Good bread probably exists in New York. Everything exists in New York, somewhere, and the real achievement is actually finding it. After ten years I've given up looking.

Tasty bread is easy to find. The Polish bakery on 2nd Avenue near my father-in-law's shop sometimes sells flax bread. It is delicious. When flax bread isn't available, the white bread is almost as good. At the Costco on 3rd Avenue in Brooklyn, the semolina baguettes are to die for. In just about any neighbourhood there are bakeries which produce nice-tasting bread. It tends to be expensive but that isn't the issue. The problem with all of these wonderful breads is that they are in weird shapes.

Suppose you find a nice loaf of bread while you're out shopping. That evening you enjoy it with soup or stew but you don't finish the entire loaf, maybe not even half of it. Next morning, maybe you'd like some toast made from that same delicious bread. Well you can surely forget that idea. Ever tried to slice a baguette in such a way that you can even put it in the toaster, let alone get it out again without burning your fingers? The commonest shapes for bread are round or turd-shaped. The round loaves are difficult to deal with. The middle slices are far too wide to fit in the toaster and ones near the edge are too short. With the turd-shaped loaves you can hope that four or five slices from the middle of the loaf are toastable size. Towards the ends of the loaf the sizes diminish to virtually nothing so that even if you managed to overcome the technical, logistic and safety issues you'd end up with toast pieces so tiny that the effort wouldn't have been worthwhile in the first place.

What you really need for toast is something that occupies most of the toaster slot. This means a slice which is approximately square and about 70mm (five inches) across. Ideally, it should be about 10mm (half an inch) thick. That is the perfect toasting slice. It is also fairly close to the ideal size for a sandwich; you'd probably want the slice to be a bit thinner but the other dimensions are about right.

Every supermarket has bread of the right size and shape for making toast and sandwiches. The only problem is that supermarket bread is inedible.

Supermarket bread tastes like cake. It is so laden with sugar that you'd never want to use it for a sandwich. It is only good for toast if you're going to put jam or honey on it. If you want to top your toast with sliced cheese or tomato or ham or anything savoury then forget it. The other disadvantage of sweet bread in the toaster is that it browns quickly without getting very warm. The result is instant cold toast.

To us it seemed that the only times we were able to get decent bread was when we were in other countries. In particular, in my native Australia, supermarkets do sell edible sandwich/toast bread but we found similar loaves just about everwhere; England, Spain, Aruba, Portugal, Canada, Bonaire and Venuzuela to name a few. (France is omitted from the list for other reasons.) In particular, in Aruba we were able to buy "Australian multigrain" bread.

Since we couldn't buy decent bread in New York it occurred to us that it may be possible to make it ourselves so a few years ago we bought a bread machine. It was stolen from the car before we even got it home but that is another story. A second bread machine was bought and we tried making our own bread, using pre-mixes. The loaves all came out the right shape but the best thing which could have been done with them was to coat them with icing, put candles in them and serve them at a child's birthday party. Pre-mixes bought in New York were not the answer. The only prospect seemed to be to make bread from original ingredients and with that in mind we already had a book on the subject. Meanwhile while in Australia last May we had bought a couple of packets of Laucke brand pre-mix just to try them. One was a 3kg sampler bag containing five individual single-loaf packages in different flavours. The other was a 5kg bag containing bulk multigrain premix. I made all the sample packets first because I had no scale on which to weigh the bulk ingredients, a deficiency which was rectified by the time we had tried all the samples. The samples were nice enough but the bread which came from the bulk multigrain mix was outstanding. Typically, I'd make a 1kg (2 lb) loaf on Saturday morning and there wouldn't be much left over for toast on Monday morning.

At 600g per loaf the 5kg bag contained enough ingredients for eight loaves. By the end of September we were nearing the end of our supply and despite making enquiries at the local and not so local shops, supermarkets and bakeries, nobody could sell us bread-making flour. In October I had to go to Syracuse for a few days, then on to Toronto. We checked several places in Syracuse including Wegman's and BJ's but without success. Finally, en route to Toronto (somewhere between St Catherines and Hamilton) we called in at a Costco just on the off-chance and when that was unsuccessful, asked someone where I might buy bread-making flour. She directed us to a nearby Zehr's supermarket and there, to my utter delight, I was able to buy both plain and multigrain bread flour. We came away with a 2.5kg bag of "Robin Hood" plain and two 5kg bags of multigrain.

Yesterday (2nd November) was my first attempt at making bread from original ingredients. I started with the plain flour and the result was pretty good, even though I did not follow any recipe from the book. All the recipes in the book call for added sugar, honey or other sweeteners and I wanted bread, not cake.

Despite the success of the Hunt for Bread in October, I am left with an ongoing problem. We really prefer the multigrain breads and whereas I have very recently discovered a local source of white bread flour, I have yet to find a local source of multigrain mix. My solace is that the 10kg of Canadian flour will last a while.

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