I love the German people for a lot of reasons: they're practical, logical, and exceedingly helpful. They never hesitate to give strangers helpful advice. If you walked around with a shoe untied, for example, several thousand Germans would point this out to you. And that's before you left your house.

One thing I don't love, though, is German bread. It's solid and hard and heavy and healthy. You can get it dense or denser, from forty different wholesome grains, with or without dried seeds on top.

Which is great -- if the first item on your To Do list is "Scrub my colon until it's shiny and pink."

The bread I like, though, is a rough and primal thing. It's hand-kneaded and hand-shaped and baked in a wood-fired oven. It's pretty much the opposite of German bread, so I was ecstatic when I finally found some in Germany. I actually smelled it before I saw it, in a bakery in Braunschweig, where the fire scented the air for miles around. In the window were huge, misshapen, crusty loaves, and inside the fragrance was pretty much the opposite of toast and closer to incineration.

This stuff wasn't served with a smear of marmalade. It was eaten around a campfire while dinosaurs watched.

On the counter, one mammoth slab had been cut in half. While the crust was scorched and solid, the inside was all fluffiness and air, with barely enough substance to support butter.

"One of those, please," I said. And I smiled all the way home.

I couldn't wait to tear it apart, but first I had to make plans. Should I slice it up, or just pull off chunks and stuff them into my mouth? Should I eat it plain or make a prehistoric sandwich? Would a wedge of cheese be too much? Would a slice of prosciutto be enough? Before I'd come up with a real strategy, my husband jumped in to help.

"That is too much bread," he declared. "There is no way we can eat that much bread. We must do something with it or it will go to waste." He was quiet for a second as his German brain weighed the possibilities. "Here is what we will do. We will freeze some, we will make croutons with some, and we will crumble some into bread crumbs."

It made sense to me, so I didn't complain. Besides, I love German practicality, and would never be so rude as to turn down their help. Ten minutes later, though, when I decided I'd start with a slab smothered in unsalted butter, I returned to the kitchen.

I looked for the bread. And looked. And looked. "Honey," I called shakily, "do we have any bread?"

There was a pause for a second, and then "No" was all he said.