Breaking Bread
LOUD AND CLEAR, I STATE THAT THE GERMAN PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO MAKE ME AND THE REST OF MY FELLOW EXCHANGE STUDENTS FAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I say with confidence that the rest of my American friends will agree with this statement. Many of you are possibly confused as to why I would make such a harsh/stern accusation to the 80.62 million people living in Germany. May I defend the first sentence of this soon-to-be-lengthy blog post by saying that the German people don’t do this on purpose. They aren’t trying to make us fat as a way to sabotage our exchange year. Rather, they are kindly sharing their culture with us, and the culture shock just happens to be too delicious too resist. This culture shock is brought to you by bread.
Bread is good. Its delicious. Its simple. Its versatile. We all know this. Its good cause it is food and food is good. Its delicious cause its bread and its really hard to do something to bread to mess it up. Its simple cause its made of come sort of plant you find on a farm in the middle of nowhere and this material makes bread basically effortless to eat. Its versatile because you can practically make/do anything to bread. You can put endless things on it like peanut butter, Nutella, vegetables, meat, BUTTER! You can do anything you want with bread from smothering it with garlic and BUTTER and making delicious garlic knots or by soaking it in an egg mixture and frying it to make French Toast or by compressing two pieces of bread filled with meat, cheese, and vegetables under two hot skillets to make a panini. So basically if Chuck Norris and Ellen DeGeneres had a food baby, it would be bread. Bread is bad ass and versatile just like Chuck but soft and loving and comforting like Ellen. And its characteristics like these that make us ask this question over and over again…
That’s right Scott Pilgrim, bread indeed makes you fat. It’s a sad but true statement. Part of me wishes for a gluten allergy so that I could avoid the imminent weight gain due to bread consumption. And this is finally where I can make my point as to how German society is making us fat.
This blog glorifying the bread in Germany would not be complete without me bashing the bread in America. Many Americans may say that the bread is quite good. The Kroger and Publix bakeries do a good job and some of those prepackaged rolls are just amazing. For example: King Hawaiian’s Sweet Rolls. UGH. Those rolls aren’t even fair. And then Americans argue that the bread at restaurants is amazing as well. Let’s be honest though, the only reason the bread at restaurants tastes so good is because it is free. Unless you are eating Ippolito’s garlic knots, the bread at restaurants is pretty standard. All of these “special” breads, rolls, and knots are typically reserved for a “special” meal. Normally, the bread consumed by Americans is sandwich bread. This sandwich bread is to the bread world as Major League Soccer is to the American sports world. Its just kinda there. No one really prefers it, but we will consume it if it is in front of us.The only bread I remember from America is sandwich bread. Normally its the plain and boring wheat bread,but sometimes we kicked our sandwich bread game up a notch. The most exciting my sandwich bread at home got was whenever we bought some special eight grain bread that has some nuts on the crust. And every time we get this bread, I am fooled that those crusty nuts and eight grains will not have the same deceiving affect that bread has on every humans’ body. Fortunately, being a swimmer has allowed me to carbo-load on bread and pass by without being a victim of bread’s delicious deception. And even though I have continued swimming over here in Germany, the bread is far too good to resist and now I am carbo-loading for an IronMan triathlon basically everyday. Maybe that is an exaggeration, but the quality of bread here is special to the exchange student but the norm for the natives.
So imagine the struggles I am now having in Germany where every single piece of bread I consume is not only good, delicious, simple and versatile, but is also high quality and fresh. There are no King’s Hawaiian Rolls or Ippolito’s in Germany, but who needs them when it is normal to eat a flaky Croissant for breakfast, a sandwich on fresh and fluffy Ciabatta bread for lunch, and a warm Baguette for dinner. These types of bread aren’t even German, but they are still significantly better than the American versions I have tried. The variety of bread I have had around my house here is endless. Yes, my family has the standard American sandwich bread, but the Germans refuse to even call it “bread.” It is advertised as “toast” because that is the only thing they use it for. Many stores also advertise white bread as “American sandwich” which I find to be the funniest of American food stereotypes. The only types of bread that are truly recognized as “bread” are the ones that come fresh from the bakery. You have Brötchen which are basically simple dinner rolls but are actually crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. They have Pretzel Rolls which are rolls that taste like a pretzels, but you probably could have figured that out on your own. Regardless, they are the Inception of the bread community. Although I previously mentioned them and basically all of us are familiar with them, Baguette and Ciabatta bread here are flawless and it takes basically everything out of me to avoid eating them for every meal of every day. We often have Kartoffeln Brot around the house which is basically a giant loaf of delicious brown bread made somehow by potatoes?! “Kartoffeln” is “potatoes” in German, so it leads me to assume that this bread is affiliated with spuds. My personal favorite is Weltmeister bread. I know that none of my descriptions give any justice to the quality and taste of the bread found here in Germany, but sometimes things have names that are the perfect explanations in themselves. Weltmeister = World Champion. So basically this bread is of world champion flavor and quality and after you eat it, you feel like a world champion ready to accomplish anything that lies ahead of you.
I may have briefly mentioned it in previous blog posts and this one as well, but the German bread culture would be nothing without the bakeries. No matter where you go in the country, you are bound to find local bakeries on every street corner in every city. Bakeries are so prevalent that you are basically seeing/smelling/tasting/feeling/hearing them every waking second of everyday. Everyday, these bakeries are baking fresh bread for you to take home to your carbohydrate-addicted, American foreign exchange student for them to eat half the loaf in one sitting. And not only do these bakeries have fresh bread, but they also have endless fresh pastries available. Don’t even get me started on those pastries.
Okay, you can get me started on those pastries. They have fresh donuts, croissants, rolls, danishes, turnovers, cakes, muffins, the whole nine yards. I won’t even try to give descriptions of how delicious/probably unhealthy these pastries are; rather, I will encourage you to make your way over to Germany at some point in your life and take up the challenge of trying every pastry offered at your local bakery. I regret to say that I took up this challenge at the beginning of the year. The only problem is that I have three local bakeries, all with an excessive amount of pastries to try. I decided to choose one and try a new pastry from there every week. However, after about four weeks, I began to feel bad about the amount of money I was about to spend at this one bakery along with the excess sugar and deliciousness I was putting into my body. I decided to stop the challenge after about one month, but before I quit, I had already found my favorites. Good for me!
The main inspiration behind the opening sentence of this blog post was a story one of my fellow exchange students shared. In order to avoid eating bread/carbo-load for an IronMan for every meal of the day and every snack of the day as well, my friend decided to eat yogurt in between meals when they were hungry. After noticing that their exchange student was eating yogurt as a snack, the host dad confronted the student. He was not angry or mad, but instead, he was rather confused. Being the German he is, the host dad confronted my friend about their yogurt consumption. He told them that yogurt won’t fill them up. Instead, they should follow the German way and eat bread in between meals because and I quote, “If you’re hungry, you need to eat bread, not yogurt. Bread will make you full.”
It is stories that this that explain why exchange students are basically destined to gain weight. Unless your my friend Sambath. The child lost 15 pounds in five months! He wasn’t even close to being overweight! I’m pretty sure he just avoided bread and didn’t take up the pastry challenge.
I just wrote 1600 words about bread. I don’t know if I am ashamed or impressed. I’ll let you can decide.
What R Those?! 