But, this bread is terrible?

Would a loaf by any other name...

I am in the midst of the five-year anniversary of my baking sourdough bread. This friends, is a momentous occasion.

There’s been half a decade of learning via beautiful loaves and utter, yet still somewhat edible crap.

If you do your napkin math, you’ll note that despite being an early recipient of Original Covid, I wasn’t a pandemic baker, having started just before the shit hit the fan in 2020. Oh how time flies when corporeal languishing occupies the majority of your days, right?

My bread quest started less as a point of boredom and/or curiosity and more a point of necessity given that while Spain has bread, it doesn’t have good bread.

I’ve seen more than one misinformed food/travel “writer” parachute into the country on a sponsored press trip and infer that Spain is a serious gastronomic destination because they have bread in the gas stations! How serious is that! Bread! At the gas stations! And yes, exclamation points are always in fine writing!

There is no question that Spain is most definitely a gastronomic destination, but it’s most definitely not due to the pan de gasolinera. That offer is, to put it mildly, horrible. Of course, when taking a broad view of the country, the bread in most restaurants, is also kind of horrible. In fact, the bread in easily 95% of the bakeries (Galicia excepted), is horrible too. It’s all part of what has become the Gas Station Industrial Bread Complex as despite bread being a definitive stable of the Spanish diet, something was lost along the way.