Do you know if the regulations regarding contaminants in both soaps, as well as consumables, is more stringent in the EU (beyond the "Fanta-to-Fanta" comparison)? In other words, would you feel more comfortable eat something basic like bread and other consumables from supermarkets in the European Union vs the US, or not? Can you eventually share a few thoughts on this?
I am not well versed in EU regulations regarding foods, aside from a recent experience in Iceland which boils down to the Fanta example. That and the fast food chains that we view as ubiquitous in the US were either sparse or did not exist in Iceland. We did not go in the one we saw, so I do not know if the menu was different or not, like one might experience in Japan.
Any thoughts I could share are my own concerns and opinions based on my experience and observations of the food and health industries in the US. It might be best if someone more expert on comparing the regulations between the two regions chimed in.
I mentioned the bread example because that's what started it for me during the Covid Pandemic isolation. I got bored and decided to learn to make bread, but did not have much to work with, so I found really simple recipes. Bread, as it turns out, only needs water, flour, salt and yeast to come out tasting absolutely delicious to the point where a loaf does not last long enough in my house to go stale. When I compared that to industrialized bread (both off the shelf and from the ersatz "bakeries" found in some of our large grocery chains), I was curious then horrified to see the amount of ingredients in those products that offered no discernible nutritional value and existed only to make the product more shelf-stable or more addictively appetizing. I say this as a person who grew up eating Wonder Bread, which I absolutely no longer consider to be "bread," but more of a sponge-cake.
From there, my wife and I started really looking at the products we were consuming and realized that we did not really know what was in 90% of them. We were just trusting the manufacturers and regulations to keep us safe, because that's what we're supposed to do as good consumers, right? It was alarming, to say the least, and even more alarming is the fact that this is not a new fight in the US, dating all the way back the late 19th/early 20th century. When the driving force behind regulation is profit margins, the rules for evaluating risk to the population start to move around in uncomfortable ways, but because of marketing and branding, we're taught at pretty early ages to trust these companies, sometimes even wearing their symbols as a badge of identity.
I'm never going to be one to say "Food company X is trying to kill us!" because that does not make good business sense. I've said it before on HN, but I'm not convinced that a lot of this regulatory slack and the declining qualities of our food is meant to intentionally harm us, but more born from the short-sighted thinking that allows executives to say something like "well, nobody has died from chemical X in product 1, yet, and chemical X can displace some of the more expensive chemical Z, so, maybe we can increase the amount a bit to bolster our profit margins?" Then they do it, quietly, and nobody dies, so they do it again...and a again. Longitudinal studies are cast aside in favor of only focusing on immediate results.
And so, we have things like canned pulverized Parmesan cheese that contains sawdust as a filler, which might arguably be harmless, but being robbed of product for the same price as the old version should also spark our inner consumer to go "hey, wait a minute..." even if we ignore the possible long term heath effects on the population as a whole. Our term for this now is shrink-flation, but it's definitely a very old tactic. This became another driving force behind my wife and my decision to try and set aside time each week to make certain products. We know what we are getting for our money, we know what to expect, and we know what is going into each one. Do we still buy other soaps or get the occasional shelf-stable pie? Yes, of course. But is our consumption of these items has plummeted to a last resort of convenience or just a rare treat.
Sorry, this turned into a blog post and I'm still skipping a lot of the nuances in my thoughts on this matter so pardon any disjointed structure in my narrative.
In the end, the lesson I learned can be summed up as _pay attention_. Read the labels, do the homework, and decide as best you can with the information you have at the time. We vote with our dollars, so spend them wisely.
I thank you for the blog-post length reply and I am sorry I triggered that with my simple question in disguise. I knew it was hard to answer.
It is funny that you specifically mentioned the bread. I go a fair bit between Austria, Spain, Greece, the UK and all around Asia.
We have a lot of really dark and heavy bread in Austria. Austrian bread frequently incorporates a variety of whole grains, including rye, spelt and whole wheat. Darker, denser loaves like Roggenbrot (rye bread) and Dinkelbrot (spelt bread) are the norm here. Austrian bread is typically made with just flour, water, salt, and natural leavening (sourdough or yeast).
I didn't ask you the question to gleam with that, am I'm apologizing in advance if its coming through like this. My point is the additives. And it might get back to that Fanta-to-Fanta comparison, but with so many other products, many American store-bought breads contain added sugar or high-fructose corn syrup, whereas Austrian breads rarely do.
I also think that a lot of additives or chemicals are simply banned in the EU leading to a lower shelf life of products, but generally more natural products. Like Potassium Bromate, ADA, BHA & BHT etc which are banned in the EU. Together with the corn syrup found seldom in eupean products, or Austrian.
Spain and Greece have less of the black and dark breads, but that movement is slowly coming. Spain has a lot of really really really great food, and very high quality.
Asia is a different story. There are some artisanal bakeries popping up in places like Hongkong, Singapore, Thailands larger cities, Malaysia etc. But in general, stores have these softy loafs of what we call toast bread. But then, they don't eat a lot of bread :)
Not sure where I'm going with this, if at all anywhere, next time you come to europe, try some of our bread.
Iceland is also interesting because they don't have over the counter drugs (iirc not even acetaminophen). But anyone can walk into a clinic, tell them what's wrong and if they think it appropriate they'll give you whatever drug they think you need.
If you haven’t baked bread before and want a great starting recipe, try Jim Laney’s no-knead bread.
Some tips:
1. You can halve the amount of salt. (1 bakers’ percent of salt is plenty. I don’t know why most recipes call for 2%.)
2. Active dry yeast is obsolete, but that doesn’t stop it from being prominently sold in grocery stores. Get instant yeast instead. SAF Red or SAF Gold are excellent choices. Instant yeast will work in a recipe written for active dry yeast, but active dry yeast may not work in a recipe written for instant yeast.
3. Get a scale and use it.
4. You don’t actually need King Arthur Bread Flour, but you should use a high quality bread flour. I experimented once (quite a while ago), and IIRC Gold Medal worked well and Pillsbury was okay. King Arthur does make a consistent product, which is nice.
Pretty much any of Ken Forkish's recipes. Linked below is one that I find really accessible and a great intro for folks new to bread baking who want to get a bit more into the finesse side of the experience. The way the dough is handled is important, I've found, since it's very easy to overwork it. Ken does a good job of describing the process.
If you were to buy only one bread book, I would highly recommend _Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast_.
That’s a good book and has lots of good recipes, but…
IMO autolyze is at best a minor improvement compared to just not doing it (maybe called “fermentolyze” in this context). (In my experience at least some degree of pre-kneading/aggressive mixing rest makes a big difference, but this recipe and Laney’s no-knead don’t do that.) But autolyze is quite the complication, especially for new bakers making simple bread! With the autolyze step, you have the complication of trying to mix yeast and salt into dough, which is not so easy. Without the autolyze step, you just mix the dry ingredients, stir, and add water.
So I wouldn’t recommend this recipe as a first serious bread for a new baker.
My favorite is Russian Borodinsky bread with caraway seed. You can find a standard GOST recipe for it online, but be warned that it's a 48 hour process that includes scalding the dough.
