As a Brit living in the US, I have a real problem with the sugar in bread. As a bread lover I detest it. Everything I eat DOESN'T have to be sweet. I can't stand it and I avoid it as much as possible.

In the last few years, I've started making my own sourdough bread (salt, water, flour, homegrown sourdough yeast) with no chemicals and I'm loving it. I can't remember the last time I've bought bread. (Dutch-oven method)

>most cheese was of the horrible processed variety

I had this experience as well, but in the last few years, things have massively improved IMHO. Don't go the deli section (where they cut cheese), go to the area where there's brie/english-chedder etc. However Wisconsin has really stepped up to the plate and now creates very reasonable European styles cheeses (of course, more expensive). It's worth trying it again if you've not done recently.

Reading this brought back another memory - cinnamon! Now, I like cinnamon as much as anyone, but why the hell is it added to everything in the US!

Oh my.. don't get me talking about cinnamon! It's now at a point I refuse to anything with it in.

The only exception is hot-cross-buns during Easter. :)

It's expensive to make good bread. Not in terms of raw materials, but in terms of labor. A machine cannot make a quality loaf of bread, you must gently knead it and let it ride with human hands. There is also a large cost in the right-on-time delivery of "good" bread. There is still quality bread sold at my grocery store, but that kind of bread isn't a staple because people don't want to go to the grocery store every other day when their non-stabilized bread gets eaten, goes stale, or goes moldy.

I am defending "bad" bread because no one ever does, and it's really not comparable to "real" bread because the uses are different. It's cheaper, last much longer, and is better suited for sandwiches and toast because of the square shape.

I'm not hating on cheap bread. You can find cheap, basic batch loaves anywhere in the western world - but the crap I found in the US was the worst.

It doesn't have to be that bad, it doesn't have to have lot's of sugar and corn syrup in it, and it doesn't have to have 20+ ingredients.

> It doesn't have to be that bad, it doesn't have to have lot's of sugar and corn syrup in it

This is my experience as well.

> A machine cannot make a quality loaf of bread, you must gently knead it and let it ride with human hands.

Nonsense. There is nothing wrong with machine kneading, many European countries (but not all!) manage to produce quality loaves at an industrial scale. Can a good baker produce even better bread in small batches? Almost certainly yes. But even there I'm not convinced that it's the kneading specifically, as opposed to general attention to the whole process.

I haven't tried American bread, but Australian is terrible compared to what you can get for little more than 1€ in Germany.

Presumably that's made without human involvement in each loaf.