Bread

The pointless photo is, of course, not of bread. It's not much of anything, really, but since that fuzzy thing in the middle is likely going to be my last spider of the season I thought I'd may as well post it anyway.

We're going to be on to watches yet, you know.

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When I was a kid I really hated the fact that my mother always bought 60% whole wheat bread. I wished for white bread in all its gummy glory. It just didn't seem fair that while everyone else was jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge eating their peanut butter and jelly with lovely, soft white bread I was stuck with the grainy stuff. It could have something to do with the origins of my dislike of sandwiches, I suppose, but I'm not going to go quite that far.

I hated 60% whole wheat bread.

Now that I'm an adult I don't buy 60% whole wheat bread.






I don't buy white bread either, though.

I discovered something unexpected when I moved up to Edmonton to start university. I lived in rez my first year, and because rez students had to (HAD TO, yes) buy a university food services dining card I ate most of my meals in one or another of the campus cafeterias. I'm not going to say much about the food in general (maybe another time, because there are certainly things to say about the food in general), but as far as the bread went it became somewhat of an eye-opening experience. I had breads I never even knew existed before.

The green soda bread they made for St Patrick's Day was a particularly memorable experience, but the less said about that, the better (who the hell makes green soda bread?).

Green soda bread aside, the thing I learned from the various breads served in the cafeterias was that it wasn't the 60% whole wheat bread I disliked. Yeah, it surprised me too.

What I really hated was boring bread.

Having different kinds of bread available to me for the first time in my life showed me that there isn't much excuse for boring bread. The term white bread is used as an insult for a reason, after all. When there are so many ways to make bread interesting, why is it that so many intelligent people fall into the trap of the same old 60% whole wheat loaf over and over again?

Yes, before you say anything I do know that economics sometimes has more than a little to do with it.

Sad, that.

I'm the first to admit that I don't go through a lot of bread, but because of that I'm much more likely to give the more exotic styles a try. Well, exotic for a kid who grew up on 60% whole wheat, anyway. I tend to be a light rye bread fan these days, but I've been known to do black Russian on occasion. The closest I'll get to white bread is potato bread (the yeast kind, which I know purists will say isn't really potato bread) or oat bread, both of which have so much better texture than plain old wonder-what-that-famous-brand-might-be. My local corner grocery with its tiny hole-in-the-wall bakery makes really good multigrain bread, which ends up at my place fairly frequently...

I could go on, but it's easier just to say that I'm willing to try pretty much any kind of bread at least once.




Yep.

This post isn't leading to any kind of moral or anything, in case you were wondering. It's just that one of my father's neighbours brought over some home-baked buns yesterday, and I had one for breakfast this morning.

It was good.

And definitely not 60% whole wheat.






Ok, if this post does need a reason to exist, I'll just end by saying that if you're the white bread type you might want to shake things up now and then. It's not that you need to go completely crazy and exist on pumpernickel or anything like that. It's more that you'll never know what you might be missing if you never manage to get past the 60% whole wheat.

You know?

Yeah, whatever. I never said that I didn't suck at morals.