Countries and Ingredients

is my single favorite local bread ingredient! I think it's available in only some of Eastern Europe, for example as far west as Poland it is not very widely spread. There's also a good selection of local herbs and seeds (some very flavorful caraway). 

There are however, many things that I cannot get locally. The most "exotic" flour is spelt (priced quite highly, but I think it's expensive everywhere), and never have I seen anything like einkorn, emmer and so on. There is a nice selection of wheat flours, but it is wider in the pastry flour range, though you can get some nice 812D or 812C for rustic white flour breads if you search hard enough. The rye flour is excellent and going by pictures of rye flours that I've seen in books or TFL, its color is a couple shades lighter gray (I may be mistaken, have only seen photos after all).

Apart from very good local honey (don't care much for the taste even the best honey, though), there's not much else. Artisan bakeries and baking bread at home has not yet caught on here at all - I expect it will take at least ten years for people to be able to afford bread from artisan bakeries and for the bread bought there to kickstart some sort of local bread revolution.

Take care, Andy, hope your hospital stay won't be lengthy!

The flours from the major South African millers weren't nearly as varied as those offered by the major U.S. millers.  For the most part, choices were "cake flour", a rough approximation of the U.S. all purpose flour but lower in protein, or "brown flour", which I suspect was a recombination of white flour and bran, sans germ.  Some were milled more finely and others more coarsely.

Then I found about about Eureka Mills.  They make excellent flours in a wider range.  During my time there, 2009-2011, they offered an unbleached bread flour, an unbleached cake flour, a brown bread flour, a whole wheat flour, cracked rye, rye meal, and whole rye flour.  The rye grain was imported but the wheat was locally grown in the Eastern Cape province.  All of them were excellent flours.  Their distribution wasn't quite so wide spread; I could usually find them in a couple of Spar supermarkets in the Pretoria area.

Seeds and whole spices were much easier to locate in bulk in South Africa than I can here in the KC area.  There were some limitations, though.  Dill seed was almost impossible to source.  Poppy seeds, on the other hand, could be bought by the kilo very inexpensively.  Whatever was available was usually very reasonably priced, compared to what was available in the U.S. at the same time.

Here in the States, we are spoiled for choice when it comes to flours.  AP flour alone can range from almost pastry-flour softness to bread-flour strength, depending on the miller and the location.  Bread flours can range up to 14% protein, which would have been unheard of in South Africa.  Cracked grains, meals, and multi-grain mixtures can be found in many stores or ordered on-line.  Some of these would have been very hard, or even impossible, to find in South Africa.

One food that I miss from South Africa are the little queenie pineapples.  Not much larger than a softball, they were locally grown and wonderfully sweet. 

I guess that each place has its strengths, and its products, that aren't necessarily matched anywhere else. 

Paul

Here in the US I get the finest bread flour, whole rye, whole spelt and whole wheat flour. But, though I was lucky to find a supplier for medium rye flour (in bulk) in Utah, there are no equivalents for German wheat type 1050, rye type 1370, and medium spelt flour.

Last week I was very happy to find Einkorn flour in our local natural food store, imported from Italy, but Emmer is not available, nor ancient rye (Waldstaudenroggen).

Thanks to Trader Joe I can now buy hazelnuts for a reasonable price. But my greatest gripe: no quark, and if I sometimes find it, at Whole Foods in Portland, it costs a fortune and doesn't quite taste right.

But if I were still living in Germany, I could not do what I'm doing here, selling breads I bake in my home kitchen. That weighs much more than those ingredients I'm missing.

Happy baking,

Karin