Greetings to all from South Asia, I have been browsing on this site since more than 6 months now and finally decided to join, to thank many of you for the ideas, recipes, contributions and insight on our common passion to bake bread. Floyd thanks for maintaining such a site - great work.

My wife is in the foreign service and we are posted here since a year and a half, I have plenty of time in my hands and before that, in Moscow, I experimented once or twice to bake bread with no particular success. Here, however, we soon found out that bread was not so appealing and had a sweet taste! We tried many sources in vein, then we came across the No Knead Bread recipe, plunged into that for a few weeks with good results then I read at the TFL about Zoe & Jeff's Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day, ordered the book and went ahead baking with great joy! Equipment wise other than a Kenwood Chef Classic stand Mixer which I had brought from Moscow, I had no idea what was needed, everything was bought or ordered from the States, baking stone, instant read thermometer, dough scraper, Silpat, etc. etc. from Texas running around in Austin at Restaurant supply companies, metallic baguette forms, brioche forms from Dehillerin in Paris, pizza peel from Super Peel (thanks Gary) ordered direct and posted to the Mission here (some strange looks when security opened the parcel - what do these people order?) - meanwhile had to do with a makeshift paddle like peel made by a carpenter in Rawalpindi, served the purpose and still does for pulling out loaves from the oven.

Now a year and a half later most of the tools are in place, only yesterday I ordered a couche from KAF and a Thermapen, books such as Peter Reinhart's BBA, Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Bread Bible, ABi5, are all there, whole lot of material to keep me busy, a good sourdough starter in the fridge since January this year, I am motoring along.

My current passion is Anis Bouabsa's baguettes - thanks janedo and dmsnyder for your recipes, great work - since the first try it has been a success and a joy to bake baguettes this way.

Thought this would make a good insight how we manage in other parts of the world where we don't have the choice or abundance of flours and tools that are available in America, but hey, when there is a will there is a way.

Cheers

Stefan