Food Culture

[wosnes]

I read this at scordo.com this morning:

Like pasta (or noodles) and beans, bread is a staple food product found in most food cultures on the planet and cultures that place high worth on staple food products seem to have the very best food on the planet. Examples include France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Japan, Greece, etc.

Specifically, the cultures of France and Italy place great importance on well made bread and it can be found on the dinner tables of both the old and new generations living in Europe. Elevating the status of bread in any given cultures yields the production of outstanding breads of all shapes and sizes (there's no magic formula, if people have high standards then only the best product will make it to market).

In the United States, we don't place much value on consuming great bread (our values are centered on capitalist goings on) and outside of the larger cities and a few random locations you'll be hard pressed to find airy, crusty, and fresh bread.

Scordo went on to say that those who wished for quality bread but couldn't find it baked their own bread. I'll have to say that since I started baking my own bread, I have a much more difficult time eating the poor quality stuff that comes from the store. My bread still isn't great, but it's a lot better than anything I can buy.

It seems that in the US, we don't place much value on consuming great anything. Michael Pollan has written about the absence of a food culture in the US. But we do have a food culture. It is cheap, fast, and, unfortunately, lacking in quality. And it's making us sick and fat.

[Over43]

That is an interesting clip. We really don't, in the US, have great food culture. I like the authors use of bread as a microcosm on the subject. And how true that is about bread. I eat mostly sourdough now, and use it for sandwiches, etc. I don't have the time or patience to bake my own. But traditional white/wheat sandwich bread is pretty awfull stuff.

[Blithe Morning]

Once upon a time the US had a food culture. The WPA was in the process of compiling a book on American food culture when the project petered out due to a set of divers circumstances.

You can read about it in The Food of a Younger Land and America Eats!

The food culture of today is sorely lacking.

[wosnes]

I don't have the time or patience to bake my own.

Actually, it's not difficult at all -- or I wouldn't be doing it. The recipe I've been using lately takes less than 2 hours and a little over 10 minutes active time, divided, from me. The other recipe I use takes a little more time overall and a little more active time from me, but it's still easy.

[wosnes]

About 15 years ago I was reading an article about The China Study and one of the researchers said that the Chinese didn't worry whether or not their food was healthy, they knew it was. I've always said that I doubted that they knew their food was healthy, but they knew they were. Now I wonder about that.

I think they knew they were able to be active and do their work and "health" didn't enter into the picture. There have certainly been times in China, not to mention other places, when personal productivity was decreased because of diet, but it was largely due to not having enough food, not whether or not the supply was "healthy."

One of the things people in the countries Vincent Scordo mentioned above (France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Japan, Greece, etc.) have in common is that they buy, cook, and eat the best quality food they can afford. They take time to prepare food with care. It would be shameful to do less for family and friends.

We often blame it on women working and generally being so busy, but many of them are as busy as we are. The women work outside the home, but feeding the family well is a priority.

[DaveMc]

The lack of good bread used to drive me crazy when I lived in Boston for a couple of years during my postdoc. I thought it was just a Boston thing (it's the only U.S. city I've lived in for any extended period). I mean, Toronto's no Europe, but it's quite easy to find extremely good bread, at reasonable prices, up here. (And not at "Ye Olde Gourmet Breade Store", just at the supermarket, or any number of local bakeries.)

[librarylady]

Gosh we have great bread easily available at Wegman's just around the corner from me! All kinds of varieties freshly baked all day. And that's in New Jersey!

[Sienna]

I love my bread machine!

[wosnes]

My grocery had some bread that they make themselves, but the list of ingredients is as bad as most other bread. They do get some good bread from a bakery about 60 miles away, but it's very expensive.

I can bake numerous loaves for less than the cost of one loaf. Money is an issue right now -- and I enjoy baking it.

[NoelFigart]

I remember one summer, wosnes, where my family had NO money. (No-one was working).

My parents bought me a 50 lb bag of flour because I refused to take any money. (Mom knew I knew how to make sourdough bread). Later on, I priced it out from the cost of that bag of flour. At the time, I could make bread for less than .30/loaf. Between that and people giving us veggies from their gardens, we actually did okay.

For those of you who have never made bread and do eat bread: While there is a zen to it, I can't encourage developing the skill enough. It's not hard, and it's not REALLY time consuming. You can do other things while the bread rises, even leave the house! There's nothing in the world quite like good, homemade bread. It's vastly superior to what is usually available in a grocery store, and pennies on the dollar cheaper.

[librarylady]

I love the smell of baking bread, but I really do not have the time. I leave the house in the morning at 8 and return home by 6. If I try to exercise, I must begin dinner at 6:30ish - then we eat around 7, then it's dishes and homework help and finishing the laundry or going out to do the grocery shopping for the week. Saturdays are filled with cleaning and laundry more homework nagging and I always make a nice dinner (with wine! ) Sundays are church, then brunch and some nice reading time, then walking the dog for an hour and a half, then dinner (usually fish - with white wine! ). So I'm glad Wegman's makes great bread!!

I come from a family of New Yorkers, who expected that there would be a great bakery right down the block and consequently nobody in the whole family were bakers. They had come from Ireland originally and were very pleased to let the Germans and Italians do their baking for them!

[wosnes]

A 5 pound bag of flour and a jar of yeast costs a little more than one loaf of bread. I get just under 6 loaves of bread from the flour and the yeast lasts me far longer. My bread costs me about 40¢-50¢ per loaf depending on where I buy the flour.

[Sienna]

@librarylady The time issue is why I use my bread machine instead of making it by hand. You don't even have to be there while it runs and if you make a milkless recipe (I have a fantastic beer bread recipe without milk) or use powdered milk you can set it on a delay start. So you can spend 15 minutes in the evening and then wake up to the smell of fresh baking bread. Or 15 minutes in the morning to come home to fresh bread for dinner. Of course, if you have a good source of delicious bread already, it's probably not necessary

[kccc]

I love the smell of baking bread, but I really do not have the time. I leave the house in the morning at 8 and return home by 6.

Well... I leave at 6am, get home between 6 and 6:30... and I make bread.

Which is NOT NOT NOT in any way to imply that YOU should. If you have a source of good bread and don't WANT to bake, then by all means continue to buy it!! It's a choice. I just wanted to say that it was possible. IF you wanted. (And a big part of the reason that it's possible for me is that I like baking. I do not like scrapbooking or Martha-type decorating or a lot of other things that people with time constraints equal to mine somehow find time to do... so I don't do those things. And I don't want to hear that I could, because it's not happening. So, no guilt for anyone, okay? Just choice.)

Strategies I use (Just FYI. Ignore if not interested).
- I make a lot of the 5-minute artisan bread (the white olive-oil recipe usually). The dough lives in the fridge for when you want it. I cook it as a baguette, which rises in 20 minutes and cooks in about 25. Some nights, that works. (Others, it doesn't... that's okay.)
- I also use a breadmaker, with a timer.
- I bake on weekends. I also do "night ahead" baking. If I don't need bread for dinner tonight, but want it for tomorrow night, it can bake after dinner, while we're doing baths and getting set for the next day or whatever. (Okay, so it's not hot when you do it a day ahead. Neither is bought bread.)
- I freeze some, in slices so I can thaw it quickly.
- And yes, I do supplement with bought bread. But I like good stuff, and it's pricey, so I'd rather bake.

[loop]

Just seconding the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day technique. I have baked bread for years, both by hand and with a bread machine, but I have baked so much more bread since discovering this technique. I have more finicky recipes that turn out higher quality bread, but this is so easy and still very good.

Here's a link to the recipe and a video of the authors demonstrating the technique for anyone who is interested:

http://www.artisanbreadinfive.com/?p=1616

http://us.macmillan.com/BookCustomPage. ... 9255#video

[Nicest of the Damned]

Unfortunately, my generation (born 1975) and my mother's generation (born 1941) grew up on crap food. My mom's cooking features a lot of canned soups and boxed items. I remember learning a lot of recipes that started with refrigerated biscuit dough in middle school home ec classes (I remember wondering why our recipes seemed to have such a fixation on refrigerated biscuit dough). I was in college before I knew that garlic came in forms other than garlic powder or garlic salt.

It is possible to learn to cook and appreciate real food, though, even from a background like that. I bake no-knead bread now. I don't have the upper body strength to knead bread for 10 minutes, or whatever it is that standard recipes call for, but I can do the no-knead bread. You start the dough the night before, and then it can rise and develop gluten by itself without much kneading. It wouldn't work for you if you came home at 6:30 and needed dinner by 7, though, unless you did it on the weekends or something, because it does take a while to bake it.

[wosnes]

I didn't start making bread until I stopped working, but it wasn't because I didn't have time -- it was the "fear of yeast" thing. While price and quality were the major reasons I started, there was also a realization that people have been making bread for centuries under less favorable conditions than I have. Many of them were certainly less capable than I am in the kitchen. There was no reason for me NOT to be able to do it.

The biggest surprise to me about bread baking is that it's not time consuming -- and I do it all by hand. I don't have a bread machine, not even a mixer.

Nicest -- I also don't have a lot of upper body strength and sometime the CHF makes kneading tiring, but I can do it.

Also, I'm about 8 years younger than your mom, and I don't really remember a lot of crap food until the 60s and then in the 70s. I know it began to increase in the 40s and 50s, but nothing like later on. At that time a lot of it was treat food, not the basis of the daily diet. I think a lot of the crap food then was of much better quality than the same thing is now. I don't think things really got bad until the 80s. That's when the culture of cheap, fast, poor-quality food started to explode.

[Aleria]

I love, love, love a thousands times over homemade bread. One of my few childhood memories is the smell and taste of my mom's bread and how when there was too much dough for our loaf pan she'd put the extra in a can to bake it XD

I haven't made it on my own in a long time, but I'm planning to make some next week. For me I really do need to be home, since my house is freezing - probably enough to stop the bread from rising in one day. I like the old fashioned knead, rise, punch down, shape, rise again, bake - I think our recipe is from the 50's or 60's, haha.

[librarylady]

Thanks for all the bread baking suggestions folks! Someday when I feel I have the time I may put them into practice. (Knowing me however, if I have time, I'll probably just curl up with a book.)
But for now I'll let the baker do it for me (which is French after all!!) They have this wonderful Miche Bread they recently introduced - I love it and it actually lasts for a few days! (In fact I think I'll pick up some tonight to have with some hearty soup - it's freezing out there!!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HiE6XrKdGQ

[wosnes]

I think bread-baking is a lot like making a pot of soup or stew, braising meat or using a slow cooker: it takes a little time and attention from me, especially at the beginning. But mostly it does what it needs to do while I'm doing something else.

[Nichole]

I have a baby and still manage to make homemade pizza dough every week, which is the same exact process. And I manage to squeeze in exercise, too. You can do it!