Let’s Get This Bread

Yesterday was possibly even better than Thursday. We had a double excursion! In the morning, we went to the bread factory Franzelutsa. This is a Moldovan factory that exports bread and candy to Germany, Europe, and the United States. It’s everpresent here.

We dressed up in scrubs and had a tour of all the machines. They sprayed our hands in alcohol to disinfect them (“if we lick our hands, will they send us home?”) and we traversed a few different rooms. They have lots of conveyor belts and mixing machines and it was really interesting to see the process of making bread. It was also fun because in every room we got to taste what was happening. Today they were making 3 different items.

In every room there was a distinct different smell. In the first room, they were making сушки, which are these bread rings that you eat with tea or coffee. They’re crispy, kind of like a mix between a crouton and a pretzel, but also not. On the boxes they were sending to England the label said “crisp bread rings” so I guess that’s what they are. They’re really popular here, and we got free samples of the regular ones, ones with onion, ones with poppyseed, sugarfree, flax seed, glazed, and glazed with poppyseed. I’ve only had the regular ones and the poppyseed ones, so this was like a whole new world.

Today in the cookie room, they were making ginger raisin cookies! These were delicious because they were still warm. (The products made by this company don’t have many preservatives, so they do tend to get hard in the box pretty quickly, so the ones we tried today and the ones they brought out from yesterday’s production were extra soft and delicious.)

Then we walked into the wafer room, which smelled like my house on school mornings: waffles! They showed us the super-hot waffle irons that made the outside wafer cookies, and then we watched them get filled with chocolate. And then we tried them. Do you sense a pattern?

We walked past storerooms and storerooms of pasta and flour and cookies to the debriefing room, where we were once again allowed to take pictures. This is a loaf of bread that is traditional to Eastern Europe.

Then they brought us multiple plates of cookies and breads, of which this is just one. My favorite was the nut and apricot black bread they made the other day, which is not pictured because I ate all of it (that is a joke). And in the back of the second you can see me casually eating bread.

After this, we had lunch at a restaurant (who thought this was a good idea? None of us could even walk) and went to the Village Museum, which is also a church. The weather was wonderful, so we sat outside on the grounds and talked, and then a friend and I wandered around the lake and up a path looking at the fossils on the ground. The stones were all made of shell fossils!

This was a fairy-tale worthy setting, it really was, and it was a gorgeous day.

After this I went to the central market in search of some items, and wandered around a bit, and all was well.

Note: the key to my heart is free samples, as everyone who know me well knows.