You’ve seen the French sauntering around with slender baguettes under their arms or sporting jaunty berets as they pedal bicycles laden with crusty bread.

Those cinematic scenes are nice, but when you really get down to business — as my countrymen are inclined to do — it’s obvious that the world’s best bread comes from Germany. Here, bread literally sustains our culture.

Germans have more varieties of bread than most other countries. According to the bread register of the German Institute for Bread (of course there is such a thing), there are now more than 3,200 officially recognized types of bread in the country. German bread culture was officially added by UNESCO to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2015.

A key German term rests upon those hearty loaves: one of the words for wo

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