As an American, I found the protein situation and the whole “Canadian” flour concept bizarre.

In the US, most high quality flours will state their protein percentage reasonably prominently on the label. It’s not particularly hard to buy commercial flour at a fairly wide range of protein levels - 13.5% and even higher protein flours are available and inexpensive. And (lucky for us?) they’re basically all farmed in the US.

But in Europe, the labels seem more interested in ash content and the milling technique, and, at best, the protein can sometimes be inferred from the nutritional information. The last time I shopped for bread flour in Europe, I found a Canadian flour with sort of acceptable protein at a very high price, and I found a Croatian “Pizza” flour that was even better at a lower price.

Do not take American mass-produced sandwich bread as any kind of product that Europeans should wish they had :)

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throwaway219450 35 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I consider myself a decent amateur baker and I've never noticed a huge difference in bread flours. I buy from a local mill because they sell interesting grains and I want to support them. Otherwise I get King Arthur, or Bob's Red Mill if I need something a bit more specific. KA is particularly good because their recipes are usually reliable and they're designed around their flours. The selection of baking ingredients is usually much wider in the average US supermarket compared to the average European one in my experience.

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chihuahua 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The irony that caught my eye in the article is that American mass-produced sandwich bread is depicted as this old-fashioned, slow production process. It takes far too long for the time-crunched futuristic British bakers. Who can wait 5 hours for yeast to ferment? The Chorleywood process comes to the rescue and whips and explodes the water-flour mixture into a foam that is baked seconds later. While those old-fashioned Americans are still waiting for their ancient traditional yeast to slowly do its thing.

At the same time, we have legions of new-age Rogan-adjacent food influencers on both sides of the Atlantic droning on about how American flour makes them bloated and tired (a line that Rogan himself repeats ad nauseam) while European flour avoids all of these problems.

	▲	amluto 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Bread is really a fascinating product. There are so many things for which modern mass or mass-ish production methods can produce results as good or better than artisanal techniques. Nails, knives [0], textiles, etc are all examples as long as one is considering a modern example that is trying to be good. But a halfway decent loaf of bread made using hundreds-of-years-old techniques (albeit probably with modern yeast [1] if it’s not sourdough) is just dramatically better than “modern” bread, even though the latter often contains highly engineered ingredients and is made with extreme precision. [0] I know it’s kind of sad, but a well designed blade cut from a sheet of high quality steel and beveled appropriately is better than even a very, very well made Japanese knife made from the alloys that, for some reason, are still state of the art in Japan. I do imagine that a highly skilled artisan could produce an even better knife from modern steels, but this is a rarity and is very, very expensive. [1] Actual modern yeast is dramatically better than your average supermarket yeast, in flavor, performance and convenience. In the US market, this means that you should use SAF, not Red Star. Good sourdough starter is still just an artisanal thing.

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jodrellblank 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> "at best, the protein can sometimes be inferred from the nutritional information."

I looked at some recently in the UK and the nutritional information is always per 100g and says e.g. 11.5g protein. Is there something wrong with that meaning 11.5% without any inference, or are continental European nutritional information boxes presented differently?

	▲	amluto an hour ago \| parent [-]
		In the US, at least in larger sized bags, flour seems to be treated as an ingredient and there might not be a nutritional fact label. I admit that I didn’t look that carefully last time I was in a European grocery store. I imagine that the 11.5g you’re looking at really does mean 11.5%.