one. It seems too good to be true, that you can pour in the ingredients, set a timer and wake up to fresh bread without having to do a single thing beyond the pouring and setting. There are rather affordable ones for 100 Eur, but they soon climb to several hundred for the better.

[beak]

They always seemed like the ultimate in "use once then leave in the back of the cupboard". Isn't preparing the dough the vast majority of the work in baking bread? (I have, as you may guess, never baked bread).

[JVL]

We had one for several years in Germany, used it regularly - and it was great, once I'd worked out which types of bread it could bake well, and which ones to leave alone. Our machine produced really tasty bread if you went for a normal white loaf, or anything up to about a 60:40 mix of white flour and another type (rye, spelt, wholemeal). Following the instructions about the order in which you add the ingredients to the mixing bowl was important, as was leaving it to stand a bit before starting the baking programme. Over time, I substituted buttermilk for part of the amount of water in the basic recipe, as that produced a tastier loaf that didn't dry out and go stale after 1 day.

All that said, hand-made, hand-kneaded bread is always much tastier and there are a whole range of bread products you simply can't make in a bread machine, despite what all the advertising blurb would have you believe. A few of the traditional German bread types (Seelen, Wurzelbrot...) need to be left well alone for at least 24 hours for the yeast and gluten to do their thing and must be made by hand. But the great thing about the bread machines is the convenience of it all: you spend 10 minutes or so getting it set up, then wait a few hours and it's done. And the overnight baking thing is great, waking up to the smell of fresh bread in the house is wonderful.

[ursus arctos]

We go through phases where we use ours a good deal, and then get out of the habit (in part because we have a typical small kitchen with very limited counter space), but our overall experience is much like JVL’s

[Pietro Paolo Virdis]

I think that settles it for me and am getting one. The information about testing which kind of bread it does well and which it doesn't was useful. I've of course checked comments online by those who purchased one and nothing like that was mentioned. Either it was praise or it didn't work well at all.

[anton pulisov]

Even the chains, Wily's, ICA, where they have a a big selection of fresh baked and warm brought out from the back, it's the light kind with more air than flour in it.

That's mostly factory bread as well, "baked off" in store. Sugar added to many of them as well.

There isn't really a culture of local bakeries in Sweden. My best bet was a Turkish bakery in Malmö that did freshly baked Turkish flatbreads.

[anton pulisov]

Bread machine bread never really did it for me. Tastes a bit limp. If I was to buy one thing then it would be a powerful mixer with a good dough hook, so that I could take all the work and much of the mess out of kneading. Then bake the thing in a preheated covered cast iron pot with a spray of water on the bread just before it goes in. I did that a few times and it came out very nicely. I am mainly just too lazy to do all the kneading and cleaning up.

[Pietro Paolo Virdis]

That's mostly factory bread as well, "baked off" in store. Sugar added to many of them as well.

There isn't really a culture of local bakeries in Sweden. My best bet was a Turkish bakery in Malmö that did freshly baked Turkish flatbreads.

I used to stop by a Persian bakery early in the mornings. You could knock on the backdoor and hand over a 20 for a couple of these still warm Barbari, about the length of a coffee table book each.



Persians have really re-introduced the proper art of bakery in this country.

[Bored Of Education]

Yes, very similar to the Green Lanes Turkish bread.

[Eggchaser]

The ancient greeks used loaves of bread as sex toys. The "kollix" was a stick-shaped loaf of bread. When applied, um, internally, it became known as an "ollisbokollix", or "loaf-of-bread dildo".

That would explain the prevalence of yeast infections in ancient Greece.

[anton pulisov]

it became known as an "ollisbokollix", or "loaf-of-bread dildo".

a load of old bokollix if you ask me

[beak]

I tell you what isn't bollocks is the theories about the etymology of pumpernickel:

https://www.etymonline.com/word/pumpernickel

pumpernickel (n.)

"dark rye bread," 1756, pompernickel, from German (Westphalian dialect) Pumpernickel (1663), originally an abusive nickname for a stupid person, from pumpern "to break wind" + Nickel "goblin, lout, rascal," from proper name Niklaus (see Nicholas). An earlier German name for it was krankbrot, literally "sick-bread."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumpernickel

The word stems from an old Bavarian term for “hard”; either referring to the process used to grind the grain into flour, or the density of the final bread product. According to Langenscheidts Taschen Wörterbücher (1956), it refers to a form of “pumping work”. The philologist Johann Christoph Adelung states that the word has an origin in the Germanic vernacular where pumpern was a New High German synonym for being flatulent, and Nickel was a form of the name Nicholas, commonly associated with a goblin or devil (e.g. "Old Nick", a familiar name for Satan), or more generally for a malevolent spirit or demon. Hence, pumpernickel means "devil's fart", a definition accepted by the publisher Random House,[3] and by some English language dictionaries, including the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.[4] The American Heritage Dictionary adds "so named from being hard to digest". A variant of this explanation is also given by the German etymological dictionary Kluge that says the word pumpernickel is older than its usage for the particular type of bread, and may have been used as a mocking name for a person of unrefined manners ("farting Nick") first. The change of meaning may have been caused by its use as a mocking expression for the (in the eyes of outsiders) unrefined rye bread produced by the Westphalian population.

So farting devil/goblin bread, then.

[treibeis]

I've never eaten pumpernickel that didn't taste like Christmas pudding. I don't like Christmas pudding.

[linus]

Disco Sea Shanties wrote:

I don't know. The exception is San Francisco, mind you, where the local sourdough bread is every bit as good as some pain au levain you'd buy from a grizzled Gauloise-puffing French market trader. But mostly it's dire as you say, and in Canada, if anything, even worse.

Montreal is easily the best metropole for bread in N. America, waaayyy better than San Francisco. There are dozens of boulangeries run by French immigrants in Montreal, and because the clientele is also more savvy, they bake things the right way and don't have to bastardize their products. In the US, a French baker will have to quickly adapt and americanize the fare or he/she will go out of business. The local bakery chains are also the best in N. America.

On top of that, you get the best bagels in this hemisphere, boiled in broth then baked in wood-fired brick ovens. You also have quality middle eastern pitas and flatbreads, along with the American-style supermarket sliced breads and muffins. And then you also have British-style crumpets, the ones you find in US stores are usually imported from Canada. Montreal is really hard to beat as far as the quality and range of the local bread offerings.

Incidentally, I'm having a toasted bagel with humus for lunch right now.

[ursus arctos]

This is the absolute truth

[EIM]

What a weird thread this is. Why did I start it? Judging by the thread title it was a tribute/parody thread, but given it was 2008 I just might have been being a bit mental.

[San Bernardhinault]

I miss European bread. US bread that's not rubbish is in desperately short supply and exists only in a couple of very narrow fields (sourdough and bagels, basically). Someday I'll be able to buy a generic loaf in a US supermarket and it won't taste sweet.

[Bored Of Education]

Incidentally, I'm having a toasted bagel with humus for lunch right now.

This is the absolute truth

Were you having lunch together?

[Bored Of Education]

What a weird thread this is. Why did I start it? Judging by the thread title it was a tribute/parody thread, but given it was 2008 I just might have been being a bit mental.

I can't work out what the title is a play on.

[Patrick Thistle]

I presumed it was to do with predicted post Brexit food shortages.

[Wouter D]

If EIM could have foreseen this back in 2008, we could all have made a killing at the bookmakers.

[EIM]

I can't work out what the title is a play on.

I'm assuming a thread title of the time. But fuck knows what.

[Pérou Flaquettes]

Co-op’s artisan-ish breads are excellent, particularly their half-baked olive loaves and red Leicester & pumpkin seed bâtards. But a right bastard to get sometimes, they don’t seem to sell many per shop. M&S food is great but I find their bread range really disappointing.

I presumed it was to do with predicted post Brexit food shortages.

Mounting evidence of people starting to stockpile medication, so my wife tells me, she is a community pharmacist and MUR specialist – Medicine Use Review –, the latter function means that she gets to talk to a lot of clients/patients and many openly tell her that.

All sort of medicines but particularly diabetes related (eg insulin vials), as hardly any of it is manufactured in the UK, and heart medication too, also drugs that aren’t made in the UK, so most of it (anyway, even if it’s made in the UK, it often relies on components – or whatever the exact scientific terminology is – made in the EU). Some people are trying all sorts of tricks atm to obtain more from their GP than they should, or they order online.

I can’t blame them, I’d do the same if I were them. I would certainly never trust the Tories to be competent and deliver on this one, particular in time of crisis, even if I’m confident they’ll find an agreement with the EU by December, or I should rephrase that really, I’m confident the Tories will accept anything from the EU to avoid a no-deal. I don’t know what sort of deal, I have only superficially followed the Brexit saga (doesn’t seem to have moved on a lot since June 2016), but I'm sure they'll get "something sorted" at the 11th hour, some sort of bespoke deal that don’t threaten to deplete half of the UK population within months.

[ursus arctos]

I wouldn't have pegged Eggchaser as the inspiration for the title, but there you have it.

[EIM]

top sleuthing.