I’ve got a huge loaf of sourdough from Panera, my favorite bread. A little bit of butter and I’m happy.
tasty chewy delight.
Does it have to be leavened? I can eat good hot tortillas plain all day long (corn or flour).
I used to eat a half a loaf of Parisian Sourdough bread at a sitting. I could have easily eaten the whole loaf, but I was afraid of breaking one (or more) of the deadly sins…
ETA: my current favorite bread isKalamata olive bread.
The wife absolutely adores the baguettes at Bouchon in Las Vegas. Me, I’m happy with a pan of cornbread (Southern-style) and some butter.
Got a bread machine? If not, get one. They’re terrific! You put the flour, water, salt, sugar, yeast in the pan, push the button and 3 hours later you got bread! And the house smells sooooo good!
I love bread.
Local Italian bread dipped in really good olive oil and balsamic is wonderful.
Lately I’ve been eating a ton of the Catherine Clark - Brownberry bread. That stuff is addictive toasted and spread with just about anything.
I agree with the OP, Panera makes some pretty good bread and while I almost never eat there (nothing against Panera I just eat mostly at home) I buy a loaf from them a few times a month.
Say what you like about British cuisine (and no doubt someone will!), but for me there’s not much that can beat a Bread and Butter Pudding on a cold winter’s day.
I’ll second bread machines. I know that better results could probably be had by hand with time, patience and practise, but chucking in some ingredients; setting the timer and waking to the smell of a freshly baked loaf is fabulous.
My local stores still don’t carry Roman Meal 
My goodness I love bread. I have been losing weight this year so I limit what I eat now but in the past I would buy a dozen bagels and just end up eating half of them like a doughnut I love baguettes and crusty rolls. Yum!
I find it generally pretty rewarding to bake bread. I don’t have a bread machine, I have a mixer with dough screws. It’s still some work, but I’ve done it often enough that it goes by pretty quickly. Frankly, I tend to have an aversion to bread machine bread. First of all, when these things started becoming ubiquitous, everybody who had them felt compelled to bake bread with hard nuggets of grain in them. And the dimensions of the bread were awkward.
Once you get your basic breadmaking technique down, a lot of specific types of bread are at root surprisingly minor changes.
Bagel: boil the dough, then bake.
Pita: Roll flat and back on a pre-heated baking sheet.
Pretzel: Roll into strips, fold into knot shape, soak in a solution of baking soda.
Pizza Dough: Roll into pizza shape.
Rolls: Add butter.
Cinnamon Buns: Roll out in a square, smear with a butter/sugar/cinnamon blend. Roll in a log and slice.
That’s just with yeast bread. Recently while looking for a recipe I can try without having to run to the store for anything, I made piadas, which are unleavened tortillas. Then I tried tortillas, which are piadas made with a little baking powder. Mix the flour with water and some fat, roll it out into disks and fry it. While you’re frying the other side, you can just go ahead and start building your taco or quesidilla, letting the cheese melt before the bread is even finished cooking.
I mean, I’m glossing over differences in traditional ingredients, but the properties of each of these bread types that seemed to be mysterious and surely troublesome turned out to be minor changes in technique.
No-knead bread recipe from the NY Times. I make it about every other Sunday.
It changed my life.
Challah. We make it just about every week for our semi-traditional Friday night Shabbat dinner. It’s more complicated than a basic bread, having the two extra ingredients of eggs and honey, but it is so good. Leftovers, when they exist, make excellent French toast.
I use the bread machine to do my kneading, because it aggravates my eczema. Then I shape the dough myself. Works great.
Why would you want to aggravate your eczema?
Thanks for the reminder - “Put Roman Meal on the shopping list.”
I finally worked out a really good whole-wheat bread recipe that rises consistently and has a good texture, so I’ve given up buying bread. Now that it’s summer, I have time to bake during the week; unfortunately, if I don’t do it before about eight in the morning, it makes the house unbearably hot.
Rock Hill Bakehouse Jewish rye.
Their other breads are delicious (except the raisin one, ew, I don’t eat raisin bread) but the Jewish rye is the Platonic ideal of rye bread.
I bake a pretty decent basic loaf of bread myself, but I can’t make anything like that. Mmmmmmmm.
Does anybody else like hearty crusty bread (especially rye bread) better after it’s got a bit dried out and stale? Mmmmmmm chewy fighty crunchy tasty bread.
And if we’re going to talk furriners, the Dutch have better cheese than the Germans but the Germans have better bread than the Dutch. This is a fact.
I bake for a living, and bread, of any type, is my favorite thing to make, play with, experiment with, and eat.
It’s my “desert island” food. If I could eat only one thing, it would be warm fresh bread with butter.
The funny thing is that in decades worth of get-togethers I almost always see people bring cookies or cupcakes. I approve of cookies and cupcakes, but bread is not a lot harder to make, and people don’t usually get it fresh. It goes over very well, especially if you’ve also brought hummus.
Also, practicing the baking of bread is a lot cheaper. With cookies you’ve got all these nuts and M&Ms you’ve got to buy, because that’s the art of cookieing. Bread is mostly flour, water and salt, but the results are magic.
But since you have confessed to being a professional, tell me this: is there really any good reason to use fresh yeast? I mean, given the convenience of the fairly dirt-cheap Instant Yeast?