Crimes Against Bread

Since some time we are finally able to buy most delicious bread in Bangkok. Bakeries have become an essential part of Bangkok shopping culture. But oh my God! You buy the freshest and crispiest French baguette – and what crimes are committed. Fresh bread is packed in a plastic bag. An hour later your crispy bread looks and tastes like flaccid cardboard.

What a waste. Some rare selected and some German bakeries offer you special wrapping paper or paper bags. But it remains a mystery why most bakeries here ruin their own goods by putting them in a plastic bag only to give them that soggy “plastic” taste.

Fair enough, paper dries the bread out – but you want to keep it forever? Or getting a bread bin? Ants all over whatever you do … Over at Sun Moulin Bakery they would have that crispy, ambrosial, fatally irresistible Danish butter loaf.

Crispy, it is to say, until the moment the freshly baked delicacy ends up in its plastic wrapping. Once sealed in plastic, texture and taste are gone. The loaf’s reduced to a lump of dough. And mold loves it! Better smoke those 99 baht.

You never really knew how quickly you can turn delicious puff pastry into an unappetizing anything by accelerating its biodegradable decomposition by means of plastic sealing.

If you really love your bread, pastries and baked goods, never leave home without a dedicated paper bag. The cheap brown packing paper does a great job. Or you prefer chewing gum by the kilogram?

If you absolutely don’t mind bakery products wrapped in plastic and have a knack for the grim kind, artist, baker and ghoul Kittiwat Unarrom in Ratchaburi is your man.

Kittiwat’s Body Bakery exhibits lovingly-made, home-baked body parts. Kittiwat has sculpted life-like heads, feet and hands from dough. All wrapped in plastic … Did I try to make a point?!