maize

There is also pelnīt maizi, literally earning bread, meaning earning a living. So if someone says a job dod maizi, nobody is talking about free loaves.

For bar food, ķiploku grauzdiņi are fried rye bread with garlic. Tourists sometimes expect garlic toast, but its harder, darker, salty, beer snack energy.

Rupjmaizes kārtojums is another one where the word hides inside the dish name. It is the layered dessert with rye breadcrumbs, jam and cream, so dont translate it as some kind of bread arrangement and panic.

Maizes zupa is dessert, not soup with bread beside it.

Saldskābmaize sounds like it should be cake when you first learn it, but no. It is the sweet-sour rye bread type, and caraway is not a strange modern flavouring there, it belongs to the traditional version. My Latvian friends argue about brands of it like people argue about coffee.

baltmaize = white bread. baltā maize is understandable too, but the compound is what you see/hear a lot.

Rupjmaize is the dark rye one. If you come from English and picture soft rye sandwich bread, Latvian rupjmaize is much heavier and darker, more like black bread.

At a cafe maizīte can just mean a sandwich. Desu maizīte, siera maizīte, that sort of thing.

maizes is the form that got me. Sometimes it is singular genitive, like maizes šķēle, and sometimes it is normal plural, like the bakery has three different maizes today. You dont get a new ending to warn you, you just have to read the sentence around it.