Slaying the Plastic Dragon - Day 5 - Bread

Now that I am thinking so much about plastic, grocery stores look different to me.  If you walk the aisles they are nothing but long rows of plastic, plastic, plastic!  How the heck did we feed ourselves before plastic?  Yet, somehow we did!

Bread is a problem.  It all comes in plastic wrappers.  You want some nice soft sandwich bread?  Plastic wrapper.  How about some English muffins for breakfast?  Plastic.  Tortillas to make wraps and quesadillas?  Plastic.

Some people make their own bread.  At various times, I have tried to do this, but alas I really am ADD and have no baking genes at all.  I've tried and failed countless times.  I have a wonderful bread machine that has been collecting dust in my closet.  I even bought a wheat grinder because I was going to buy fresh kernels and make my own.  Hah! Hah! Hah!  I am delusional sometimes.

Either I spent a lot of time and energy making bread that was a flop, or I spent a lot of time and energy making bread that was successful and eaten up in 5 minutes - rendering us breadless once again.

My biggest quest for my particular family is to find acceptable white sandwich bread not in a plastic wrapper and also tortillas for wraps and quesadillas.  I know that whole wheat is better for you, so I do try to buy that kind as well.  My 15 year old, like me, actually prefers non-white bread, but my husband and sons are incorrigible.  How did I wind up with these bumpkins??? (But I love them anyway.)

This will be an on going exploratory process, I can tell.  Here's how I've tackled the problem so far:

I went to an excellent local place, the Great Harvest bakery and sadly their nice white loaf was already in a plastic sleeve.  But for some reason they had not wrapped the 9 grain loaf or the rosemary garlic.  So I got both of those, put them into a cloth bag, brought them home, got out an old huge empty Christmas tin that had once held holiday popcorn and stored both loaves in there.  The bread stayed fresh!  Now this loaf bread is not the right shape for a toaster, but we've been snacking on bread and butter and we've had soup twice this week and I just served nice thick slices of bread with the soup.  The bread, by the way, is extremely yummy and satisfying.

But I needed sandwich bread!  On Friday a.m. I went to Whole Foods and asked over the counter which bread was considered white bread.  The lady told me the Italian.  I said, I want a loaf, please, sliced and here is a bag you can put it into.  No plastic please!  And it worked!  Still not the right shape for toasters, but it was nice and fresh so it didn't really need to be toasted to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

I do think, at some point soon, I am going to take my bread machine out of storage and try to make some sandwich loaf shaped bread again.

One morning I made corn muffins for breakfast.  Jiffy has these cute little cardboard boxes of corn mix.  The inner sleeve is old fashioned wax paper.  They have not changed at all in my lifetime.  I remember my mother buying this brand.  Just add milk and an egg, bake, and you've got some tasty corn muffins.  So Jiffy, thank you for being a keeper!

Continuing my quest for bread without the plastic, I stopped by Harris Teeter which is near where I take my 15 year old to her math tutor.  Lo and behold, they have bulk bread rolls!  You probably can also buy whole loaves over the counter and bring your own bag too.  I didn't bother with that, but I did pick up some of those delicious pretzel sub rolls and some challah rolls.  Harris Teeter provides nice paper bags to put your rolls in.  Other stores don't give you the paper bag option - only plastic.  So thank you Harris Teeter for providing the paper bags.

I still don't have a solution for tortillas.  Maybe we can attempt to make our own?  I think I should talk my teens into attempting it.  The corn tortillas need a tortilla press apparently, but you can make the flour ones without that.

So stay tuned for our ongoing adventures in plastic free bread!