When a store has a buy-one-get-one-free deal, it would be nice to have an app that would match me up with somebody else in the store who also wants only one of that thing; then one of us could buy them and we could split the cost. I can't be the only one who doesn't have room in the freezer for a second bone-in pork roast.
Food sharing in general should be encouraged (as a fickle single man I end up throwing away a lot of food, after e.g. opening a jar of tomato sauce and consuming half of it and leaving the other half in the fridge to use "soon"), but that's odd if it only looks in stores.
Tomato sauce, wine, soups, and other liquid foodstuffs are excellent contenders for ice cube trays. A housemate in university introduced me to 'red wine cubes' from the freezer for chucking into beef Ragu and it turned my world right side up. We now have bags of all sorts in our freezer.
Before covid, I used to bake a batch of three baguettes probably 3x/week, bringing them to work to share. I also brought in growlers of homebrew to share after work. People asked me if, on account of being at home the last two years, I'd been doing a lot more of it. In fact, I've baked and brewed significantly less in that time, and I miss both the sharing and the social time that came about because of those things.
I am also fickle with my food, and a vegan to boot. I solved this problem of leftovers for my situation by making soup. With leftovers, like your tomato sauce, you can always make a soup. Making soup is easy. You can do that in parallel with making dinner, or quickly before breakfast or lunch. You can store and carry it in a thermos flask, or in a simple jar and heat it in a microwave at work. You can also use it as a starter for tomorrow's dinner. Or freeze it for later consumption. Soup, it's great!
I recently got into using tomato powder, have you ever tried it? It would mean more work, but much more shelf-life and granularity of how much tomato you actually want.
I used to immediately throw away half of any load of bread I'd buy because it would always have gone off by the time I got that far down. I would love to have moved that half to a paper bag instead and given it to someone else.
As a German the cultural differences around bread are really interesting. Already the cartoon picture of the half loaf of bread is so fundamentally different to what I am expecting it to look like. Also people in the comments saying they rarely not finish a loaf of bread.
This [1] is how it looks like here and when bought at a bakery it's usually so big that we buy it in quarters and even that lasts a couple of days. It also tastes very different from what the rest of the world considers bread. It's much stronger in flavor.
That's a sourdough bread, right? Now, there's a rabbit hole to dive into. It uses a different type of levain / yeast culture compared to bread based on dried yeast.
Long story short, sourdough was / is how bread was made throughout history. Fermentation takes a very long time due to the nature of the levain. At some point, bakers noticed how the leftovers from brewers yeasts drastically shorten fermentation. That and industrialization led to modern day bread you find in the supermarket.
Jon from Proof Bread on YT does a much better job at explaining. [1]
Another great watch is Michael Pollan's "Cooked" series. In the 3rd episode, he explores bread, it's history and makes the case about modern industrialization affecting the quality and the nutritional value of modern bread. [2]
FWIW in the US this is called "artisan bread", as opposed to supermarket bread. You can get it in bakeries in every major city, and at farmer's markets, but not most supermarkets, especially not outside the city. It's really popular in San Francisco for example.
I found this out because I brought some bread from back to the suburbs to my parents, and they thought it was awesome, and had never had it before ... ! I haven't lived in the suburbs for ~20 years so I forgot that the availability of food is different.
> but not most supermarkets, especially not outside the city.
Not sure what part of the country you live in, but this kind of bread is available at even the smallest out-of-the-way grocery store anywhere in California, and on most of the west coast that I've been to. I know because my family is hooked on it...
Keep in mind, this service appears to be focused on India, where the kind of loaf bread pictured is also not the most traditional. (When I lived in Afghanistan and would occasionally buy loaves of sandwich bread at groceries catering to expats, my Indian colleagues referred to it as "double roti"—a term I found delightful. I wonder how common that usage is in India these days.)
> this service appears to be focused on India, where the kind of loaf bread pictured is also not the most traditional.
While that's technically true, when we use the word "bread" we generally mean this (Western?) kind of bread. For the Indian kinds of bread we normally use roti. In everyday contexts, if someone says bread, it almost always refers to the kind of bread pictured there.
Indian cuisine also has a pretty wide selection of different "breads" (dough patties? DeepL does not even know a word for "Teigfladen" (de)). Naan and Roti are probably the most known, but there are several others including very fatty ones.
(somebody from India please chime in, I don't know the names :-) )
(Not from India but had an Indian roommate once and attended his wedding in India thereafter (obviously :-))
Having eaten bread many places in Germany over the years, I certainly is aware of the shape of bread you show, but I've also had plenty of loaves of bread similar to the image in the linked site in Germany.
Well, we Germans are known for our baked goods and at a bakery you will find a wide variety including French croissants, baguette or Italian ciabatta. But at least in Bavaria "bread" is the one I linked and you refer to everything else by name. Whole grain bread usually comes in that form and of course toast. It's just not what comes to my mind especially in the context of a loaf.
I've seen it as a throwaway gag in a few movies too - also usually with French speaking characters for some reason - observing how terrible baked goods (or sometimes bread specifically) are in the US.
I wonder if this is an example of emojis taking over public consciousness. The bread picture on this site is clearly the bread emoji, even though this is a picture and it could have been any bread shape.
My friends and I once (as in, one day...) went stealng bread from doorsteps in Germany, until we tasted one that was so ...different... to what we considered to be 'bread', we never did it again.
Black bread?
'Different', meaning 'absolutely disgusting' to [our] tastes, at that time.
Our tastebuds have to learn to appreciate new tastes. So if you grew up on a very sugary taste palate, having dark bread for the first time will be tough. If you were unlucky enough to pick one with added caraway I'm not surprised at all. That has some strong and somewhat bitter taste and serves you right for stealing it xD
As an Austrian I can fully agree. we buy bread in full, halves or quarters and I eat it for a week without toasting. bread that is getting too dry to eat can be toasted or cut up in cubes to be used as croutons in soups and salads or used as a base for dumplings.
We'd always eat frozen bread at my grandma's. She'd buy a new loaf, pull an old one out of the freezer, and put the new one in. I don't think we ever had a fresh slice of bread there. I love this memory for some reason.
Yup. I've been making my own bread for ~4 years, mainly due to family. When I know I have a busy week ahead or travelling, I make two loaves that weekend and freeze one. Family gets good sourdough bread, and the toast from frozen is in no way noticeably different.
You might want to try par-baking and freezing, instead of just freezing the cooked loaves. At the peak of my sourdough-ratholing last year, I scaled up my recipe size so that I was making four loaves (batards weighing in at around 650-700 grams), and then par-baking and freezing three of them for use over the next week or two.
My method:
1. Do whatever it is that you do before baking a loaf of bread
2. Bake the loaf for around 2/3rds the target time. In my case, this is about a half hour. I bake these loaves at 200°C, on a baking stone and covered with a huge aluminum salad bowl to sorta emulate a steam oven. At the end of the half hour, the crust is still white due to the bowl, and just starting to go brown on the tips of whatever cuts I added.
3. Take the loaf out and let it cool for a couple hours
4. Seal it in a plastic bag and put it in the freezer
5. Proceed with life for a time
6. When in need of more bread, take a par-baked loaf out of the freezer and put it on the counter, and pre-heat the oven to 200°C
7. Once pre-heated (~20 mins later, let's say), put the still-frozen loaf (sans plastic!!) into the oven uncovered, and cook for another 15 mins
8. Take it out to let it cool and enjoy
IMO a par-baked and then frozen loaf is noticeably better than a single-baked loaf, at least when using a home oven. I speculate that this is because a home oven needs a longer total baking time than a (hotter, steam-injected) commercial oven to fully bake + get the right crust, and that extra time turns into a drier crumb. But I further speculate that the par-bake-and-freeze technique preserves the crumb, since the crumb is really pretty much done by the time the 30-min par-bake is over, and the crumb ends up spending a good chunk of the 15-min finishing bake just de-thawing rather than drying out.
Pff, wait til you discover you can freeze also sausages and butter without losing any quality, which sadly can't be said about bread, defrosted bread tastes pretty bad, which is why I don't freeze it. I mean if I would be that desperate or lazy that I wouldn't want to go to small convenience store right under my building to buy half loaf, I have always at home enough flour and it would make more sense to keep dry yeast in stock to prepare own bread.
I would have agreed with you completely until I got married and discovered that it's not the freezing that does it, but the thawing. It's all in how you thaw.
Now I pull the loaf out a few hours before it's needed and let it thaw at room temperature in the pantry. Definitely leave it sealed.
I laugh now thinking about how as kids we put the bread in the microwave on defrost. That makes some damn nasty bread :-D
Depends on the sausage I guess, and on the defrosting process. Personally, I don't like to freeze any meat - chances are that it had been frozen already, and refreezing it will ruin it.
My mom freezes everything to save money, and there is an element of emancipation for me to be able to not do that, but generally speaking I just find it a destructive practice from a flavour perspective.
The only complaint I have is that when there isn't space, she forces it in anyway and then you end up with mangled, frozen slices that don't fit in the toaster.
If you have the space, a second deep freeze is a game changer. You can often find them for cheap or even free, the ones from the 90s seem to last forever.
Freezing bread alters it. I can't recall off hand what it does but I don't much like the taste. I'm not particularly a fan of bread at the best of times though, so I might be more susceptible to the change taste of frozen bread than most. In fact it's pretty much only freshly baked bread that I enjoy.
The change in consistency happens most quickly at temperatures in the single digits, that’s also why bread in the fridge gets stale faster. But toasting the bread reverts the process. So the trick is to defrost in the microwave and pop it in the oven (if still in a loaf) or toaster (if sliced). Put some water on the crust to prevent it from baking too much. Works wonders on yesterday’s rolls too.
We have delivered batches of 7 loaves from a local bakery every 2-3 weeks, and of course freeze them. The trick is to, as soon as I can after receiving them, put the loaves with their original bag inside also a large freezer bag, so they are double-bagged, and right into the freezer. When taking it out, toast it as needed, either so lightly that it just thaws, or as toasty as you like if you want toast.
While nothing is like a chunk or slice of bread still warm from the oven, this is more than good enough and often not distinguishable from the bread as received. One note is that this is pretty high-density bread, so it might not work as well with 'fluffier' breads. In any case, the double bagging does work for me to eliminate that ucky freezer burn taste, or at least put it off so that it takes 2+months in the freezer for it to appear.
I've also found for cakes and pastries that wrapping in cling wrap, then aluminum foil tightly sealed by rolling the edges together, then a freezer bag works well for many months.
Freezer bread is only the same as never-frozen bread if you toast it. Otherwise it tastes odd and there's really no good way to defrost it quickly. I don't always want toast.
Rolls are especially poor in the freezer as they have to first be half defrosted then cut then toasted and even then the top has a slightly odd taste, probably due to the thickness. Of course, I'll still stick them in there rather than wasting them, I'll just be miffed about it.
I'm eating loads of bread, good bread is not easy to come by in London, at least to my taste. There is this one place I like, they do big loafs that reminds me of the bread my grand parents were buying in France. Problem is that they won't sell me halves and my partner doesn't eat much so I freeze it from time to time.
Frozen bread from a decent bakery always beat any kind of "fresh" supermarket bread.
I do the same with bagels / english muffins / etc., it's crazy to waste perfectly good bread if you just didn't get around to eating it before it spoiled. If it's a baguette or country loaf that's about to go bad I usually just make croutons / breadcrumbs out of it.
It really is a game changer. Even just putting it in the fridge prolongs its shelf life. Just make sure to keep the bag sealed with a twist tie, to keep the bread from drying out. I also save the heels until last, as well. They make good end caps while you're finishing the rest of the loaf.
My flatmate, who is a baker by trade, violently disagrees with putting bread in the fridge. He argues that the condensation in the bag/box you store it in increases the chance of mold and interferes with the bread's structural integrity.
He recommends to store bread in a paper bag in a bread bin somewhere on your counter top, but a clay baker or something similiar will also do the trick.
I'll add, that it's perfectly legit to store bread in the fridge if it would go bad otherwise. Just one of the usual nitpicks tradespeople have regarding their line of work.
This is super awesome; pleasantly surprised to see this is relevant for my home town :-D
Also, funnily this is how they are sourcing the data. Ingenious!!
"The search is only available in select big cities in India because it uses Dunzo as the data source. No affiliation with Dunzo.
The API used to call Dunzo is open but undocumented. So if someone from Dunzo is reading this, don't be sending take-down notices. This is a very niche and tiny thing and is unlikely to put any strain on your servers."
What I love about this is the way half loaves are found, simple but really clever.
Search for "bread" with the correct category, and then filter out all results that are greater than 300 grams. It works out because all the artisanal bread are excluded with a regex.
Mel Brooks joke: a man in a deli notices that there's nothing but salt on every shelf. He asks the shopkeeper if he sells a lot of salt. The shopkeeper says "If I sell a bag of salt a week I'm lucky. But the guy who sells me salt, boy, can he sell salt!"
This is a great idea that "doesn't scale" and could one day be a $1B business. Well done!
He sucks at selling, however the guy who he buys the salt from is excellent at selling. Therefore capable of getting the shop owner to buy excessive amounts of salt.
Could be...think about this: a niche search engine that tells you which individual products are in stock, and where they are, could be very valuable indeed. How many times have you thought, "I need to buy an X right now, but I don't know which store(s) carry it?"
I see a new dating app in the making ... match people who want half loaves with others who want half loaves and send them out to buy a full loaf together.
There are two halves to every half loaf, as well as the various quantities in beween. Matching karen who has eaten the first half, with Darren who has 9 (of the original 29 slices) left with BillyJoeJimBob who has eaten 'every other slice' sounds ike a nightmare....but so much like real loaf....i mean life.
In NL every supermarket, baker or other place where you can buy bread will be more than happy to sell you half loaves, to the point that plenty of them have them pre-sliced and packaged ready to go.
Yep, i also don't quite understand what needs to be solved here.
I just ask the cashier in the bakery for a half or quarter loaf. Or grab a pre-cut half/quarter one in the supermarket. There are plenty of options (types of bread, sourdough or not, based on different grains, etc) over here in germany.
The experiences of others could be vastly different than yours. A possible answer: the developer has been throwing away bread, and couldn't easily find their favourite bread in smaller quantities in a city in India.
Here in New Jersey my local Whole Foods doesn't sell half-loaves anymore. I like some of their breads but I'm not willing to spend $6 for a loaf that I won't be able to finish.
Maybe the bakeries in India don’t offer this service/product for some reason? If so, a website like this could put some pressure on them to introduce half-loaves.
In Czechia as well, all supermarkets carry (500-600g) half loaves, only difference being that some are cut and packaged already directly from 3rd party bakery and some they cut in shop, usually if they have their own bakery like Tesco or Albert (Ahold). And of course ALL convenience stores carry 1/2 loaves, many even 1/4 loaves.
Maybe if you don't have a freezer or toaster? Because bread freezes very well, and if you buy a full loaf it's cheaper per serving.
I might be taking this too seriously, but I just started freezing bread in my 40's LOL (artisan bread). All you need is a bread knife and zip loc bags.
Big quality of life improvement. After you toast it, it's better than fresh. There is some science behind this that I don't remember.
Readit News
But no, it only searches store inventories for half-loaves for sale.
I love the laser focus on half-loaves anyway.
The solution is apparently to organize WeChat groups around buying -- and subsequently dividing -- the oversized items.
I don't need 4 cases of soda, but I'd take a BOGO if I could split the deal with someone.
This [1] is how it looks like here and when bought at a bakery it's usually so big that we buy it in quarters and even that lasts a couple of days. It also tastes very different from what the rest of the world considers bread. It's much stronger in flavor.
[1] https://www.sonachgefuehl.de/rustikales-bauernbrot/
Long story short, sourdough was / is how bread was made throughout history. Fermentation takes a very long time due to the nature of the levain. At some point, bakers noticed how the leftovers from brewers yeasts drastically shorten fermentation. That and industrialization led to modern day bread you find in the supermarket.
Jon from Proof Bread on YT does a much better job at explaining. [1]
Another great watch is Michael Pollan's "Cooked" series. In the 3rd episode, he explores bread, it's history and makes the case about modern industrialization affecting the quality and the nutritional value of modern bread. [2]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-0p0p0zqVE [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epMAq5WYJk4
Yes, the one I linked is made out of sourdough, which is a sign of quality here. Though, we do also have the same style of bread without sourdough.
I think the benefits of bakers yeast are reliability and predictability.
I found this out because I brought some bread from back to the suburbs to my parents, and they thought it was awesome, and had never had it before ... ! I haven't lived in the suburbs for ~20 years so I forgot that the availability of food is different.
Not sure what part of the country you live in, but this kind of bread is available at even the smallest out-of-the-way grocery store anywhere in California, and on most of the west coast that I've been to. I know because my family is hooked on it...
While that's technically true, when we use the word "bread" we generally mean this (Western?) kind of bread. For the Indian kinds of bread we normally use roti. In everyday contexts, if someone says bread, it almost always refers to the kind of bread pictured there.
(somebody from India please chime in, I don't know the names :-) )
(Not from India but had an Indian roommate once and attended his wedding in India thereafter (obviously :-))
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0723382/
I've seen it as a throwaway gag in a few movies too - also usually with French speaking characters for some reason - observing how terrible baked goods (or sometimes bread specifically) are in the US.
Dead Comment
My method:
1. Do whatever it is that you do before baking a loaf of bread
2. Bake the loaf for around 2/3rds the target time. In my case, this is about a half hour. I bake these loaves at 200°C, on a baking stone and covered with a huge aluminum salad bowl to sorta emulate a steam oven. At the end of the half hour, the crust is still white due to the bowl, and just starting to go brown on the tips of whatever cuts I added.
3. Take the loaf out and let it cool for a couple hours
4. Seal it in a plastic bag and put it in the freezer
5. Proceed with life for a time
6. When in need of more bread, take a par-baked loaf out of the freezer and put it on the counter, and pre-heat the oven to 200°C
7. Once pre-heated (~20 mins later, let's say), put the still-frozen loaf (sans plastic!!) into the oven uncovered, and cook for another 15 mins
8. Take it out to let it cool and enjoy
IMO a par-baked and then frozen loaf is noticeably better than a single-baked loaf, at least when using a home oven. I speculate that this is because a home oven needs a longer total baking time than a (hotter, steam-injected) commercial oven to fully bake + get the right crust, and that extra time turns into a drier crumb. But I further speculate that the par-bake-and-freeze technique preserves the crumb, since the crumb is really pretty much done by the time the 30-min par-bake is over, and the crumb ends up spending a good chunk of the 15-min finishing bake just de-thawing rather than drying out.
Now I pull the loaf out a few hours before it's needed and let it thaw at room temperature in the pantry. Definitely leave it sealed.
I laugh now thinking about how as kids we put the bread in the microwave on defrost. That makes some damn nasty bread :-D
My mom freezes everything to save money, and there is an element of emancipation for me to be able to not do that, but generally speaking I just find it a destructive practice from a flavour perspective.
And stale or moldy bread, my alternative, is very easy to notice.
The only complaint I have is that when there isn't space, she forces it in anyway and then you end up with mangled, frozen slices that don't fit in the toaster.
While nothing is like a chunk or slice of bread still warm from the oven, this is more than good enough and often not distinguishable from the bread as received. One note is that this is pretty high-density bread, so it might not work as well with 'fluffier' breads. In any case, the double bagging does work for me to eliminate that ucky freezer burn taste, or at least put it off so that it takes 2+months in the freezer for it to appear.
I've also found for cakes and pastries that wrapping in cling wrap, then aluminum foil tightly sealed by rolling the edges together, then a freezer bag works well for many months.
Deleted Comment
Rolls are especially poor in the freezer as they have to first be half defrosted then cut then toasted and even then the top has a slightly odd taste, probably due to the thickness. Of course, I'll still stick them in there rather than wasting them, I'll just be miffed about it.
Dunns Bakery in Crouch End is decent if youre close.
Except frozen bread tastes bloody awful.
Also, funnily this is how they are sourcing the data. Ingenious!!
"The search is only available in select big cities in India because it uses Dunzo as the data source. No affiliation with Dunzo.
The API used to call Dunzo is open but undocumented. So if someone from Dunzo is reading this, don't be sending take-down notices. This is a very niche and tiny thing and is unlikely to put any strain on your servers."
Search for "bread" with the correct category, and then filter out all results that are greater than 300 grams. It works out because all the artisanal bread are excluded with a regex.
https://github.com/prashantbaid/halfloaf/blob/master/lambda/...
https://brc5og74x0.execute-api.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/prod...
This is a great idea that "doesn't scale" and could one day be a $1B business. Well done!
Dead Comment
I just ask the cashier in the bakery for a half or quarter loaf. Or grab a pre-cut half/quarter one in the supermarket. There are plenty of options (types of bread, sourdough or not, based on different grains, etc) over here in germany.
Maybe if you don't have a freezer or toaster? Because bread freezes very well, and if you buy a full loaf it's cheaper per serving.
I might be taking this too seriously, but I just started freezing bread in my 40's LOL (artisan bread). All you need is a bread knife and zip loc bags.
Big quality of life improvement. After you toast it, it's better than fresh. There is some science behind this that I don't remember.