Comment by mettamage | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mettamage | Hacker News Reader

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Ah, the Americans... ;-)

As a Dutch person living in Amsterdam, I completely agree. I noticed when I visited SF a few times (and California in general) that:

- Vegetables are more expensive

- Bread is sweetened (there goes my breakdfast)

- Bread sucks (yep, I said it, basic bread should be thrown into the thrash can)

- Basic cheese in the US is a new species, and I am afraid of it

I went around these 2 issues by buying the highest quality French bread and imported cheese (how I missed actual France with their actual French bread... :'( ). While it was expensive, I could at least make a breakfast that I eat in Amsterdam (bread with cheese with butter, unsweetened).

The butter was normal. I have to give the US that.

Though, I do like what you guys can do with oatmeal. It taught me that the normal Dutch breakfast is uninspiring as hell, haha. So all in all, it was reall a positive experience, but it's so much nicer when you meet American people showing how they eat breakfast rather than traveling around in the country and simply guessing how to eat normal (normal being unsweetened / healthy -- I find that normal...).

Also, I found the US amazing with certain dinner options (e.g. sushi burito's).

San Francisco is an anomaly as far as food in the US is concerned. I'm French and have been living in SF for close to a decade (and Louisiana before that, so I've been spoiled when it comes to "american food" that doesn't suck), and there are very few things I cannot find here - people are into food, and if you take the time to look for specialty stores you will find them.

Of course there's the cost difference, but then again that goes both ways - I can find avocados, strawberries, etc. here of a quality and at a price you'd be hard pressed to find in France. Tbh, I'd argue that as far as meat/seafood/etc. is concerned, you can get better quality in SF than you can in 90% of France, where your main option will be an Intermarché or a Carrefour.

I'd also argue that the pastries you find at Tartine/Four Barrel/etc. (they typically source from a variety of bakeries from around the bay) are way beyond, in quality, what you'd find in 90% of French bakeries (the glory days of master bakers are long gone, and a lot of it is frozen crap these days, although it's been getting better in the last few years). I suspect that by this point there are more world class bakers by square kilometer in the Bay Area than there are in France, perhaps with the exception of Paris/Lyon (quite a few that I've met went to France to study baking though, so our national pride isn't completely destroyed). I bake my own bread and can buy freshly milled flour from the The Mill, which would also be hard to find in France unless you had personal connections.

But of course, I haven't gotten to the main part - which is the insane diversity of food stores and restaurants here. No matter what kind of south american, african, middle eastern, asian cuisine you want to make/eat, you'll be able to find it. That is not the case at all in France.

What food/restaurants do you remember in Louisiana?

I was a broke grad student so can't speak much to restaurants, although I know my foodie friends have lots of favorites in New Orleans (I was in BR). I was just fortunate enough to make some local friends with cajun families, and the dinners I was invited to were always a flurry of new foods, spices, etc. I got to try new things I had never had before, like okra or catfish or pecan pie, and there was just a very strong food culture.

This was all very different from the more "corn on the cob & chicken nuggets eaten in front of the TV" USA I had known until then.

I'm still in New Orleans for grad school through December at least, but many places have been done for by the pandemic. Not all yet though.

> Bread is sweetened > Bread sucks

I spent some months working in Houston a while back, and this drove me crazy! I mean, why on earth would you sweeten bread?!

Another thing that struck me was how many ingredients everything seemed to have - you could pick up just about any item in a grocery store, and it was pretty much guaranteed to contain 10-30 ingredients. Even the bread.

> Basic cheese in the US

This too - most cheese was of the horrible processed variety, with little flavour and an odd texture. And of course, dozens of ingredients. And of course, there was sugar in it.

Another thing - corn syrup. Not content with putting sugar in everything, corn syrup was added too.

As a Brit living in the US, I have a real problem with the sugar in bread. As a bread lover I detest it. Everything I eat DOESN'T have to be sweet. I can't stand it and I avoid it as much as possible.

In the last few years, I've started making my own sourdough bread (salt, water, flour, homegrown sourdough yeast) with no chemicals and I'm loving it. I can't remember the last time I've bought bread. (Dutch-oven method)

>most cheese was of the horrible processed variety

I had this experience as well, but in the last few years, things have massively improved IMHO. Don't go the deli section (where they cut cheese), go to the area where there's brie/english-chedder etc. However Wisconsin has really stepped up to the plate and now creates very reasonable European styles cheeses (of course, more expensive). It's worth trying it again if you've not done recently.

Reading this brought back another memory - cinnamon! Now, I like cinnamon as much as anyone, but why the hell is it added to everything in the US!

Oh my.. don't get me talking about cinnamon! It's now at a point I refuse to anything with it in.

The only exception is hot-cross-buns during Easter. :)

It's expensive to make good bread. Not in terms of raw materials, but in terms of labor. A machine cannot make a quality loaf of bread, you must gently knead it and let it ride with human hands. There is also a large cost in the right-on-time delivery of "good" bread. There is still quality bread sold at my grocery store, but that kind of bread isn't a staple because people don't want to go to the grocery store every other day when their non-stabilized bread gets eaten, goes stale, or goes moldy.

I am defending "bad" bread because no one ever does, and it's really not comparable to "real" bread because the uses are different. It's cheaper, last much longer, and is better suited for sandwiches and toast because of the square shape.

I'm not hating on cheap bread. You can find cheap, basic batch loaves anywhere in the western world - but the crap I found in the US was the worst.

It doesn't have to be that bad, it doesn't have to have lot's of sugar and corn syrup in it, and it doesn't have to have 20+ ingredients.

> It doesn't have to be that bad, it doesn't have to have lot's of sugar and corn syrup in it

This is my experience as well.

> A machine cannot make a quality loaf of bread, you must gently knead it and let it ride with human hands.

Nonsense. There is nothing wrong with machine kneading, many European countries (but not all!) manage to produce quality loaves at an industrial scale. Can a good baker produce even better bread in small batches? Almost certainly yes. But even there I'm not convinced that it's the kneading specifically, as opposed to general attention to the whole process.

I haven't tried American bread, but Australian is terrible compared to what you can get for little more than 1€ in Germany.

Presumably that's made without human involvement in each loaf.

It is also becoming increasingly difficult to find "plain bread" in Dutch supermarkets. The majority of them now have additives like soy lethicin, 15 kinds of leftover flours/powders from some other industrial process, even the 'artisan' labeled ones.

That saddens me. I must confess that I'm used to my brands, so I don't look around that much at the Albert Heijn (the supermarket I go to, for reference: an upscale-ish supermarket that tries to be normal and sort of is? Looking at fellow Dutchies here to see what they think).

I think (as an American in Amsterdam) —

Low-end: LIDL, VOMAR

Lower-middle: Dirk van der Broek

Middle: Albert Heijn, Jumbo

Middle—high: EkoPlaza, Landmarkt

High-end: Marqt

I buy my bread from Vlaamsch Broodhuys—an upscale bakery chain—as there’s one by my home.

Diverse good breads are easily accessible in the Netherlands, I find. Back in the US, getting good bread is requires research and a drive. In my college town, both of the only two good artisanal bakeries were started by Europeans who were too fed up with American bread culture!

Seconded!

The additives are there for a reason. More bread with more additives is sold because people prefer that type of bread, whether for convenience, price, or they simply prefer the flavor and texture.

As a lifelong consumer of oatmeal but only ever making it one way, now I'm interested, what did you learn about oatmeal?

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