The american pallet is simply different and all our breads tend to be sweeter. The other part of this is that amercian breads tend to only use 1 grain, wheat. And they tend to either use whole wheat or bleached wheat.

Even when something is a "9 grain" bread, usually what that actually means is it's wheat bread with other grains in the crust.

Very hard to find a rye bread in the US.

I’ve always found King Arthur to be reliable? Their recipes are good and include metric, you can get the flour anywhere and they’re very proactive with support if you have questions about tweaking. Also good books.

Good bread exists, it’s just not cheap like it is in Europe.

I find baking best demonstrated visually, so here is a sourdough-focused Youtube playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFja1ShZFsA&list=PLec5dGKCK8...

If you are interested in a specific type of bread say so.

Measuring the ingredients alone won't yield a great loaf because the environment matters too, so I just suggest learning to read the dough -- just practice.

I think you'll find two things are true about American bulk baked goods:

- The quality is highly uniform.

- The quality is highly bland.

As with any mass-produced food, the goals are typically quantity and low cost, though often with a putative appearance of quality or artisanal character. The compromises are largely against a high-quality product, though there are places where this may be found, albeit at far higher prices.

Of you may bake your own.

I enjoy a local Pittsburgh bakery Mancini's. That's my benchmark for "good bread", I've never been to Europe though.

not disagreeing, the US certainly doesn't have the variety of France/Belgium/Germany, and the average is certainly much worse.

But, there are local bakeries here and there and many of them seem to make pretty good breads? Maybe I don't know what you're specifically looking for though. I'm in LA at the moment and I can be both frustrated with the average but still find some good stuff.

Eh, I found the Seattle artisanal bakeries (Fremont, Grand Central) to be better than all but the best I’ve found in Europe.

Reproducibility requires more than just measuring ingredients, however, as other characteristics can greatly change results. Leaven viability, flour moisture content, relative humidity, ambient temperature, and accidents of a home-baker's process (did you get interrupted by a child / work / partner / household exigency during your dough prep or bake) all have pretty sharp impacts on results.

Precise reproducibility requires not just monitoring ingredients, but overall environment, dough response, and more.

Or ... you can roll with it as an amateur (both in the "nonprofessional" and "for the love of it" senses), recognise that every bake is its own experiment, measure what you can, but allow for variation. I've been baking bread for about six years now. Results vary, many look great, and all but a very few taste amazing, even where I go far out of nominal parameters.

Biggest goof to date was omitting salt from a batch. (Salting the finished product ... recovered mostly.) Otherwise I've survived odd assortments of flours, accelerated or extended prooving cycles, high- or low-temperature ovens, different cookware, and more. Bread is just really freaking resilient stuff, and so long as you're not planning on hitting the same spot every time, have fun with it, and learn, in the spirit of TFA.