I write this with my jaw aching from having just gnawed through the toughest piece of rye bread in the history of bread products (probably). (Insert “since sliced bread” pun here.) It was a little like chewing through plasticine found behind the sofa four years after your toddler dropped it there.
Bread.
What is wrong this this f***ing country? Why is it impossible for anyone in the UK to make a decent fricking loaf of bread?
Bread in this country comes in two flavours: brown and white. Or you can have a sort of mix of the two, or a variation on either with a few seeds left in. And if you want it fresh, then the crust has to be four millimetres thick, presumably so you can beat the baker to death with it. ("The irate bread shopper, in the kitchen, with the loaf of bread. Because the bread was f*ing st!)
This is why I hate Americans:
• Tomato bread
• Rye bread
• Sour dough
• Pretzels
• Bagels with a whole range of toppings (the “everything bagel”! how I love thee!)
• Bread
• Bread
• Bread
I love tomato bread. Except in the UK if you buy tomato bread it tastes as though whoever made it just soaked a regular loaf of farmhouse white in a vat of Heinz tomato soup and then bunged it back in the oven for two hours.
Rye bread! My absolute favourite (and the spur of this particular angry rant). In America you can go into the crappiest, tackiest diner and still get good rye bread. You can go into nearly any supermarket and get a decent loaf of sliced rye bread. And it is lovely. Here? Nothing. Rye bread - like tomato bread and anything else that isn’t brown, white, or grey with seeds - is a “specialist” bread. You might get it on the specialist shelf where they don’t know how to describe things, in a health food store, or via an organic vegetable delivery company (as I just did). But it is related to the rye bread of America only in the same way that Jim Davidson is related to Bill Hicks by being a “comedian”.
Pretzels! How hard can it be? When I used to commute through London Bridge, I would occasionally stop off at the pretzel stall in the walkway, knowing every time that it would be a disappointment, and it always was. Those pretzels tasted only like a memory of pretzels past, pretzels tasted in New York, like a pensioner kissing the bald pate of her shrivelled husband in memory of the shock of hair that made her love him. Grr.
The really depressing thing is that I lived in various different areas of London, each with different communities, for thirteen years, and you couldn’t even get a decent loaf of bread there.
And I mean, have you ever stepped foot into the bread section of Sainsbury’s or Tesco’s? I would love to attend the bakery training day for the teenagers there. “Just stick it in the oven until you smell smoke.”
So Americans, ye board majority, this is why I hate* you: while I sit here with my jaw feeling as though I’ve just performed fellatio on a herd of elephants, your palette gets to caress the fluffy goodness of decent bread products without having to travel 2,000 miles.
Ugh.
Keith
*Of course I don’t “hate” you at all, I am just insanely jealous, but there’s nothing like an attention-grabbing thread title, eh? What I really hate is how this country is constitutionally unable to make a decent loaf of bread.
P.S. If anyone has the recipe for a decent loaf of rye bread, please let me know. Have bread maker. Will bake.