Why German bread is the best in the world (2018)

I live in Taiwan and the bakeries and store bought bread here are quite bad. There is the occasional tangzhong/Japanese milk bread which is ok but everything is bland or overly sweet with a very loose crumb. It’s all the same enriched dough recipe everywhere.

People in Taiwan seem to hate salt, or pride themselves on avoiding it, so the bread often has zero salt in the dough which has an odd, neutral flavour profile. Whenever I talk about it with anyone they insinuate that it’s because I’m a foreigner and all foreigners are crazy about salt. Meanwhile, I’ve been to Japan and love the bread over there.. Bread should be 1-2% salt by weight(to the flour).

Dough is also never fermented here. This results in hilariously bad attempts at French bread like baguettes or country loaves. I grew up in Montreal and I am intimately familiar with what this sort of thing should taste like.

I do a lot of my own baking now.

East Europeans bake real bread. Sadly what you find in North America supermarkets and most bakeries is fluff.

My sister's Bulgarian piano teacher's husband, a former policeman, told of landing in Halifax Canada and going out to buy a loaf of bread to sustain them on the train to Montreal - and being much disappointed.

Me, I just came back from my every four weeks 200 km drive to my favorite Albanian bakery in the big city.

Bread is one area where the US is sorely lagging behind Europe and there needs to be some sort of revolution. I don't think most Americans know what they are missing. I hope this will change soon, similar to the progress that has been made over the past 30 years with coffee and beer (and somewhat with cheese).

Having recently finished up five years in Munich and being back in the states, I can’t really disagree. Some brands in the US, like Killer Dave’s, are okay, but it’s hard to get heavier breads and especially rolls here.

We’re using the Wildgrain subscription box to get good bread, but it’s quite pricey, and the croissants it comes with seem impossible to bake correctly (following the instructions just has them come out with a clearly undercooked center).

Meh, German bread is almost same as Czech/Slovak one and I would definitely refrain from such bold statements, I was for instance nicely surprised by my breakfast bread (durum?) in Turkey and I remember it vividly being extremely good and thinking this is even better than our CE bread. Just because you eat bread parody in US it doesn't make it German bread best in the world.

CNN's website is the worst in the world, heavily hijacking the back button.

Actually you get very average bread in germany. In the last 20 years everybody switched to those bake in the store things so they taste the same everywhere and the quality is declining.

Unless you consider toast a bread. That is what i remember from my year in the states. Toast is bread and that is it. But toast is not bread.

But if you find a rare hand made sourdough bread in germany.. it costs you ... but with a good olive oil and salt ... its the main course.

It's good, but Austrian bread is still a bit better.

I'm going to go out a limb here and I am going to say that the bread in Western Europe (France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, excluding the UK) is vastly superior to their cardboard, heavy, tasteless Eastern counterparts.

That's an interesting idea...

I was thinking about which types of breads that I really like, enough to go out of my way to buy and they're mostly German (or german-style) breads because they have interesting textures and tastes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rye_bread - gluten free, since the dawn of civilizations.

sorry but bread in Australia is the best I've ever tried.

Good strong wheat is grown here.