FYI: Calculation Errors in Calvel's Book 'The Taste of Bread'

I am not across the pond, more like across the arctic ocean as I am in Japan.

None of the bakeries I have seen from the inside (in Japan and across Europe, including the UK) have ever been using flour in consumer packaging, most of them small. That doesn't mean there aren't any that do, but I think it is rather unlikely. 

I was in France, Germany and Switzerland last year, and the in terms of flours, my shopping experience at supermarkets was rather disappointing. The flours I saw in supermarkets were mostly T45/405 and T55/550, in some you get wholemeal flour, but more often they sell wholemeal bread mixes instead.

Whilst it is possible to make bread with T55/550 flours, I prefer not to. If I use T55/T550, I blend with other flours, for example rye or durum flours, and those I found difficult if not impossible to find in supermarkets. In Switzerland I was told I could get Ruchmehl in supermarkets but when I tried to buy some, I couldn't get it. In Germany, I was looking for semolina di grano duro rimaccinata for making Puglian bread and could find none. I called up an Italian restaurant and they gave me a phone number and said call Luigi on this number. Luigi turned out to be a small wholesaler in a garage catering to Italian restaurants. And he stocked Altamura durum in 5, 10 and 25 Kg bags. In France, I could not find any épautre, none whatsoever. And this was in Alsace where you will find all kinds of spelt based breads in bakeries. At least in Germany I found some Dinkel T630 in one shop selling health foods. So, even if you do find flours other than T45/405 and T55/550, the more interesting flours are hard to come by in retail shops, it is far less time consuming to order from a mill or bakery/restaurant supplier.

And once I have to buy from a mill or wholesaler for some of my flour anyway, I might as well buy all my flour that way. So the supermarkets are simply of no interest to me. I buy salt and potato starch in the supermarket and that's about it.

Here in Japan, the supermarkets only sell cake flours and what Americans call all-purpose flours. Trust me, you do not want to use those for baking bread. It may be all-purpose, but bread is not one of those all-purpose purposes. For bread, you have to use flour that explicitly says "for bread use" on the package: パン用. In some supermarkets you may see such flour occasionally but you can't rely on it being available. Instead, you buy your bread flour from a mill or a wholesaler.

There is one company that caters exclusively for home bakers. They're called TOMIZ and they rent shelf space in the food sections in upmarket department stores (think Selfridges or Harrods). But even so, home baking in Japan is largely understood as a housewife hobby and most of it is cakes and confectionaries. They do carry bread flours but it is not their focus. And since they have to pay the supermarket for the shelf space they will only place items they know will sell in large quantities. So when you go there to get that extra fine wholemeal flour you like to add to your baguette for a rustic touch, or that rye grist you use for Rhenanian black bread, more likely than not, it won't be on the shelf. You then have to order it. But if you have to order it anyway, you may as well order it directly online and get a 25 Kg sack instead of 500 g bags.

And if you want buckwheat flour, despite it being a staple food in the form of soba noodles, it is very difficult to find and even then usually comes in 200 g or 300 g packages that cost as much as a 1 Kg pack from a soba miller. And brown rice flour is impossible to find in retail. Same for sorghum flour, although I found two lonely 600 g packs of Bob's Red Mill Sorghum once at a 24/7 department store called Don Quichote, known simply as Donki, that caters almost exclusively to foreign tourists hunting for curiosity items they perceive to be typically Japanese.