Show HN: I made a website to search for half loaves of bread
halfloafnear.me
halfloafnear.me
But no, it only searches store inventories for half-loaves for sale.
I love the laser focus on half-loaves anyway.
But if you really want to be extra pedantic: the Ethereum Name System is a domain system running on the blockchain, and each domain is a NFT with an expiration date.
During the lockdowns I also started with some more traditional preservation techniques like oils and vinegars. Not for long term storage (not enough space) but just for a couple days or weeks at a time. E.g. buying a bag of average quality olives then chuck them in a jar with good olive oil, fresh herbs, garlic, optionally things like chili and an orange rind. Yields both great olives as well as flavored oil for dressings.
For emergency preparedness, I keep a few hundred cans of food around. I live in a rural area, and this is prudent.
I never eat them all best-before, and as this is canned food, best-before is not an expiry/safety date, even remotely.
It is a flavour date.
So I donate my stuff, before purchasing new. And before anyone gets all weird about it, I eat from the same stock I donate, even the day of donation.
This means people get good quality food, I get to renew my stocks, and the grocery store with the donation bin, may or may not have been where I bought the food.
If more people did this, we'd all be better able to handle disasters, and those in need would be better fed. A real win-win.
Not really; expiration dates are printed on food (including canned food) because customers want them. Manufacturers are responding to, not attempting to drive, customer demand.
Marks & Spencer introduced them in 1970 in the UK (1) It's true there was a survey of consumers and folks favored them, but I will refrain from posting the enduring veracity and reflectiveness of a survey and point out that consumers likely wanted dates that meant something
They are often meaningless and we can assume the consumer wasn't in love with dates that are more complex than not.
1. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/sell-and-best-date...
It probably depends on location and population.
Food banks have grocery store-like buying power and relationships with wholesalers and local producers, and in my experience nearly all of the food they distribute comes from those sources.
The can drives around the holidays are mostly just for awareness. At the ones I worked at checking, sorting and packing those was very costly in labor both paid and volunteered.
We always accepted direct food donations because americans are super fucking weird about donating money to the immiserated, but will also get very mad if you turn away their useless donations. Which is bad for PR, so against the goals of the org. We always accepted them but "how can we not" was a constant question.
> £1 each or 4 for £5
I checked with the floor manager if that was accurate and how could I buy 5. Turns out I had to do it in two different transactions.
Moral of this story is: store promotions often don't make much sense.
I suppose we have excise taxes to thank for that.
They do seem quite at liberty to put signs that say 2/3.50 and then have the individual price listed higher beside it.
Really? Because KFC does this all the time with a la carte biscuits. The per-item rate is higher if you buy four (as advertised on the menu) than if you were to buy one four times in a row.
The solution is apparently to organize WeChat groups around buying -- and subsequently dividing -- the oversized items.
I don't need 4 cases of soda, but I'd take a BOGO if I could split the deal with someone.
This [1] is how it looks like here and when bought at a bakery it's usually so big that we buy it in quarters and even that lasts a couple of days. It also tastes very different from what the rest of the world considers bread. It's much stronger in flavor.
(somebody from India please chime in, I don't know the names :-) )
(Not from India but had an Indian roommate once and attended his wedding in India thereafter (obviously :-))
- 15 Best Indian Bread Recipes: https://food.ndtv.com/lists/10-best-indian-bread-recipes-146...
While that's technically true, when we use the word "bread" we generally mean this (Western?) kind of bread. For the Indian kinds of bread we normally use roti. In everyday contexts, if someone says bread, it almost always refers to the kind of bread pictured there.
It's British or American, depending how much sugar was added.
Long story short, sourdough was / is how bread was made throughout history. Fermentation takes a very long time due to the nature of the levain. At some point, bakers noticed how the leftovers from brewers yeasts drastically shorten fermentation. That and industrialization led to modern day bread you find in the supermarket.
Jon from Proof Bread on YT does a much better job at explaining. [1]
Another great watch is Michael Pollan's "Cooked" series. In the 3rd episode, he explores bread, it's history and makes the case about modern industrialization affecting the quality and the nutritional value of modern bread. [2]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-0p0p0zqVE [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epMAq5WYJk4
Yes, the one I linked is made out of sourdough, which is a sign of quality here. Though, we do also have the same style of bread without sourdough.
Ingredients: Artisan bread is usually just flour, water, salt, yeast (sourdough is just flour and water, too). Sandwich bread can include milk or other fats to make it softer and is more of a “cake”. In industrial settings, there are a lot of preservatives included in the sandwich bread.
Mixing: Artisan bread is mixed by hand. Sandwich bread is mixed in a mixer. The former thus has less worked gluten.
Shaping: Artisan bread is made into a ball (similar to “spinning” pizza dough). Sandwich bread is poured into a tin and requires no shaping.
Bake: Artisan bread is baked at high heat, around 500F, in steam. Sandwich bread is baked in a specific tin at lower heat, like a cake.
As you can see, the sandwich bread is easily scalable and, being essentially a cake, is preferred by many. A loaf of sandwich bread is around $1-$2 where an artisan bread is like 4x more.
Also, there are flours, like rye, which have to be made with sandwich-type methods. These flours don’t have enough gluten to hold shape on their own.
After a moment, they look at me and ask where we can get some.
No preservatives necessary. You just need a freezer and a toaster.
Which storing bread that has a crust worth preserving, I tend to make sure it gets a little air (covering it with linen cloths, for example), and accept the small amount of drying out that comes with this form of storage.
I tend to bake two loaves (always with tangzhong if the particular recipe can tolerate it), wrap both, immediately freeze one, and the other one lasts somewhere short of a week.
I don't think either of those are true - at least not an any bakery I've ever been to.
Cakes are a very specific type of baked good, made with a batter not a dough, which do not use yeast for leavening. Cakes also do not rely on gluten, and in fact limit it's formation by utilizing low protein flour.
Also, bread dough will never 'pour' unless you've gone horribly wrong.
For batter vs. dough: yes, they are not the same, but adding any fat to dough inhibits glutten (e.g., https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/36267/how-does-f...), which is why sandwich bread is soft and spongy. It may not pour, but neither does muffin batter or brownies, for example. My point is there is a whole spectrum for gluten formation.
Compare the cake recipe https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/classic-birthday-ca... to the bread recipe above. The main difference is that butter is added along with eggs, and the leavening is different. Artisan bread only has the 4 ingredients, sandwich bread adds sugar, milk, and oil, and cake changes leavening and adds eggs/butter. As you go up the spectrum, you are intentionally avoiding strong gluten development, resulting in smaller holes and softer texture. See challah bread for another data point of bread with eggs+oil https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/classic-challah-rec.... You can also make the gluten weak by using something like 100% rye, which has to be baked in the same tin (though that would have a harder crust).
The cake recipe has a 2:3 ratio of flour to sugar, while the bread recipe has a 14:1 ratio. It also has a 2:1 ratio of flour to fat, with the bread being 6:1. The cake also has a much higher hydration ratio, more milk, eggs, and a completely different mixing process.
Really not "essentially" the same thing at all.
The bread parent linked (and most German breads for that matter) is a rye bread!
Do you really mean mixing, or rather kneading?
Kneading bread is very hard work; occasionally I do it for a single loaf, but it really doesn't scale above 1 or 2 loaves. Even artisinal bakeries have machines for it.
I think the benefits of bakers yeast are reliability and predictability.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0723382/
I've seen it as a throwaway gag in a few movies too - also usually with French speaking characters for some reason - observing how terrible baked goods (or sometimes bread specifically) are in the US.
I found this out because I brought some bread from back to the suburbs to my parents, and they thought it was awesome, and had never had it before ... ! I haven't lived in the suburbs for ~20 years so I forgot that the availability of food is different.
Not sure what part of the country you live in, but this kind of bread is available at even the smallest out-of-the-way grocery store anywhere in California, and on most of the west coast that I've been to. I know because my family is hooked on it...
If it's baked by a local, skilled person (an artiasan!) and delivered early in the morning, I'd call that artisan bread.
But I think a lot of supermarket bread is basically baked in a big facility mostly by machines. I don't know the details but I think they have to make the ingredients more homogeneous for this to work. And if it's not delivered the same day, they will need to put preservatives in it.
IMO the difference is like night and day. My dad is the kind of person who swears by everything Costco, but even he likes the fresh artisan bread.
The only complaint I have is that when there isn't space, she forces it in anyway and then you end up with mangled, frozen slices that don't fit in the toaster.
On a side note, with energy prices (which are typically high in the UK compared to some other places) I'd be loath to use an "old" freezer. We once rented a place, and I found their circa 80s freezer user more electricity than we did for the rest of the flat.
I've always been one to prefer newer, more energy efficient devices even at a higher initial cost (it's somewhat of a hobby of mine to see how energy efficient I can make things in my home), it's times like these where I feel it's actually paying off.
My method:
1. Do whatever it is that you do before baking a loaf of bread
2. Bake the loaf for around 2/3rds the target time. In my case, this is about a half hour. I bake these loaves at 200°C, on a baking stone and covered with a huge aluminum salad bowl to sorta emulate a steam oven. At the end of the half hour, the crust is still white due to the bowl, and just starting to go brown on the tips of whatever cuts I added.
3. Take the loaf out and let it cool for a couple hours
4. Seal it in a plastic bag and put it in the freezer
5. Proceed with life for a time
6. When in need of more bread, take a par-baked loaf out of the freezer and put it on the counter, and pre-heat the oven to 200°C
7. Once pre-heated (~20 mins later, let's say), put the still-frozen loaf (sans plastic!!) into the oven uncovered, and cook for another 15 mins
8. Take it out to let it cool and enjoy
IMO a par-baked and then frozen loaf is noticeably better than a single-baked loaf, at least when using a home oven. I speculate that this is because a home oven needs a longer total baking time than a (hotter, steam-injected) commercial oven to fully bake + get the right crust, and that extra time turns into a drier crumb. But I further speculate that the par-bake-and-freeze technique preserves the crumb, since the crumb is really pretty much done by the time the 30-min par-bake is over, and the crumb ends up spending a good chunk of the 15-min finishing bake just de-thawing rather than drying out.
My mom freezes everything to save money, and there is an element of emancipation for me to be able to not do that, but generally speaking I just find it a destructive practice from a flavour perspective.
And stale or moldy bread, my alternative, is very easy to notice.
Now I pull the loaf out a few hours before it's needed and let it thaw at room temperature in the pantry. Definitely leave it sealed.
I laugh now thinking about how as kids we put the bread in the microwave on defrost. That makes some damn nasty bread :-D
some people recommend sprinkle a bit water and put defrosted bread into oven for short time, but haven't tried it, I prefer fresh bread
My wife disdains bread heels too. She grew up upper middle-class, while I grew up in a working poor family.
My theory is that one's estimation of heels is in inverse proportion to how well-to-do your family was growing up.
(I like both, they aren't the same thing)
The method I was taught was to wrap the slice of bread in a paper towel and microwave for 5-10 seconds.
While nothing is like a chunk or slice of bread still warm from the oven, this is more than good enough and often not distinguishable from the bread as received. One note is that this is pretty high-density bread, so it might not work as well with 'fluffier' breads. In any case, the double bagging does work for me to eliminate that ucky freezer burn taste, or at least put it off so that it takes 2+months in the freezer for it to appear.
I've also found for cakes and pastries that wrapping in cling wrap, then aluminum foil tightly sealed by rolling the edges together, then a freezer bag works well for many months.
Rolls are especially poor in the freezer as they have to first be half defrosted then cut then toasted and even then the top has a slightly odd taste, probably due to the thickness. Of course, I'll still stick them in there rather than wasting them, I'll just be miffed about it.
Except frozen bread tastes bloody awful.
Dunns Bakery in Crouch End is decent if youre close.
Also, funnily this is how they are sourcing the data. Ingenious!!
"The search is only available in select big cities in India because it uses Dunzo as the data source. No affiliation with Dunzo.
The API used to call Dunzo is open but undocumented. So if someone from Dunzo is reading this, don't be sending take-down notices. This is a very niche and tiny thing and is unlikely to put any strain on your servers."
Search for "bread" with the correct category, and then filter out all results that are greater than 300 grams. It works out because all the artisanal bread are excluded with a regex.
https://github.com/prashantbaid/halfloaf/blob/master/lambda/...
https://brc5og74x0.execute-api.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/prod...
This is a great idea that "doesn't scale" and could one day be a $1B business. Well done!
It could become some niche search engine but I don't see any money at all involved. Nobody is earning commission on half a loaf of bread. There's no money there. There are already store stock tracking websites for many profitable products (like photography equipment) and general search. The half a loaf of bread niche is a guarantee that there's no money in this particular site.
For example, I look for photography equipment prices (in canada) using photoprice.ca, which scrapes canadian camera stores that have their stock online like henry's or broadway camera, as well as comparing against amazon.ca, amazon.com, and US stores that ship to canada like Adorama and B&H.
The issue is just 'is the data available'. None of that makes it profitable if it's just loaves of bread.
I just ask the cashier in the bakery for a half or quarter loaf. Or grab a pre-cut half/quarter one in the supermarket. There are plenty of options (types of bread, sourdough or not, based on different grains, etc) over here in germany.
> This website is of course a non-useful, silly little thing. But I hope that it can get people to start thinking about why more stores don't sell half loaves when it seems like a more practical thing to do.
Maybe if you don't have a freezer or toaster? Because bread freezes very well, and if you buy a full loaf it's cheaper per serving.
I might be taking this too seriously, but I just started freezing bread in my 40's LOL (artisan bread). All you need is a bread knife and zip loc bags.
Big quality of life improvement. After you toast it, it's better than fresh. There is some science behind this that I don't remember.
(Edit:) Also of course anti-competitive behaviour by the bakery cartel drives up prices in Canada.
I see this as a free promo for Dunzo and hope it hasn't caused them too much trouble.
Apparently correct way is cutting at angle so that loaf became thin in the center of bread. This way whoever cut bread after me can decide if they want full or half. In my method there is a sudden step which forced you to first cut the leftover half.
This applies for long breads, not round one.
The 1x1x1 "half" loaf is the standard size in Japan
https://prtimes.jp/i/36645/189/origin/d36645-189-bc3e74b4250...
Further, it's also common to be able to buy bread in 3 and even just 2 slices.
https://www.panstory.jp/img/images_np/fujipan/2015/06/01.jpg
For me, I crave bread, meaning if I buy the half loaf then I'd likely eat the entire thing in 1-2 days so I like being able to buy 2 slices and avoid the temptation to eat the 6 or so I would have had if I'd bought the half loaf
Also, it's common in Japan to be able to buy a loaf as to comes out of the oven. Bakeries all over Japan advertise at what times bread will be freshly backed.
Note: the fact that this size is ubiquitous in Japan also means the site is no really succeeding there. For example here's 7/11's bread
https://www.sej.co.jp/products/a/bread/
There are over 21k 7/11 stores in Japan and that's just one of several big chains that carry half loafs
I smell a HN hug of death incoming
> I love bread but I don't want to be eating 20 slices in 3 days. It shouldn't be so hard to find half-loaves of bread. They should be available more abundantly.
> *Available in: Bengaluru, Chennai, Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Mumbai, New Delhi, and Pune
I’d begin by guessing that half loaves of bread are much more common in India than the US.
They had a two for one sale of half breads at one point, I was like "what is the point.."
Kinda refreshing to see an India-only service on the front page of HN.