On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 2:01 PM, ruthsimplicity <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote: > Fluffy stuff bad. > One of the things I miss most from the East Coast (US) is rye bread. I loved going into the bakeries as a kid, had a choice of a dozen different kinds of ryes and whole breads. Picked on out, asked for it to be sliced. About the only thing that was white an fluffy as this magical bread served Easter time called babka. Babka looks a lot like challa only it's even more filled with egg yokes. Citron, white and dark raisins, an egg glaze on top and perhaps some sugar water that baked to become a bit of an icing, running here and there.
Texas gets its bread tradition from the Czechs, the people who in West, Texas make 30 different varieties of kolaches, all baked into fluffy, gooey white bread. It's pretty disheartening to go to a manly Texas barbeque place and have the bread be the Texas tradition of Wonder bread. Why Wonder bread? Well, it was the poor people who ate the rye breads. The richer people got to eat things made out of white flour. So to show our wealth, we make everything out of white flour. There's a similar thing running through Tex-Mex. The traditional Mexican bread is of course corn tortillas. Flour tortillas, made with lard and white flour, are considerably more expensive. So of course Mexicans showed their wealth by eating flour tortillas. So now we have this massive weight problem amongst Mexicans who have settled in Texas which will probably soon be reported as metabolic syndrome and diabetes. When it comes to eating healthy, better to be poorer than richer.
