We love good bread. Sadly, in some parts of the world good bread proved elusive. Understandably, this fine carb just doesn’t feature in diets of some people. In other places it does feature, but it’s such poor quality we can’t bring ourselves to eat it! So here’s why/how bread is so hard to find, where we found good bread and how we tackle the problem making our own overlanding bread.

Good bread is elusive!

In Europe, finding good bread wasn’t a problem – there are plenty of good bakers around to sell you their delicious wares. But in our early days overlanding in Africa and in most of The Americas, finding good bread was/is one of our most taxing food challenges.

Oh, it’s fine if you’re happy with cheap supermarket bread… plenty of that on the shelves in almost any country. Personally, I hate it. I’m a bread snob. And I challenge you to find a loaf in your average supermarket, particularly in most of The Americas, that doesn’t have a suspicious amount of awful and unnecessary ingredients. Sugar (or a sugar alternative) is top of my hate-list. No matter how nice and healthy-looking the packaging, the loaf tastes like slightly sweetened cottonwool. Call me picky… but I don’t think good bread, sourdough or regular, should contain sugar/sweetener. Full-stop.

And here’s my pet gripe about supermarket so-called ‘sourdough’ bread: it might be labelled ‘sourdough’, but often it isn’t real sourdough bread. It’s just ordinary (usually crappy) bread with sourdough flavour added and sold at a premium price. Check the ingredients: if it contains yeast, it’s not real sourdough bread. The whole point of real sourdough bread is that the sourdough is the raising agent. Real sourdough bread is more time-consuming to make and is therefore more expensive. Be aware people! Are you getting real-stuff sourdough bread, or a bit of extra chemical sourdough flavouring in an otherwise crappy, cheap bread.

Okay… whinge over!  

Where we found good bread

Having said that good bread isn’t available, particularly in the Americas, there are of course exceptions. Over our 7+ years travelling around South, Central and North America, we have found some great bread.

I’ve found good stuff in some North American chains:

• Cobs in Canada – excellent range and quality, especially the sunflower flax sourdough
• Panera in USA – these are not just eat-in lunch spots, they sell great loaves of bread to take away – we like their rustic sourdough.
• Save On Foods in Canada, and Wholefoods in USA occasionally had a decent baguette, wholewheat, multigrain or sourdough loaf (although I’ve noticed both of these chains can be guilty of the abovementioned ‘sourdough-with-yeast’ heist!).

Also a few great artisan bakers spring to mind that we found in the Americas:

• Panaderia Paris in Rurrenabaque, Bolivia;
• any bakery in French Guiana (it’s France – they’re all good!);
• Boulenc in Oaxaca City, Mexico;
• Alpine Bakery in Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada.

Overlanding Baking Bread

So what do we do??? If good bread isn’t available… I could bake my own! Of course I could… how hard can it be, eh? Unfortunately, my lack of talent in the baking skillset made fresh home-bread seem an unrealistic hurdle overlanding. I tried traditional bread, but didn’t have great results.

In Africa I made Beer Bread in the Dutch Oven over an open fire – that was nice, but it’s only good for a few hours after making it – it goes dry and awful pretty quickly. Also, it tastes (surprise, surprise) very beery. So whatever you have it with needs to agree with the quite strong beer taste.

I also found a recipe for flatbreads (using my homemade yoghurt as the raising agent). These were ok, but didn’t satisfy our taste for proper good bread! And again, they don’t keep, so they need to be eaten immediately.

But then… a revelation… in 2019 I got some sourdough starter!

If you’ve never done the whole sourdough starter thing, it’s waaay easier than I ever expected (see here overlanding with sourdough). There is a bit of trial and error involved managing the sourdough starter, but the starter culture is a very forgiving thing. You can’t really mess it up too badly. And you’d have to try really hard to kill it off completely!

In the hope of encouraging other clueless non-baker overlanders (like me) to give it a go, click here for my favourite sourdough bread recipe.

Not only is it easier than I thought, but it turns out, sourdough isn’t only for bread! Who knew, eh? There’s a whole easy-peasy world of other yummy overlanding sourdough treats out there (overlanding sourdough discard recipes).  

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