Let them eat cake!

If there is one thing I absolutely, wholeheartedly, unequivocally do not like about my newly adopted country, it's the bread. I'm sorry America, but compared to a French baguette, or a Dutch Tijgerbrood, or even a German Kaiserbrotchen, your bread just does not make the cut. You make great burgers, an awesome Caesar salad, and the best biscuits and gravy I ever had, but don't count on winning any prizes for your bread.
I'm sorry.

Luckily for me, husband-dear shares my dislike of American bread. And after trying every single brand of bread in our local commissary as well as our local Publix, we've had to come to the conclusion that American bread is just not for us. It's too heavy, too sweet, and the texture is just not right. Bread is supposed to be light, airy, chewy, and definitely not sweet. Oh, we'll always keep a loaf of something whole-wheaty and healthy in the freezer, just in case one of us gets a sudden craving for a PB&J sandwich, but let's be honest here, it's kept in the freezer because we know it will probably last us about two weeks if not more, by which point it would have gone moldy had it been kept anywhere else but in subzero temperatures.

But as we all know, bread is an excellent source of carbohydrates. And as we also all know, husband-dear and I are insane health-tri-freaks. So we need carbohydrates at least every once in a while. And if you don't like bread, the options you're left with (pasta, potatoes, rice), smack more of a major dinner than a quick after-exercise snack. And truth be told, we both missed having a good sandwich. Like the kaiserbrotchen with cream cheese and salmon we used to have for lunch in Germany. So when our tax return came in earlier this month, we decided to splurge and bought ourselves a bread-machine.

This bread-machine was going to be the end of all of our bread-related troubles. We were going to make healthy, airy, chewy, right-textured wheat bread that was going to knock your socks off. Our bread was going to be the envy of the neighborhood, and people were going to be begging us for more. Several of our friends make their own bread using a bread-machine, and they love it. Their bread is awesome. I also remembered several of my good friends back in Holland spending about five minutes each night pouring flour and water into their machine, only to produce the most delectable bread ever.

It was going to be a piece of cake.
Was.
Because it's not. Holy crap. Making bread is hard.
We're now on loaf number three, and we've yet to make one that looks AND tastes alright. We can apparently either make a bread that looks like a turd and tastes great, or a loaf that looks great but tastes like your regular Walmart Great Value whole wheat. And not to be a prima donna here, but don't you at least want your bread to resemble an actual loaf? And not some gnarly knots of baked wheat? I mean, call me picky, but my bread needs to look like bread, or at least somewhat resemble it.
Not only are the recipes horribly complicated, requiring gluten, yeast, sugar, salt, special flour, butter, and water, even if you follow them to a "t", your bread still does not come out right. And trust me, between husband-dear and I, there's enough anal retentiveness to make sure we REALLY follow the recipe.

So right now we're looking into alternative bread recipes. Ones involving oil. Or something odd called lecithin. Or perhaps asking our friends in Holland to send us that "all in one flour" where all you do is add water. Or possibly sending our bread-machine back to where it came from.
Either way, the bottom line is that we still haven't solved our bread problem.

Perhaps we should take after Marie Antoinette, and just eschew the bread completely and eat cake.
Hrumph.