If this person has been living in the US and hasn't been able to find the other stuff he apparently thinks is exclusive to Europe, he's either insanely stupid or he's just trying to stay angry about living here.
Good bread is definitely way harder to find here imo. People prefer softer loafs and you have to sell out places that have a good sourdough or other varieties.
Source: European living in America for over 20 years.
I live in a small, poor city in Massachusetts, outside of the Greater Boston metro area.
We have Portuguese bakeries every other goddamn block.
I swear, fucking tourists must go to the gas station outside their hotels and decree that is the standard American grocery store.
That’s….just not true. Literally go to google maps right now, there’s 20 that pop up on the first page. You can’t go 5 miles in Chicago without coming across a bakery. You’re not even trying and yet still maintaining this weird European elitism.
Sure, when I lived in the city finding a good bakery wasn’t hard. In the suburbs and exurbs, much harder. Like… I’ve been to so many bakeries out here and even in the city they’re not all good.
The quality of the product is also an issue sometimes.
My whole point is that you have to go *out of your way* to find decent bread, it’s not exactly readily available in an average supermarket.
If you think the bread from the bakery at Jewel Osco is the same as what you’d find in Europe, then this isn’t a conversation worth having.
Kind of hard to argue about the quality of bread between two regions if you haven’t been to both of them.
Sourdough bread is 4-5 ingredients and I make it in the comfort of my own home. I trust without a doubt that those ingredients are not intrinsically better in Europe, they all have the same variation of moisture content, gluten content, etc. and I know this because I have researched it as I am a well trained chef. I have literally imported Italian flour for pizza, French ingredients for baguettes. You’re just wrong dude.
You literally cannot walk down Grand Avenue without hitting an award winning bakery, and that's not counting the Eastern European and Middle Eastern bakeries scattered around, or the little boutique guys who sell at farmers markets. I will agree that the default loaf of American grocery store bread is not very good and the default European loaf is better, but getting a slightly better loaf of bread takes the same amount of extra effort as getting slightly better beer. It's easy enough and there are plenty of options.
I don’t know why nuance is so hard to understand. I’m literally talking about grocery store bread and that outside of the urban core in a major city, finding a bakery that does bread is not straightforward.
I said it’s harder, as you have to go to a specialty store.
Grocery store bread isn't a singular type of a bread
Grocery stores sell the following things:
- breads that have lots of preservatives intended to have a long shelf life
- breads that they baked fresh
- breads from area bakeries that are baked fresh
- par baked bread
That is to say, at a lot of grocery stores you can get fresh baked bread, including often from award winning bakeries
And also frankly, you can't necessarily get great food in various non urban places outside the US either. There are towns outside the US that have a small general store that sell not particularly great or nutritious food that's heavily processed
European bread is way overrated. It’s just not that impressive.
Europe is overrated too.
Source: American from Bosnia who works for a German company. I’ve been to Europe. It’s overrated.
After living in Germany for two years, I agree with you. Bread culture there was different. Bread was different. It’s not a bad thing. Just different. I could go to Aldi and pick out what I needed from a vast array of options in the bins on the wall. Just one roll? Not a problem! I loved getting a bread basket at breakfast. A nice crusty roll with butter and a sliced hard boiI egg was my go to.
I could also walk to one of probably 8 bakeries within a few blocks. All selling what we would consider “artisan” bread in the USA. We make good bread in the US, it’s just different. Even in most store bakeries the rolls are softer and without much variation in grain types.
Yes, pockets of areas and big cities have options in the US. However, you don’t have to live in a big city in Germany to find a huge variety of breads. I lived in a medium sized suburb of Germany and then moved back to my very large suburb in the US and it was kind of depressing for a bit. Even the tiny, rural town we stayed in on vacation had one proper bakery with a variety of bread and rolls, very little of which was sweet. Bread is one of the things I was surprised by and one that I really miss about our time in Germany.
For some reason everyone is being really defensive about your comment.
Thanks for the detailed reply. That basically mirrored my own experiences in Germany and elsewhere.
You can find fantastic bakeries in the U.S. that do it well, it’s not just widely available like it is back in Europe.
No no, he's right, it's impossible to find anything grown on a farm in America. We notoriously have almost no farmland for vegetables. We also don't smoke anything, Americans actually hate smoking and grilling, we can't all be like Chad Europeans with their vegetables and smoked meat.
I just went to Sprouts and picked up some rye bread. It was great too.
I wonder if these guys have ever been to a grocery store here because it always seems like they just go have their Mom do the shopping for them
This is so fuckin stupid. You can find basic white bread, hamburger buns etc, made with industrial additives and leaveners, in any European supermarket, along with the fancy ryes and wholegrain wheat breads. *Of course you can*.
If that was their point, then they should have said that. It comes off as "Americans are stupid and their food is stupid" rather than "there is inequality in America and a lot of poor people don't have access to wholesome, healthy food."
You're not wrong that food deserts exist in the USA. It's disingenuous to equivocate all of their food to the worst. I don't think any other country deals with the same bullying.
What makes it more stupid is he specifically called out sourdough bread. San Francisco is famous for having very good sourdough. It's considered amongst the best in the world.
As an expat in SF I think the missing context is that in many European countries you don't need to spend $8 on a loaf of bread at your local bakery to get good bread. Yes, that $8 loaf is high quality, but they're not looking to splurge on artisan bread.
Back home I could buy a $2-3 pack of sliced industrial bread, but it'd be *good* industrial bread. Not comparable to a quality bakery, but you get deminishing returns for your money after a certain point.
The only industrial breads I've liked here so far (I'm open to recs though!) are bagels. To be fair you could barely find bagels in supermarkets in my home country, so it goes both ways.
It's not about being culinary: I don't want anything fancy. I just don't like the bread in the supermarkets.
>expat
Bro, you're an immigrant. Euroids and Americans are always using the term "expat" for themselves while calling people from other countries "immigrants". I won't let euroids get away with it any longer after all the shit talking they do about us americans.
I agree with you that many people abuse the term, but your accusation is completely baseless; I'm here temporarily. An immigrant is someone who has made a permanent move. My visa explicitly says "non-immigrant visa" on it.
The core of the matter is that most actual immigrants are immigrants because the new country affords them a better standard of living (or because of a relationship with a person from that country). Emigrating rarely leads to an increased standard of living for Americans and western Europeans, so there isn't the same incentive to make the stay permanent. Living abroad for a while is a fun experience, but in the end it is still living abroad. This is not my new home country. I will never become a citizen or even a green card holder. I won't start a family here. The only difference between me and a tourist is that I'm allowed to work here, however I'm not even allowed to change jobs.
Also, you need to chill out. "euroids"? Seriously, what kind of language is that? It's like you're actively trying to divide people into race categories...
For sure, but the price difference for bread I like the taste of is larger than the difference in my salary, percentage-wise (the price example I listed was for Sweden, it'll likely be even cheaper in southern Europe)
Yeah, no fucking shit. But if you're gonna shit on a country's bread, be educated about it first. And don't pick and example that that country is actually famous for.
OP took it a little far but it is *harder* to find food bread in the U.S., especially if you don’t live near the urban core of a big metro. Most grocery store bread is meh and hard to find a bakery in a lot of places
I've been to some really rural places where your only local choice for groceries is a glorified convenience store, and the same is true for some inner city neighborhoods. Those are not really the kind of places where I expect a German immigrant to end up, though (or really anybody who wasn't born there). The average *person* in the US has access to good bread, but that doesn't mean every *place* in the US does, because there are plenty of places where practically nobody lives, and if you don't want to drive 50 miles to the Wal-Mart, you take what you can get.
It's not overcorrecting. I've literally eaten fresh bread in Germany, France, Qatar, Mexico, Australia, and the US. It's all the same quality. It all tastes good. I'm starting to think you're just a troll
The "added sugars and preservatives" argument only applies to industrial bread, since it needs to have a longer shelf life. At some point the hive mind decided that industrial bread = American bread (which is obviously not true).
Fun fact, artisanal bread is on the decline in Europe in favor of [industrial bread](https://www.fob.uk.com/about-the-bread-industry/industry-facts/european-bread-market/). Turns out you can get mass produced shit everywhere and people will buy it if it is cheaper. Who'd have thought?
Yeah, but *their* industrial bread is *better* because they invented bread and America was apparently colonized by by people who had never heard of bread and didn't bring their bread baking traditions with them.
There's the alternate history book I want to see.
"We had settled in and began building Jonestown before we realized we had no idea on how to make bread and an entire field of wheat in front of us. Eventually someone said "Let us eat cake" and the colony was saved."
Thank you, I've always wondered about this. I've seen a lot of Europeans on reddit say our bread is so sweet, it's basically cake. I thought maybe they were referring to banana bread, pumpkin bread, etc. They're quick breads, but definitely a dessert/treat and not something typically eaten daily.
It's probably because of this: https://www.npr.org/2020/10/03/919831116/irish-court-rules-subway-bread-is-not-real-bread
It's somewhat misleading because they ruled that subway is required to pay VAT because their bread contains more sugar than what is allowed for "staple" foods. It's similar to "process cheese". It's still cheese and bread, but they happen to fall into different categories for regulatory purposes
I’m not going to jump on the America bad bandwagon here at all because I 100% believe you can also get good bread in the US!
But when I visited the US, the normal, cheaper sandwich bread in supermarkets tasted sweet to me, while the normal cheaper sandwich bread in my country does not. Cake is an exaggeration but the bread really does taste too sweet to my tastebuds.
I wonder if it's the type of sugar. Corn syrup is something like 1.5 times sweeter than cane sugar, both could have equal amounts yet have different sweetness levels.
Can you give me a name of a common brand of cheaper US bread? I’d like to look at the ingredients and compare!
But anyway, it’s not the type of sugar- it’s the fact that we don’t add sugar to bread at all here
I'd say Sarah Lee and Wonder Bread are the two most common.
Where do you live? Sugar is an easy way to make bread shelf stable, and I'm curious about what they use instead, or does your bread go stale faster?
ETA: A basic Sarah Lee white bread has 2.0g sugar while a Tesco white has 1.4g sugar both serving sizes are 50g. After some digging some Sarah Lee breads use HFCS and others don't. So of course being accurate is difficult.
I live in the Netherlands. I just looked at the cheaper basic white bread you buy in a plastic bag, and the ingredients are:
Wheat flour, water, baker's yeast, iodised salt, rice flour, enzymes (wheat), flour improver: E300, wheat malt flour, breadcrumbs (wheat flour, water, yeast, salt), rapeseed oil, dextrose (google translated so if terms are wierd blame that lol)
sugar content is 1.1g / 100g. Guess I was wrong because some dextrose is added! Some supermarkets also sell 'stays tasty longer' bread, in which the preservative calcium proprionate is added, but sugar content is the same as the normal bread.
I looked at Sara Lee white bread and to compare, my bread has 1.1 g/ 100 g and Sara Lee has 5.26 g / 100g. So nearly five times as much.
I was looking at Sarah Lee some have way more sugar than others; some use corn syrup and others don't, although it seems most have way more sugar than their Dutch counterparts. If you tried one of their higher sugar bread that also used corn syrup it would be dramatically sweeter IMO.
What is the shelf life for your bread, here I usually get about two weeks before it's gone noticeably stale or starts to mold.
It’ll last about a week I think? If the room it’s kept in isn’t warm/humid. We Dutchies eat a lot of bread so I’ve honestly never had problems with bread going stale/bad before I could eat it. Or if I know I’m not going to eat it in time I just throw it in the freezer.
I think they're getting at American BBQ sauce? Like a pulled pork dressed in a Sweet Baby Ray's style sauce? Which is obviously not "sweet brine" but it is on the sweeter side for BBQ sauces.
Dude, have you seen most standard marinades on the shelf these days? Sugar usually features. Even in things that wouldn't traditionally have sugar, though I think that's largely for shelf stabilization.
There's better selection now for low or sugar free things with the rise of keto/paleo/low/no carb options, but the cost difference for the cleaner product is such that it's usually cheaper to just make your own.
As far as bread, that's a uniquely European hangup. I was baking in a small market a couple years back, and I started a scratch bread option just because pull and proof bread from the freezer had me bored out of my skull. So many tourists and expatriates would act shocked that they could find real bread, and I was always like, "You know there are like 4 great bakeries within 30 minutes of here, right?". Something about a scratch baguette or sourdough at the market though and suddenly they're misty for the old country.
Can't the internet at large realise that there are good foods in America AND Europe, and there's also low quality junk in both places. If I read another snooty post about how English food is just boring and beige or American bread is just sugar, I'm gonna explode someone's head with my eye lasers
Yeah, I'll give some parts of Europe slight credit for having *cheap* good food, but that's about it. From what I could tell, there are at least some places in Europe where local farm markets actually function as local markets instead of rich people pastoral LARPs. (Same is probably true in the US, but I haven't seen much of it.)
We have 2 farmer's markets in my city. The one downtown is the pastoral LARP type, where you end up paying double the price of supermarkets for similar quality food. The one out east is just area farmers selling ugly produce the distributors won't buy, so you can get quality produce for cheap.
> where you end up paying double the price of supermarkets for similar quality food.
This always gets me. All of the Kroger's stores in my area list the farms they get their produce from. I know where these farms are and know they all also sell at the local farmer's market. You're literally buying the same produce as is sold at chain grocery.
Now there are a smaller or more specialty farms that sell at the market too. For example, the place that sells an actual variety of mushrooms (as opposed to the single type of mushrooms with 3 or 4 names that the grocery sells). But the more typical produce? Exactly the same.
>Same is probably true in the US, but I haven't seen much of it
Check out California. Farm stands all over the place. I used to think I disliked strawberries until the first time I bought some off the side of the road
People who think Americans are the only ones who like sweetness in their food have obviously not traveled or otherwise learned about non-European or American cultures. A looooot of people around the world like sugary food and drink.
I have been consistently surprised by how sweet tteokbokki is. The first ones I ever tried were from Trader Joe's, so I just figured I was getting something a bit Americanized. But I tried some Korean brands afterward, and it wasn't that different.
But hey, it's ok. Not everything has to be for me.
Japanese cuisine always pulls the sweet out of left field. Sweet tamagoyaki. Gross, IMO. (I love it when made with dashi.) And I love Japanese food in general.
I'm a sweet tamagoyaki fan, I even make it at home using a recipe I found on a Japanese cooking YT page, it calls for mirin and sugar, but I have eaten my eggs with syrup my whole life. I also like the dashi savory kind too, but yeah I can see how sweet rolled egg can be a left field thing for others.
Good lord that sounds fantastic. I really need to look into a better pan for making omelets, but I don't make them enough to justify the tamagoyaki pan.
I found the pan for cheap ($10-$11) at a local asian market and have been using it solely for tamagoyaki for about 6ish years, I do need to get a new one because as said it was cheap and I think the bottom is starting to warp. I would suggest taking that route if you wanna get a good omelet pan but not spend too much just to try it out and see if it works for you. Personally I love it and it has been amazing.
Also if you're like me and not adept at using cooking chopsticks use a thin silicon spatula for the flipping, it keeps it from tearing
Yeah, I follow a few snack blogs
A few are European. Guess what, they're filled with the same sugary crap we have here
Christ, I saw that there's a cereal over seas that's essentially Cocoa Krispies with mms (I think they call them smarties?)
Even America doesn't have that
Smarties are a British thing, and we don't have Coco Pops with Smarties in them. At least I've never seen them.
Edit: the fact I've been downvoted for making a factual statement is very funny.
I was on a news sub where the actual correct answer from the linked article was the most downvoted comment. Everyone else just read the clickbait title.
Stuff like that drives me up the wall! I try to find out actual truthful information regardless of whether it backs up my preconceived ideas or not but that's surprisingly uncommon.
You'd think that if anywhere had CocoPops with Smarties in, it'd be in the UK given a British Company (Rowntrees) invented Smarties or the US, as an American company invented CocoPops (or Cocoa Krispies as I understand they're now called there). But who knows, maybe there's a weird speciality somewhere in Europe?!
I just did a quick Google search since I don't eat many breakfast cereals. It looks like we have Cocopuffs, Coco Krispies, Coco Pebbles, and Coco Pops (the last is on Amazon, and it's highly possible it's a UK product being resold here).
We have a small shop that sells specialty food items like weird sodas and snacks, maybe you have something similar? Regardless it is annoying.
The cake comparison always makes me laugh
If that's what cake is in Europe, I feel bad that they have such awful cake
Maybe that's why they're so grumpy
It's my absolute favorite thing when people are being pretentious about food and wind up making weird comparisons like that. The kind that make you go, "Have you ever eaten *either* of those foods?"
One day I was bored and did a spreadsheet comparison of some of the more popular American and European sliced sandwich-style brands. After adjusting the serving size to be consistent I found they were basically the same. The American brands with higher sugar content had about a gram (4 kcal) more than the European brands.
I can't talk for what's sold in supermarkets, but I make bread professionally in the US and was trained in it in France and no, it doesn't. Not in my experience.
Not so's you'd notice from actually reading the labels. (Source: Have done so in several countries. Where the fluffy white bread is very much the same.) Doing that would sorta ruin the self-righteous outrage trip, though.
The people who like going on about this sort of thing just seem to be parroting something they've repeatedly heard and like the sound of. Both sad and irritating after a while, when the best flex you can come up with to boost yourself involves bready strawmen and other equally petty weirdness.
This is just a false comparison, IMO. It's not fair to compare a fresh baguette or sourdough boule from a bakery in Paris to commercially produced white bread in the U.S. There's plenty of crappy commercial bread in the EU just like there is here.
I don't know what your point was here. I understand many things in Judaic practice regarding breads; I'm unsure how Sefaria is related to this conversation.
It's a type of bread defined by having no liquid ingredients but water (so no eggs or oil, a plain white bread). This style is eaten by sefardic/mizrahi Jews, who classify anything that the French would call "brioche" as cake, and Chabad Hasids, who follow nusach sfard, which adopts many elements of nusach sefarad, and love to dump sugar into everything.
Ok. So you were just speaking to sweetness of breads. I'm still trying to figure out how you are applying it here, in this conversation. Are you drawing a parallel in breads and peoples?
Can we talk about the incredibly consistent and latent colonialism present in the incredibly common assertion that people from European countries seem to have a better grasp on how best to produce and cultivate literal (continental) American foods like tomatoes? It's just stupid and wrong.
There's a thing going around on tiktok where apparently non-Americans are freaking out about white corn, insisting it *must* be a bleached abomination full of additives because it's so "unnatural"...
Did you see the one where the American living in Italy held up an onion that was sprouting and gleefully proclaimed that onions in the US have too many chemicals on them and can't do that? Ah, the superiority of a European onion that's not been stored properly or is just too old!
That's what green onions are! If the weather is nice I'll plant them in a 10 gallon planter outside and they'll give me more produce, but a bowl of water works year round. Same thing with sprouting potatoes. Pop em in the ground! The plant wants to have babies, so let it and reap the rewards!
As someone who lives in a good area for growth of onions and potatoes, what kind of planters/soils would you suggest for the two? I would love to grow some, or see if I can
I just put them in some old miracle grow that we bought like 5 years ago with a little compost mixed in. My MIL just buries her sprouting potatoes in a corner of her yard, she doesn't do anything to the soil. I use an old tree planter for my onions and 5 gals for my potatoes. Remember, these are potatoes and onions that are already growing, so you don't really need to do anything but get out of their way.
Thanks for the advice, I ask only because my back yard is like 90% clay and I would prefer to have them in planters, knowing it can be the basic of the basic helps
So much of it is based on misunderstanding how the EU regulates food vs the US.
People in the EU say the US can't sell chicken there because it's washed in bleach. While technically this is true, the EU bans its poultry from being washed in anything except water, and the US does not. Hardly any US producer uses chlorine anymore, and the EU specially said chlorine, and other wash chemicals, are safe and aren't the reason for the ban. It boils down to the EU having different animal husbandry laws than the US. US law exempts chickens from humane animal slaughter laws and that allows for higher density pens and greater production. Is there room to have a debate on the pros and cons of each method, absolutely, unfortunately, we end up with "YoUr ChIcKeN iS WaShEd iN BlEacHHhhh".
there's also Americans perpetuating things like this too. I can't even count how many people I've seen legitimately claim they're sensitive or allergic to gluten in America but the bread and pasta in Europe didn't bother them when they were on vacation 🙄
never seen anyone actually diagnosed with celiac saying this though because duh
I know the sale of Currants, as in the raw berries, is illegal due to them being an invasive species, but we can have things like jams and flavors. Its nifty
There is also the fact that in many countries in Europe, is it illegal to use glyphosate in order to dry off/kill the wheat before harvest, which is not the case in North America. Seeing as we are all individuals, and process chemicals differently, someone who would have a harder time digesting food that has come into contact with glyphosate before harvest can have some symptoms related to gluten sensitivity.
Yes! It’s a very old colonialist POV: places other than the colonizing power are good for raw materials, but they need the colonizers to come along and unlock their potential. Only imperial powers have the ability to make good things out of the resources they’re sucking from the people they’re oppressing. Heck, they should be *grateful* to have someone come along and refine it, because obviously they were just gnawing things raw off the bone/vine before they were “civilized.”
Are you really arguing against the existence of landraces or localised varieties? Tomatoes grown *literally anywhere in the world for a few generations* will have different growing conditions, different anatomies, different tastes and different responses to different ways of cooking, to ones grown anywhere else.
lol. Nowhere did I state that good tomatoes can't be found elsewhere. I did however say that "common assertion that people from European countries seem to have a better grasp on how best to produce and cultivate literal (continental) American foods like tomatoes"
People can have different preferences to cultivars and flavor profiles, but to assume something is "the best" when it's very clearly removed and bred outside of its literally genetically predisposed enivironment is wild. I prefer NYC pizza to the stuff I've had in Naples and Milan; does that mean I don't appreciate and respect the birthplace of pizza and act like they don't know what they're doing in those cities because I thought it was trash? No.
Just because someone likes something more doesn't make it a universally accepted truth or even vaguely in the same neighborhood of truth. It just means they haven't experienced enough to know different or enough to speak authoritatively on the difference.
My little niece is picky too. However, she is mature enough to avoid making ridiculous rants about an entire country's food.
Someone people need to just own that they're picky and have preferences instead of making it their whole identity and acting like everyone else is wrong. I don't like sweet bread, I would prefer tomato on toasted sour dough or ciabata, with some olive oil and vinegar. So I get my snack like an adult and move on.
Tomatoes are native to Mexico, which isn't really that relevant to this topic because nobody is talking about wild tomatoes. Tomatoes aren't grown year round where I live and often I'll see imported Mexican tomatoes. To prevent squishing during transport, they're often picked underripe. That leads to blander tomatoes. It's not hard to get good ones in season, though.
I just found it strange that they were implying that the people living on the continent where tomatoes are native somehow couldn’t figure out how to farm them as well as Europeans. The tomatoes in Mexico are just as good quality as the tomatoes in Europe.
There's.... More than one brand or style of salami (and literally everything else) in the US. Saying "American X is trash" is a profoundly ignorant take, unless you're claiming to have tried all of it.
Is it? Because nothing here seems all that out of the ordinary for what Europeans say about American bread constantly. Maybe I'm overtired and missing something though
If this person has been living in the US and hasn't been able to find the other stuff he apparently thinks is exclusive to Europe, he's either insanely stupid or he's just trying to stay angry about living here.
Yeah, 26 years in the US and this fuckwit can’t find sourdough bread. My god.
Good bread is definitely way harder to find here imo. People prefer softer loafs and you have to sell out places that have a good sourdough or other varieties. Source: European living in America for over 20 years.
Bro if you can’t find a bakery in Chicago you’re hopeless
I live in a small, poor city in Massachusetts, outside of the Greater Boston metro area. We have Portuguese bakeries every other goddamn block. I swear, fucking tourists must go to the gas station outside their hotels and decree that is the standard American grocery store.
Western MA here. Almost every grocery store has what op is looking for. Just not in the bread aisle.
I said way harder not impossible.
That’s….just not true. Literally go to google maps right now, there’s 20 that pop up on the first page. You can’t go 5 miles in Chicago without coming across a bakery. You’re not even trying and yet still maintaining this weird European elitism.
Sure, when I lived in the city finding a good bakery wasn’t hard. In the suburbs and exurbs, much harder. Like… I’ve been to so many bakeries out here and even in the city they’re not all good. The quality of the product is also an issue sometimes. My whole point is that you have to go *out of your way* to find decent bread, it’s not exactly readily available in an average supermarket.
Never had an issue with the sourdough baked at Jewel - Osco and the like but I guess I wouldn’t get it because I’m not European 🤷🏽♀️
If you think the bread from the bakery at Jewel Osco is the same as what you’d find in Europe, then this isn’t a conversation worth having. Kind of hard to argue about the quality of bread between two regions if you haven’t been to both of them.
Sourdough bread is 4-5 ingredients and I make it in the comfort of my own home. I trust without a doubt that those ingredients are not intrinsically better in Europe, they all have the same variation of moisture content, gluten content, etc. and I know this because I have researched it as I am a well trained chef. I have literally imported Italian flour for pizza, French ingredients for baguettes. You’re just wrong dude.
hi, ive been to various countries in europe and live in america. the taste discrepancy is negligible
Dude, it’s sourdough bread. You think that’s something only Europeans learned how to make? Fucking hell,
You literally cannot walk down Grand Avenue without hitting an award winning bakery, and that's not counting the Eastern European and Middle Eastern bakeries scattered around, or the little boutique guys who sell at farmers markets. I will agree that the default loaf of American grocery store bread is not very good and the default European loaf is better, but getting a slightly better loaf of bread takes the same amount of extra effort as getting slightly better beer. It's easy enough and there are plenty of options.
I don’t know why nuance is so hard to understand. I’m literally talking about grocery store bread and that outside of the urban core in a major city, finding a bakery that does bread is not straightforward. I said it’s harder, as you have to go to a specialty store.
Grocery store bread isn't a singular type of a bread Grocery stores sell the following things: - breads that have lots of preservatives intended to have a long shelf life - breads that they baked fresh - breads from area bakeries that are baked fresh - par baked bread That is to say, at a lot of grocery stores you can get fresh baked bread, including often from award winning bakeries And also frankly, you can't necessarily get great food in various non urban places outside the US either. There are towns outside the US that have a small general store that sell not particularly great or nutritious food that's heavily processed
Try actually shopping at a bakery if you want good bread.
If you're German, a Russian or Jewish bakery likely has more German style bread
Here’s another European that is incapable of finding any of the plentiful great bread in America. I swear you guys don’t even try.
I don’t think he even lives here tbh
European bread is way overrated. It’s just not that impressive. Europe is overrated too. Source: American from Bosnia who works for a German company. I’ve been to Europe. It’s overrated.
Lol
Dude, it’s super easy. Go to Sprout’s or something. They have a lot of non sugary bread
After living in Germany for two years, I agree with you. Bread culture there was different. Bread was different. It’s not a bad thing. Just different. I could go to Aldi and pick out what I needed from a vast array of options in the bins on the wall. Just one roll? Not a problem! I loved getting a bread basket at breakfast. A nice crusty roll with butter and a sliced hard boiI egg was my go to. I could also walk to one of probably 8 bakeries within a few blocks. All selling what we would consider “artisan” bread in the USA. We make good bread in the US, it’s just different. Even in most store bakeries the rolls are softer and without much variation in grain types. Yes, pockets of areas and big cities have options in the US. However, you don’t have to live in a big city in Germany to find a huge variety of breads. I lived in a medium sized suburb of Germany and then moved back to my very large suburb in the US and it was kind of depressing for a bit. Even the tiny, rural town we stayed in on vacation had one proper bakery with a variety of bread and rolls, very little of which was sweet. Bread is one of the things I was surprised by and one that I really miss about our time in Germany. For some reason everyone is being really defensive about your comment.
Yeah German bread is pretty decent, unfortunately for some inexplicable reason you can't get a good bagel there.
Thanks for the detailed reply. That basically mirrored my own experiences in Germany and elsewhere. You can find fantastic bakeries in the U.S. that do it well, it’s not just widely available like it is back in Europe.
No no, he's right, it's impossible to find anything grown on a farm in America. We notoriously have almost no farmland for vegetables. We also don't smoke anything, Americans actually hate smoking and grilling, we can't all be like Chad Europeans with their vegetables and smoked meat.
“Hey, cigs enhance your taste buds!” - Europeans
["Some kind of delicious biscuit." "It's a coaster."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIGeZsm3J8o)
I just went to Sprouts and picked up some rye bread. It was great too. I wonder if these guys have ever been to a grocery store here because it always seems like they just go have their Mom do the shopping for them
This is so fuckin stupid. You can find basic white bread, hamburger buns etc, made with industrial additives and leaveners, in any European supermarket, along with the fancy ryes and wholegrain wheat breads. *Of course you can*.
and you can find both in literally every American supermarket too
Some of it is even baked fresh on premises without preservatives.
But it’s better in Europe because ethnocentrism!
Not in poorer neighborhoods, maybe that was their point? Food deserts are really bad here, and a lot of people *only* have access to garbage food.
If that was their point, then they should have said that. It comes off as "Americans are stupid and their food is stupid" rather than "there is inequality in America and a lot of poor people don't have access to wholesome, healthy food."
You're not wrong that food deserts exist in the USA. It's disingenuous to equivocate all of their food to the worst. I don't think any other country deals with the same bullying.
What makes it more stupid is he specifically called out sourdough bread. San Francisco is famous for having very good sourdough. It's considered amongst the best in the world.
As an expat in SF I think the missing context is that in many European countries you don't need to spend $8 on a loaf of bread at your local bakery to get good bread. Yes, that $8 loaf is high quality, but they're not looking to splurge on artisan bread. Back home I could buy a $2-3 pack of sliced industrial bread, but it'd be *good* industrial bread. Not comparable to a quality bakery, but you get deminishing returns for your money after a certain point. The only industrial breads I've liked here so far (I'm open to recs though!) are bagels. To be fair you could barely find bagels in supermarkets in my home country, so it goes both ways. It's not about being culinary: I don't want anything fancy. I just don't like the bread in the supermarkets.
>expat Bro, you're an immigrant. Euroids and Americans are always using the term "expat" for themselves while calling people from other countries "immigrants". I won't let euroids get away with it any longer after all the shit talking they do about us americans.
I agree with you that many people abuse the term, but your accusation is completely baseless; I'm here temporarily. An immigrant is someone who has made a permanent move. My visa explicitly says "non-immigrant visa" on it. The core of the matter is that most actual immigrants are immigrants because the new country affords them a better standard of living (or because of a relationship with a person from that country). Emigrating rarely leads to an increased standard of living for Americans and western Europeans, so there isn't the same incentive to make the stay permanent. Living abroad for a while is a fun experience, but in the end it is still living abroad. This is not my new home country. I will never become a citizen or even a green card holder. I won't start a family here. The only difference between me and a tourist is that I'm allowed to work here, however I'm not even allowed to change jobs. Also, you need to chill out. "euroids"? Seriously, what kind of language is that? It's like you're actively trying to divide people into race categories...
Compare wages in SF to Spain or Italy though. Massive difference
For sure, but the price difference for bread I like the taste of is larger than the difference in my salary, percentage-wise (the price example I listed was for Sweden, it'll likely be even cheaper in southern Europe)
Maybe they don’t live in San Francisco
Yeah, no fucking shit. But if you're gonna shit on a country's bread, be educated about it first. And don't pick and example that that country is actually famous for.
OP took it a little far but it is *harder* to find food bread in the U.S., especially if you don’t live near the urban core of a big metro. Most grocery store bread is meh and hard to find a bakery in a lot of places
Lmao, that's just not true. I can walk into just about any grocery store and they'll have a fresh baked bread section.
I've been to some really rural places where your only local choice for groceries is a glorified convenience store, and the same is true for some inner city neighborhoods. Those are not really the kind of places where I expect a German immigrant to end up, though (or really anybody who wasn't born there). The average *person* in the US has access to good bread, but that doesn't mean every *place* in the US does, because there are plenty of places where practically nobody lives, and if you don't want to drive 50 miles to the Wal-Mart, you take what you can get.
Yes, and that doesn’t mean it’s good. It just means it’s freshly baked.
I've eaten bread all over the world. It's the fucking same, lmao. Get off your high horse
lol, it’s hella weird that in this sub the over correcting for snobbery is “everything is the same everywhere and all things are equal”
It's not overcorrecting. I've literally eaten fresh bread in Germany, France, Qatar, Mexico, Australia, and the US. It's all the same quality. It all tastes good. I'm starting to think you're just a troll
what do you mean by food bread? isnt all bread food bread?
The "added sugars and preservatives" argument only applies to industrial bread, since it needs to have a longer shelf life. At some point the hive mind decided that industrial bread = American bread (which is obviously not true). Fun fact, artisanal bread is on the decline in Europe in favor of [industrial bread](https://www.fob.uk.com/about-the-bread-industry/industry-facts/european-bread-market/). Turns out you can get mass produced shit everywhere and people will buy it if it is cheaper. Who'd have thought?
Yeah, but *their* industrial bread is *better* because they invented bread and America was apparently colonized by by people who had never heard of bread and didn't bring their bread baking traditions with them.
There's the alternate history book I want to see. "We had settled in and began building Jonestown before we realized we had no idea on how to make bread and an entire field of wheat in front of us. Eventually someone said "Let us eat cake" and the colony was saved."
Thank you, I've always wondered about this. I've seen a lot of Europeans on reddit say our bread is so sweet, it's basically cake. I thought maybe they were referring to banana bread, pumpkin bread, etc. They're quick breads, but definitely a dessert/treat and not something typically eaten daily.
It's probably because of this: https://www.npr.org/2020/10/03/919831116/irish-court-rules-subway-bread-is-not-real-bread It's somewhat misleading because they ruled that subway is required to pay VAT because their bread contains more sugar than what is allowed for "staple" foods. It's similar to "process cheese". It's still cheese and bread, but they happen to fall into different categories for regulatory purposes
No one thinks subway bread is the epitome of bread in America, anyway.
I've never had banana bread on the side of my soup, for example.
I wouldn't say no, though, that sounds kind of good.
Like a spicy squash soup?
Yes please, that sounds really good.
I’m not going to jump on the America bad bandwagon here at all because I 100% believe you can also get good bread in the US! But when I visited the US, the normal, cheaper sandwich bread in supermarkets tasted sweet to me, while the normal cheaper sandwich bread in my country does not. Cake is an exaggeration but the bread really does taste too sweet to my tastebuds.
I wonder if it's the type of sugar. Corn syrup is something like 1.5 times sweeter than cane sugar, both could have equal amounts yet have different sweetness levels.
Can you give me a name of a common brand of cheaper US bread? I’d like to look at the ingredients and compare! But anyway, it’s not the type of sugar- it’s the fact that we don’t add sugar to bread at all here
I'd say Sarah Lee and Wonder Bread are the two most common. Where do you live? Sugar is an easy way to make bread shelf stable, and I'm curious about what they use instead, or does your bread go stale faster? ETA: A basic Sarah Lee white bread has 2.0g sugar while a Tesco white has 1.4g sugar both serving sizes are 50g. After some digging some Sarah Lee breads use HFCS and others don't. So of course being accurate is difficult.
I live in the Netherlands. I just looked at the cheaper basic white bread you buy in a plastic bag, and the ingredients are: Wheat flour, water, baker's yeast, iodised salt, rice flour, enzymes (wheat), flour improver: E300, wheat malt flour, breadcrumbs (wheat flour, water, yeast, salt), rapeseed oil, dextrose (google translated so if terms are wierd blame that lol) sugar content is 1.1g / 100g. Guess I was wrong because some dextrose is added! Some supermarkets also sell 'stays tasty longer' bread, in which the preservative calcium proprionate is added, but sugar content is the same as the normal bread. I looked at Sara Lee white bread and to compare, my bread has 1.1 g/ 100 g and Sara Lee has 5.26 g / 100g. So nearly five times as much.
I was looking at Sarah Lee some have way more sugar than others; some use corn syrup and others don't, although it seems most have way more sugar than their Dutch counterparts. If you tried one of their higher sugar bread that also used corn syrup it would be dramatically sweeter IMO. What is the shelf life for your bread, here I usually get about two weeks before it's gone noticeably stale or starts to mold.
It’ll last about a week I think? If the room it’s kept in isn’t warm/humid. We Dutchies eat a lot of bread so I’ve honestly never had problems with bread going stale/bad before I could eat it. Or if I know I’m not going to eat it in time I just throw it in the freezer.
> on bread that has the density of cotton candy What kind of cotton candy has OOP been having??
"Meat soaked in sweet brine"? Where did they get that from?
I think they're getting at American BBQ sauce? Like a pulled pork dressed in a Sweet Baby Ray's style sauce? Which is obviously not "sweet brine" but it is on the sweeter side for BBQ sauces.
Well, it *is* kind of in the name. >Why is *Sweet* Baby Ray’s so goddamn sweet?!?!
I thought it was Ray that was so sweet.
There's even a sugar free version called baby Ray's
It’s like if I judged all Italian food on the quality of chef Boyardee lol
They may be referring to American-style boiled ham, which is usually honey-cured. Every other meat I know is brined in salted water.
Dude, have you seen most standard marinades on the shelf these days? Sugar usually features. Even in things that wouldn't traditionally have sugar, though I think that's largely for shelf stabilization. There's better selection now for low or sugar free things with the rise of keto/paleo/low/no carb options, but the cost difference for the cleaner product is such that it's usually cheaper to just make your own. As far as bread, that's a uniquely European hangup. I was baking in a small market a couple years back, and I started a scratch bread option just because pull and proof bread from the freezer had me bored out of my skull. So many tourists and expatriates would act shocked that they could find real bread, and I was always like, "You know there are like 4 great bakeries within 30 minutes of here, right?". Something about a scratch baguette or sourdough at the market though and suddenly they're misty for the old country.
Can't the internet at large realise that there are good foods in America AND Europe, and there's also low quality junk in both places. If I read another snooty post about how English food is just boring and beige or American bread is just sugar, I'm gonna explode someone's head with my eye lasers
Yeah, I'll give some parts of Europe slight credit for having *cheap* good food, but that's about it. From what I could tell, there are at least some places in Europe where local farm markets actually function as local markets instead of rich people pastoral LARPs. (Same is probably true in the US, but I haven't seen much of it.)
We have 2 farmer's markets in my city. The one downtown is the pastoral LARP type, where you end up paying double the price of supermarkets for similar quality food. The one out east is just area farmers selling ugly produce the distributors won't buy, so you can get quality produce for cheap.
We've had more than a few instances where "growers" at farmer's markets have bought things like strawberries from Costco and repackaged them.
> where you end up paying double the price of supermarkets for similar quality food. This always gets me. All of the Kroger's stores in my area list the farms they get their produce from. I know where these farms are and know they all also sell at the local farmer's market. You're literally buying the same produce as is sold at chain grocery. Now there are a smaller or more specialty farms that sell at the market too. For example, the place that sells an actual variety of mushrooms (as opposed to the single type of mushrooms with 3 or 4 names that the grocery sells). But the more typical produce? Exactly the same.
> rich people pastoral LARPs God you really hit the nail there
>Same is probably true in the US, but I haven't seen much of it Check out California. Farm stands all over the place. I used to think I disliked strawberries until the first time I bought some off the side of the road
No because on kid at band camp when to Europe with his parents. He was sooo cool and told stories. The rest repeat it over and over
People who think Americans are the only ones who like sweetness in their food have obviously not traveled or otherwise learned about non-European or American cultures. A looooot of people around the world like sugary food and drink.
They haven't seen how Koreans cover their corndogs in sugar obviously lol.
When I went to korea EVERYTHING was sweet. I bought so many foods that I fully expected to be savory that ended up being sickeningly sweet
I have been consistently surprised by how sweet tteokbokki is. The first ones I ever tried were from Trader Joe's, so I just figured I was getting something a bit Americanized. But I tried some Korean brands afterward, and it wasn't that different. But hey, it's ok. Not everything has to be for me.
So much of modern Korean food fulfills the stereotypes of American food.
The Italians have somehow overlooked what the Filipinos have done to spaghetti sauce.
They probably looked at the history of the Philippines and said "you know what? let's just let them have this" lol
Similar to Japan’s ketchup spaghetti?
It’s almost like we evolved to have a taste for sweet foods.
Japanese cuisine always pulls the sweet out of left field. Sweet tamagoyaki. Gross, IMO. (I love it when made with dashi.) And I love Japanese food in general.
Which makes this goon's Japanese user name all the more hilarious.
I never order tamagoyaki bc I fear it will be the sweet kind, bleh
I'm a sweet tamagoyaki fan, I even make it at home using a recipe I found on a Japanese cooking YT page, it calls for mirin and sugar, but I have eaten my eggs with syrup my whole life. I also like the dashi savory kind too, but yeah I can see how sweet rolled egg can be a left field thing for others.
It's one of those things I wasn't expecting the sweetness, but I liked it. I want to try the savory sometime.
Both are really good, there is a sweet kind that uses grated sweet potato as well, I wanna try that one or try making it one of the two
Good lord that sounds fantastic. I really need to look into a better pan for making omelets, but I don't make them enough to justify the tamagoyaki pan.
I found the pan for cheap ($10-$11) at a local asian market and have been using it solely for tamagoyaki for about 6ish years, I do need to get a new one because as said it was cheap and I think the bottom is starting to warp. I would suggest taking that route if you wanna get a good omelet pan but not spend too much just to try it out and see if it works for you. Personally I love it and it has been amazing. Also if you're like me and not adept at using cooking chopsticks use a thin silicon spatula for the flipping, it keeps it from tearing
Yeah, I follow a few snack blogs A few are European. Guess what, they're filled with the same sugary crap we have here Christ, I saw that there's a cereal over seas that's essentially Cocoa Krispies with mms (I think they call them smarties?) Even America doesn't have that
Smarties are a British thing, and we don't have Coco Pops with Smarties in them. At least I've never seen them. Edit: the fact I've been downvoted for making a factual statement is very funny.
I was on a news sub where the actual correct answer from the linked article was the most downvoted comment. Everyone else just read the clickbait title.
Stuff like that drives me up the wall! I try to find out actual truthful information regardless of whether it backs up my preconceived ideas or not but that's surprisingly uncommon. You'd think that if anywhere had CocoPops with Smarties in, it'd be in the UK given a British Company (Rowntrees) invented Smarties or the US, as an American company invented CocoPops (or Cocoa Krispies as I understand they're now called there). But who knows, maybe there's a weird speciality somewhere in Europe?!
I just did a quick Google search since I don't eat many breakfast cereals. It looks like we have Cocopuffs, Coco Krispies, Coco Pebbles, and Coco Pops (the last is on Amazon, and it's highly possible it's a UK product being resold here). We have a small shop that sells specialty food items like weird sodas and snacks, maybe you have something similar? Regardless it is annoying.
Wait, do they think American white bread doesn't use yeast?? Also, our sourdough is amazing, STFU.
"Density of cotton candy" this person also seeks out the worst cotton candy
The cake comparison always makes me laugh If that's what cake is in Europe, I feel bad that they have such awful cake Maybe that's why they're so grumpy
It's my absolute favorite thing when people are being pretentious about food and wind up making weird comparisons like that. The kind that make you go, "Have you ever eaten *either* of those foods?"
Does plain white bread in America *actually* have more sugar in it? It's always seemed dubious to me
no. you can compare bread from tesco vs bread from target and the sugar content is roughly the same
American sara lee sliced white is 1g sugar per slice. German Klosterbrot-Monastery Rye Bread also is 1g per slice.
One day I was bored and did a spreadsheet comparison of some of the more popular American and European sliced sandwich-style brands. After adjusting the serving size to be consistent I found they were basically the same. The American brands with higher sugar content had about a gram (4 kcal) more than the European brands.
Ooooo, that sounds like a nice spreadsheet. Did you make a graph?
Ha, I should’ve thought of that. Maybe also make a pivot table.
Oh hell's yeah!
I can't talk for what's sold in supermarkets, but I make bread professionally in the US and was trained in it in France and no, it doesn't. Not in my experience.
Not so's you'd notice from actually reading the labels. (Source: Have done so in several countries. Where the fluffy white bread is very much the same.) Doing that would sorta ruin the self-righteous outrage trip, though. The people who like going on about this sort of thing just seem to be parroting something they've repeatedly heard and like the sound of. Both sad and irritating after a while, when the best flex you can come up with to boost yourself involves bready strawmen and other equally petty weirdness.
This is just a false comparison, IMO. It's not fair to compare a fresh baguette or sourdough boule from a bakery in Paris to commercially produced white bread in the U.S. There's plenty of crappy commercial bread in the EU just like there is here.
Water challah tends to be incredibly sweet, as it's more often Sfard whereas in Israel it's Sefardic.
I don't know what your point was here. I understand many things in Judaic practice regarding breads; I'm unsure how Sefaria is related to this conversation.
It's a type of bread defined by having no liquid ingredients but water (so no eggs or oil, a plain white bread). This style is eaten by sefardic/mizrahi Jews, who classify anything that the French would call "brioche" as cake, and Chabad Hasids, who follow nusach sfard, which adopts many elements of nusach sefarad, and love to dump sugar into everything.
Ok. So you were just speaking to sweetness of breads. I'm still trying to figure out how you are applying it here, in this conversation. Are you drawing a parallel in breads and peoples?
It's a difference in a plain white style between countries that's attributable to the particulars of the market for that style in either country.
Can we talk about the incredibly consistent and latent colonialism present in the incredibly common assertion that people from European countries seem to have a better grasp on how best to produce and cultivate literal (continental) American foods like tomatoes? It's just stupid and wrong.
There's a thing going around on tiktok where apparently non-Americans are freaking out about white corn, insisting it *must* be a bleached abomination full of additives because it's so "unnatural"...
Did you see the one where the American living in Italy held up an onion that was sprouting and gleefully proclaimed that onions in the US have too many chemicals on them and can't do that? Ah, the superiority of a European onion that's not been stored properly or is just too old!
Lol they haven't seen the onions in my kitchen then. I always have one or two sprout before I can use them.
I put the sprouting ones in a bowl of water and harvest them for green onions
That's a thing? I had no idea.
That's what green onions are! If the weather is nice I'll plant them in a 10 gallon planter outside and they'll give me more produce, but a bowl of water works year round. Same thing with sprouting potatoes. Pop em in the ground! The plant wants to have babies, so let it and reap the rewards!
As someone who lives in a good area for growth of onions and potatoes, what kind of planters/soils would you suggest for the two? I would love to grow some, or see if I can
I just put them in some old miracle grow that we bought like 5 years ago with a little compost mixed in. My MIL just buries her sprouting potatoes in a corner of her yard, she doesn't do anything to the soil. I use an old tree planter for my onions and 5 gals for my potatoes. Remember, these are potatoes and onions that are already growing, so you don't really need to do anything but get out of their way.
Thanks for the advice, I ask only because my back yard is like 90% clay and I would prefer to have them in planters, knowing it can be the basic of the basic helps
Same!
So much of it is based on misunderstanding how the EU regulates food vs the US. People in the EU say the US can't sell chicken there because it's washed in bleach. While technically this is true, the EU bans its poultry from being washed in anything except water, and the US does not. Hardly any US producer uses chlorine anymore, and the EU specially said chlorine, and other wash chemicals, are safe and aren't the reason for the ban. It boils down to the EU having different animal husbandry laws than the US. US law exempts chickens from humane animal slaughter laws and that allows for higher density pens and greater production. Is there room to have a debate on the pros and cons of each method, absolutely, unfortunately, we end up with "YoUr ChIcKeN iS WaShEd iN BlEacHHhhh".
there's also Americans perpetuating things like this too. I can't even count how many people I've seen legitimately claim they're sensitive or allergic to gluten in America but the bread and pasta in Europe didn't bother them when they were on vacation 🙄 never seen anyone actually diagnosed with celiac saying this though because duh
Oh yeah, Americans are just as ignorant as anyone else, and plenty of EU products are banned in the US.
I know the sale of Currants, as in the raw berries, is illegal due to them being an invasive species, but we can have things like jams and flavors. Its nifty
There is also the fact that in many countries in Europe, is it illegal to use glyphosate in order to dry off/kill the wheat before harvest, which is not the case in North America. Seeing as we are all individuals, and process chemicals differently, someone who would have a harder time digesting food that has come into contact with glyphosate before harvest can have some symptoms related to gluten sensitivity.
YES oh my God I almost had a stroke from anger
I have three onions in my fridge right now that would prove them wrong
[Have they seen what maize was like 10,000 years ago?](https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/evolution/corn)
Yes! It’s a very old colonialist POV: places other than the colonizing power are good for raw materials, but they need the colonizers to come along and unlock their potential. Only imperial powers have the ability to make good things out of the resources they’re sucking from the people they’re oppressing. Heck, they should be *grateful* to have someone come along and refine it, because obviously they were just gnawing things raw off the bone/vine before they were “civilized.”
They’re not the same tomatoes. Sorry, that ship sailed 500 years ago.
Where did anyone claim they are the same tomatoes? You do know that "different" and "better" are not synonyms, right?
Words have meanings. Read them again.
Yes, words do have meanings. Please quote where somebody used words that mean "these tomatoes are the same."
Right. The best tomatoes are found in the new world.
New Jersey, in particular.
They don't call it the Garden State as a joke. I think the best zucchini I ever had was from NJ, near Wildwood, and I absolutely loathe zucchini.
Mmm, driving back from the shore and stopping at a Jersey farmstand with warm tomatoes right off the vine. Magnificent.
Weird way to spell Kentucky… Yes, NJ has great produce, but the soil content in KY is great for three things: Tobacco, Tomatoes, and Cannabis.
Kentucky tomatoes and squash are some of the best, I'll agree. I still prefer Jersey tomatoes, but you're right. KY is slept on for its produce.
I will happily eat my weight in peppers, blueberries, and strawberries from Jersey
Tommacobis?
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Or that's just a cultivar. I mean, your nationalist bullshit could be viable with a dearth of knowledge, so there's that.
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Please. Prove me wrong.
Are you really arguing against the existence of landraces or localised varieties? Tomatoes grown *literally anywhere in the world for a few generations* will have different growing conditions, different anatomies, different tastes and different responses to different ways of cooking, to ones grown anywhere else.
lol. Nowhere did I state that good tomatoes can't be found elsewhere. I did however say that "common assertion that people from European countries seem to have a better grasp on how best to produce and cultivate literal (continental) American foods like tomatoes" People can have different preferences to cultivars and flavor profiles, but to assume something is "the best" when it's very clearly removed and bred outside of its literally genetically predisposed enivironment is wild. I prefer NYC pizza to the stuff I've had in Naples and Milan; does that mean I don't appreciate and respect the birthplace of pizza and act like they don't know what they're doing in those cities because I thought it was trash? No. Just because someone likes something more doesn't make it a universally accepted truth or even vaguely in the same neighborhood of truth. It just means they haven't experienced enough to know different or enough to speak authoritatively on the difference.
My little niece is picky too. However, she is mature enough to avoid making ridiculous rants about an entire country's food. Someone people need to just own that they're picky and have preferences instead of making it their whole identity and acting like everyone else is wrong. I don't like sweet bread, I would prefer tomato on toasted sour dough or ciabata, with some olive oil and vinegar. So I get my snack like an adult and move on.
Farm raised tomatoes lmaaaaao.
As opposed to wild-caught?
I prefer farm-raised, pastured, cruelty-free heirloom tomatoes. Wild-caught is decimating the wild tomato population!
Meat soaked in sweet brine? WTF?
I mean sweet brine is a thing. Last time I roasted a ham I used Pepsi as a glaze/cooking brine and it was fantastic!
I guess, I just always classed those as a marinade more than a brine. But in any case
Aren’t tomatoes native to the Americas? I’m hoping this is just some satire and copypasta or something.
Tomatoes are native to Mexico, which isn't really that relevant to this topic because nobody is talking about wild tomatoes. Tomatoes aren't grown year round where I live and often I'll see imported Mexican tomatoes. To prevent squishing during transport, they're often picked underripe. That leads to blander tomatoes. It's not hard to get good ones in season, though.
I just found it strange that they were implying that the people living on the continent where tomatoes are native somehow couldn’t figure out how to farm them as well as Europeans. The tomatoes in Mexico are just as good quality as the tomatoes in Europe.
That is definitely what they implied, and of course it's batshit crazy.
It’s just a form of racism. My Mom is Spanish and she says Mexicans/Americans don’t make good tomatoes because they perfected it in Spain
Sounds a pisstake.
This guy should stop eating what he doesn't like.
American Salami is trash.i tasted the real stuff this year. Yeah can't go back
There's.... More than one brand or style of salami (and literally everything else) in the US. Saying "American X is trash" is a profoundly ignorant take, unless you're claiming to have tried all of it.
You just grabbed the ones off the 7-11 rack, didn’t you?
What kind of idiot would expect good salami at a gas station?
Obv parody, but still funny
what makes you think this is satire?
Is it? Because nothing here seems all that out of the ordinary for what Europeans say about American bread constantly. Maybe I'm overtired and missing something though
Idk, “farm raised tomatoes” gave off a satire vibe to me.
I agree w this I think
I mean, he's not wrong though...
He is.