Irish Court Says Subway Bread Is Too Sugary to Be Called 'Bread'
foodandwine.com
foodandwine.com
Ok, it's interesting that the law in Ireland requires a 2% or less baker's weight of sugar. And I do enjoy a good sourdough, which isn't made with any sugar, or just a pinch.
But my favourite sandwich bread is Japanese milk bread, it's soft, lovely crumb, and it browns beautifully in the pan.
It's got a lot of sugar in it, that's the secret. A random recipe I found says 18% baker's weight, which seems accurate.
Are we pretending that polysaccharides are the staff of life, but when you get down to disaccharides they become the Devil? The glycemic index of white flour is dire, I doubt adding sugar is going to move the needle.
Sugar in dough makes it soft, with a giving crumb, and a crust which can be brown without becoming hard.
Exactly what you want in a sandwich filled with toppings, so that they don't shoot out the back when you bite into it.
Clutch your pearls all you want about 'Subway misrepresenting healthy food'! They publish the macros of their sandwiches. It's not nearly so healthy as eggs scrambled in butter, there's a ton of carbs and not nearly enough fat.
Unless you think it's the other way around that's healthy. It's your stomach, you get to pick.
Also, I wouldn't use "It can only be metabolized by the liver" as evidence of fructose's carbohydrate status: a) that has nothing to do with the definitions, and the statement is true for a very large number of molecules.
> Under one percent of ingested fructose is directly converted to plasma triglyceride.[2] 29% - 54% of fructose is converted in liver to glucose, and about a quarter of fructose is converted to lactate. 15% - 18% is converted to glycogen.[3] Glucose and lactate are then used normally as energy to fuel cells all over the body.
edit: [1]https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/joim.12993
That's sixty grams of sugar, or about 55 of high fructose corn syrup. Can't be more than 200 grams of flour in a twelve-inch subway, so twenty grams of sugar?
You'll be fine. Just, maybe don't get that fountain drink to go with it...
Absorb or metabolize?
I'd be interested in seeing any references for what you're talking about. I've heard before that fructose can lead to problems in excess, so it would be great to know some quantative guidelines for safe consumption.
https://www.climbingnutrition.com/diet/fructose/
There are some references as links, would be nice to find something drier with a thicket of refs at the bottom.
As usual, Le Wik delivers, though I'd enjoy seeing this section expanded:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fructose#Fructose_digestion_an...
Isn't carb an abbreviation of carbohydrate, which in turn is a synonym of saccharide?
How come fructose is a monosaccharide but not functionally a "carb"?
Functionally => how it functions, how it interacts with something else, c.f. "functional testing" :) Unsure if this is nutritional terminology or just HN-reader terminology.
My riposte here is that the Irish definition of bread doesn't comport with many delicious baked goods I would be happy to call bread, and eat with cheese and some cold cuts. I'm glad you appreciated it.
This isn't that unusual; Germans refuse to call many tasty beverages 'beer', and I'm sure this suits the Irish just fine.
We could just tax it all equally (plenty of folks making good money eat at Subway) and ensure that the people have enough money to get by. But instead, governments around the world create these Rube Goldberg machines that require a court to define what bread is.
You can also use sales tax to nudge people into buying more healthy food. The fact that hamburgers and chips are cheaper than a salad and fruit is something you can correct somewhat by moving junk food to the higher sales tax.
And I personally also think that the judges might have taken into account that this seems like yet another multinational that wants a tax cut over the heads of the normal companies. The news that Mr President pays nickles and dimes as income tax where John Doe pays tenfold nicely paints the picture...
But your comment essentially boils down to fix poverty. People have been trying to do that for a long time. Situation is improving in some places but we are still not even close to be there.
So until we fix poverty, workarounds like this provide real help to real people.
You wouldn't need legal definitions for obvious things like that if people didn't constantly try to wring every last drop of profit out of each other by twisting things this way and that. Them's the roots of the "Rude Goldberg" machines in your comment: people getting creative to make a pig's meal of perfectly sensible laws that are there for a reason other than help folks maximise their profits by selling hot bullshit on a stick.
Exactly. If you add enough salt, sugar, and fat you can make anything taste good, regardless of whether it's actually "food".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Sugar_Fat:_How_the_Food...
Take the FIA’s technical regulations of F1 as a non-political example. They’re long and get longer every year, primarily because they have to address issues like having a mass damper mounted inside the chassis defined a “moving aerodynamic part”, but a giant fan on the back of the car not defined as a “moving aerodynamic part”.
I think it’s important for people to pay attention to, because when you hear somebody like a politician speaking, you might think that you know what all the words they’re saying mean, but there’s a good chance that you actually don’t.
This is about the "statutory definition of bread" for the purposes of being considered a "staple food" for tax purposes.
The only reason this is of any interest at all is because it makes fun of how sweet mass-market American bread tends to be. "Your bread's so sweet the Irish government doesn't consider it bread!" Which is a fun point that I wholeheartedly endorse, but it doesn't make any difference to what we call "bread" in everyday life.
I just went and looked at the Irish Tesco’s website, and plenty of the sliced bread they’re selling exceeds 2% sugar by weight. So if you were an Irish voter and you once heard a politician say “I’m going to make bread 0% VAT”, you could have easily been fooled into thinking that included the bread you get in your grocery shopping, when perhaps it doesn’t.
Why are all that other stuff in sliced "bread", then? Probably because they improve shelf life or make the product resemble some ideal of "bread" that has been created by marketing teams and promoted by advertisements showing fake bread behaving in a certain way in different cooking conditions (oooh, look at how crisp those bread slices are as they pop out of the toaster!) (wait, why does your toaster have a strobing red light slit?).
In short, that sliced "bread" is not bread, it's a product that masquerades as bread for the purpose of being sold to people who want to buy actual bread. It's like a, a, a mimetic parasite that pretends to be one kind of animal when it is another so that it can more easily approach its host. It's like a cookoo egg that will hatch to a cookoo fledgling that will throw all other eggs outside the nest so it can hogg their parents' attention. It's like a synthetic hormone, or protein, that binds onto the receptors that are meant for the real thing and inhibits the real thing's action. It replaces true bread in the baskets and the bellies and the minds of people, until nobody buys true bread anymore becase it looks ...weird and not like what they're now used to call bread, and everybody buys that fake bread shit instead, that the fake bread makers prefer to sell over true bread, because it makes them more money.
Sure, that sort of stuff should not be allowed to be sold as bread in the first place. It should be forced to have big, red labels on its packaging stating clearly "THIS IS NOT REAL BREAD". When consumer goes to supermarket to buy bread, because they want to buy bread, they should be informed that what they are about to buy is not bread- then they can make their choice whether to buy it or not.
There’s fairly obvious qualitative difference between a handmade sourdough and a loaf of supermarket bread, but they’re both bread.
Also, it’s pretty easy to make a fantastic, lovingly crafted loaf of bread by hand that ends up having more than 2% sugar.
In any case, let me be clear: I didn't say anything about Nikes not being true shoes. My comment is about fake bread. I also didn't say anything about who makes bread and for how long it's made. My comment is about ingredients added to fake bread that are not needed to make bread and are only needed to produce a product of inferior quality to true bread so that this product can be sold at a cut price and displace true bread in consumers' baskets etc.
This comment is just ignorant of how modern food science works. All of the ingredients in mass-produced bread exist to improve the quality of the product. They exist to improve the texture (try recreating that texture at home, you won’t be able to), to improve the moisture content, to improve the nutritional value (eg, all of the vitamins added to fortified flour), and to improve the shelf life.
You’re free to not like it, and it would be reasonable to say it’s not ‘traditional bread’. But traditional bread didn’t contain yeast monocultures either, so most breads won’t meet that standard. What you have is a very niche opinion, and it would be equally valid to say that adding extraneous ingredients like seeds or yeast makes something ‘fake bread’.
I don't need to recreate the texture of fake bread. I can make my own bread and it has a great texture that is exactly like the texture of the bread I've eaten all of my life, straight from the baker's. I don't know why you need to improve the moisture content of bread either, the moisture content of real bread is just fine. As to fortifying bread with vitamins- why ever would I need that? I eat plenty of vegetables and fruit, as well as meat and pulses and so on and I don't need my diet supplemented with vitamins in bread, of all things. As to shelf life, the only reason that fake bread lasts longer is so that it can stay on the shelf longer and be sold for longer. I don't care about that, neither does anyone I know. Like I say it's only meant to maximise the seller's profit.
Like I say in my other comment, fake bread is fake and real bread is real and I'm afraid that the only reason we're having this conversation is because fake food is so common it's taken the place of real food and many people think it's normal. It isn't- it's overprocessed shit of the lowest possible quality.
Also, please note that I never said anything about seeds, or yeasts, etc, ingredients that are common in real bread.
Also, just to point out a factual error. Most of the sliced bread in the supermarket is sold the same day it’s baked. The added shelf life is so that it lasts longer once you’ve taken it home.
I personally love to bake, but I don’t bake bread that often because I can’t eat a loaf of homemade bread before it goes stale.
What an awful conversational style. I specifically said that sliced bread in particular is fake bread, not that the bread I don't like to eat is fake bread. You keep over-interpreting my comments and coming up with things I never said.
And what you say about fake bread being baked the day it is sold is wrong, or at least it is in my neck of the woords (the UK).
Nothing in mass-produced anything exists to improve quality. The economics of mass-production only work if quality is reduced with respect to small-scale production. Because when you mass-produce something, you want to sell it to as many people as possible. And in order to sell something to as many people as possible, you have to make it as cheap as possible, or most people won't buy it. But, to make something cheap you have to reduce its quality, because good quality costs a lot of money - and if you're mass-producing something you have real low margins because you're counting on selling as much of it as possible to make a profit, so you have to choose the cheapest ingredients. And so quality goes out the window.
Edit: typo
But German beer having a bad reputation in the world? Which part of the world would that be? Really curious.
Belgium, next door, has a couple thousand more, also of high quality, across a much wider field.
Honestly an unfair competition, but it's how Germans like it, I suppose.
I my view the "Reinheitsgebot" as it is called is just a way to ensure that this is a basic product where everybody knows what's inside, so more of a quality standard than a taste standard.
The large industrial breweries and their products dominate the market and the majority of German beer drinkers probably don’t really care about (and likely couldn’t tell apart) the type or specific taste of their beer, as long as it’s beer.
However, the quality of German industrial beers is still very good. It’s just that they mostly taste the same, especially those of the Pilsner variety.
Nevertheless, even though they don’t dominate the market there’s a flourishing, often centuries old, tradition of highly diverse, local brews and plenty of different types of beers.
In the last decade or so, mostly due to the craft beer trend in the US and the UK, there’s also been a growing number of modern craft beer and micro breweries.
I'd like to know if the thing that I'm going to buy will taste sweet or not and I treat, it having name 'bread', as a good indicator that it will taste rather salty than sweet.
Originally that essentially meant hops, wheat, water. Nowadays it may also include sugar, natural color enhancing, salt and simple preservatives.
Many "tasty beverages you would call beer in the US" barely qualify for a drink in germany, either because it tastes like water with a drop of beer or has almost no real taste at all (ie, tastes artificial with flavor). That's on top of the poor water quality in the US that contributes to a (IMO) chalky and flat base taste.
I wasn't thinking of the many world-class microbrews in the USA, nor the proletarian pisswater either; most of them qualify as beer in Germany, that bitterness you're tasting comes from your palate, not the water.
Rather of lambics, which, being not much of a beer drinker myself, I prefer. The sweet ones are alright, but a dry cherry lambic, now, that's what I call a beer.
Honestly, this whole paragraph sounds incredibly ignorant from most any perspective. Most US generalizations have a certain amount of truth to them, but you seem to have picked the wrong ones. You have no idea what tasty beverages they were referring to, or that the US and many other countries have incredibly fast-growing craft brewery scenes, or that tap water isn't centrally managed across the US so poor water quality "in the US" is undefined.
While the US has a fast growing craft brewery scene, the german one has about 800 years head start in experience and market depth.
Tasty beverages for me as a german boil down to either a soda or beer. ANd granted, I've tasted the american versions of various sodas and softdrinks. Even our coca cola tastes better and less artificial.
I suspect this is just because it's not what you're used to rather than an actual quality judgment. I feel this about my home city when I travel elsewhere, and I complained about my current home city when I first moved here from a different country. For instance, I've felt the same about the water in many German cities whether I visited from Switzerland or the US.
> While the US has a fast growing craft brewery scene, the german one has about 800 years head start in experience and market depth.
I agree that this difference probably exists, but no one's starting from scratch these days and there's no reason to indicate it would continue at the same pace as Germany in the 1200s anyway, so I would presume it's far from a 800-year headstart (if there's any at all). In many cases, there may be no advantage besides the cultural recognition of certain concepts that have been more pervasive in Germany for a long time. Have you actually tried a decent variety of North American craft beers?
Germans appear to love their mineralwasser. I find it tastes like soap. If that's what you like, then the stuff out of my tap will also be undrinkable.
No arguments about the soft drinks, though. I go out of my way to get the Coke with sugar rather than corn syrup -- I don't think I'm just fooling myself that I can taste the difference.
And this is why so many travelers to the US buy "imported" beers at bars without knowing that they've been tricked into overpaying for our mid-tier national brands.
Whether it's healthy or not has nothing to do with it, there's a specific cut off to prevent brioche/cakes qualifying and it's over it.
Yes, the insulin response of the second is orders of magnitude greater. It's poison.
it's trying to remind me how good sugar is, while making it seem like a government action to do anything to protect it's people is silly.
Thanks, I hate it.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/food/1988/0...
Devil or not devil is off topic: it's not about not-devil or devil, it's about the difference between bread and cake. Which isn't a value judgement at all. But that is a line that will unsurprisingly be drawn differently in different cultures.
The legal issue isn't putting too much sugar in a product, it's putting much sugar in there and then labeling that product in a way that is deceptive in the local language (and in this case a tax angle, but it could be a court issue even without that).
Also, eating sugar in a healthy person (non-diabetic) is only bad when it leads to overeating calories, not because of the blood sugar response, which is perfectly normal.
There's nothing wrong with getting some sugar in your blood, and avoiding foods on such meaningless criteria is a recipe for eating disorders (orthorexia). The carbohydrate-insulin model is complete bullshit.
i only trade with subway because it is the closest thing to food i can buy at the airport or by the freeway. without consumer access to complete information, i doubt that i will have access to products that are not adulterated with cheap, harmful ingredients.
this seems to me like a canonical example of the sort of case where regulation would make a more efficient market.
What you and I call it doesn't matter - for legal (and tax) purposes, bread with too much sugar stops being a "staple food" and becomes cake. It's just the way the law is written, and whether it's a good idea or not, it's common for tax laws to promote certain lifestyle choices like eating healthy or not smoking.
The business in the article tried to use a loophole to avoid taxes and got slapped down by another loophole.
That's missing the point, Ireland isn't banning subways. You are still free to go and eat there.
The point is to have some common labels that define what a substance is, and some minimum quality control.
If I go and buy milk I would hope it comes from a cow, and isn't just water with artificial coloring.
Because after that it’s technically not a bread, it’s a brioche. As much as applesauce starts to be an Apple jelly.
Yes it’s your stomach and you pick what you want to eat but it is deceiving. The Irish court is not saying to stop to eat at Subway but to give the right info to me as a customer about what I am going to eat.
As a note, this is "baker's percentages", where the amount of flour is defined to be 100% and all other ingredients are measured by weight relative to the flour - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker_percentage
I have known Europeans to criticize American bread for being too sweet but if you live and shop here it's easy enough to find better bread.
People are often surprised by the proportions of ingredients in restaurant food anyway. The reason that restaurant food tastes "better" than home cooking is often down to added sugar, salt, and fat.
Baker's percentage (foo) = 100% * weight(foo) / weight(flour)
Of course you can make sandwiches with it. It’s bread after all.
But it’s not made for sandwiches.
(The recipe I use is 10% sugar.)
(It’s great for making French toast.)
I bet it's tasty but not interesting to me.
1-1/3 cups water
1 tablespoon instant yeast
1 tablespoon honey (optional)
1/4 cup vegetable oil
4 egg yolks (extra large eggs)
1 tablespoon salt
I verify the yeast with warm water + honey, then I throw the whole mess into the bread machine and let it mix/wait/punch down/rise etc. Then I take it out of the machine, form the challah, let it rise again on a sheetpan, egg wash, and bake it in the oven.
You can add more yeast for faster rising but since I use a bread machine I don't bother.
You can throw raisins in without affecting the rest of the recipe. Traditionally challah with raisins was for rosh hashana, and was in a circular shape rather than braided, like polish paska.
The ultimate is french toast, though, which definitely isn't a sandwich.
> Brioche dough contains flour, eggs, butter, liquid (milk, water, cream, and sometimes brandy), leavening (yeast or sourdough), salt, and sometimes sugar.
So I guess sugar shouldn't be required to make bread with a very soft internal structure (as mentioned in case of the Japanese Milk Bread).
---
Just because it doesn’t taste sweet doesn’t mean it’s not basically equivalent to eating raw sugar, nutritionally.
(Edit: receiving down-votes and I'm curious to know what's controversial about the above. Perhaps Subway is advertised differently in your country? Would be interesting to know.)
If they were promoting it as a brioche sandwich, that'd be one thing.
Yay English.
For example, while rye bread might taste sweet, it's not because of added sugar (for example, only certain types of Finnish rye breads have syrup added to them, but most do not). The sweetness comes naturally from the rye when it's processed for enough long time. Just like the sourness.
When I moved overseas (I moved around a bit then settled down in Australia), it was really hard for me to get used to the fact that most commercially made food had sugar in it. I couldn't stop thinking "why there is sugar in my sandwich", "why there is sugar on my pizza" and so on.
Then I eventually moved over the poverty line (as a new migrant I was broke at first) and started eating "better" food, and I realised that the sugar thing was not a trademark of all Australian food, but just a trademark of Australia's junk food.
Nowadays, in my head I associate the "sugary" feeling to junk food, and the "non sugary" to higher quality food. (Obviously all of the above only applies to savoury dishes).
I'm told that in other countries the average sugar contents tend to be even higher (usually in the form of corn syrup). What is the commercial motivation behind the widespread use of sugar in cheaper food? I personally find it unpleasant but perhaps I'm in a minority? Or maybe there are other factors at play maybe related to food processing etc.?
[1] (not really everywhere though because of regional differences)
But sugar is a cheap way to make something feel tasty, especially to an unsophisticated taste, and people get addicted to it. I know because I was a sugar addict once. I drank liters of cola, and ate tons of junk food. And then when my blood sugar started to approach the red zone, I stopped and now I avoid added sugar foods at all, except an occasional pastry once in a while. And it does change how you taste things. The cheap high of added sugar is replaced with rich gamut of actual food taste.
Sugar is metabolized quickly, and then is followed by a huge insulin spike shortly after. The whole process is up in 4-5 hours. While you're eating, it feels like you're getting something--those are the same signals that trigger the insulin.
More substantive foods containing fats and proteins (probably, that's the stuff you like) take much much longer, >8hrs, and correspond to a more muted, but longer term, insulin response.
So, if you eat a bag of chips with a sugary coating, you get a signal of "oh this is super fulfilling!" while the insulin is spiking, and then a "my stomach is empty again" in 4 hours when the whole thing ends.
This makes you buy more of whatever thing had a bunch of sugar in it.
There is normally no sugar at all (or much less than the 2%) in "common" Italian bread though there are particular kinds of bread that do contain it.
Traditionally (at the time where there were not any children snacks at the supermarket, and even if there were noone bought/used them) it was traditional to give children as a mid-afternoon snack a slice of bread briefly soaked in water wirh some white sugar on it (as an alternative to an even more traditional slice of bread with some olive oil and a pinch of salt).
When the kid was grown enough, like - say - 10 or older sometimes a few drops of (red) wine might have been added to the bread and sugar.
https://www.subway.com/en-us/menunutrition/nutrition/alwaysi...
Edit: Found the ingredient lists. Ingredients are in order of quantity from greatest to least.
"9-Grain Wheat" bread recipe in 2012:
> Enriched wheat flour (wheat flour, malted barley flour, niacin, iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), water, high fructose corn syrup, whole wheat flour, contains 2% or less of the following: wheat gluten, oat fiber, yeast, soybean oil, wheat bran, calcium blend (calcium carbonate, vitamin D3), salt, rolled wheat, dough conditioners (datem, sodium stearoyl lactylate), yeast nutrients (calcium sulfate, ammonium sulfate), degermed yellow corn meal, rolled oats, rye flakes, caramel color, triticale flakes, parboiled brown rice, refinery syrup, honey, barley flakes, flaxseed, millet sorghum flour, flavor (yeast extract, salt, natural flavor)
https://web.archive.org/web/20120121203702/http://www.subway...
Note that the recipe contained more high fructose corn syrup than whole wheat flour.
Current "9-Grain Wheat" bread recipe:
> Whole wheat flour, enriched flour (wheat flour, malted barley flour, niacin, iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), yeast, sugar, grain and seed blend (wheat, rye, yellow corn, oats, triticale, brown rice, barley, falx seed, millet, sorghum), wheat gluten, contains 2% or less of: salt, soybean oil, malted barley flour, cultured wheat flour, sunflower lecithin, dough conditioners (ascorbic acid, enzymes)
https://www.subway.com/-/media/USA/Documents/Nutrition/usPro...
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2011/04/22/1355399...
12% seasoning is still a lot by weight, to be sure -- it's something like four tablespoons per pound of ground beef -- but a lot of these "fast food companies aren't using real food!" stories get overly sensationalized, and this one never came across like it had a whole lot of there there.
> Diets rich in whole grain foods and other plant foods and low in total fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol, may help reduce the risk of heart disease and certain cancers.
https://www.fda.gov/food/food-labeling-nutrition/health-clai...
Products that are 100% whole grain almost always explicitly say "100% whole grain" (or wheat) on the packaging.
All foods served in school breakfasts and lunches in the US must be "whole-grain rich" as of the 2014-15 school year, with the presence of the FDA health claim being one of the approved ways to confirm that a food is "whole-grain rich":
https://www.fns.usda.gov/tn/whole-grain-resource
Subway has always been marketed as a healthy fast food option, but its "9-Grain Wheat" bread was carefully named and advertised without being described as "whole grain" or "whole wheat". Many consumers assumed that "9-Grain Wheat" was whole wheat bread, when the ingredients told a different story before 2014.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subway_(restaurant)#Soy_protei...
/Stopped eating Subway because the bread clogs me up.
>In reality, a 591 ml bottle of Vitaminwater contains about 33 grams of sugar, while a 355 ml can of Coke contains 39 grams.
It's got a lot of sugar unless you drink the artificial sweetener version.
I'm not saying that sucrose isn't worse than starch. Obviously pure sugar is worse. Fructose is significantly worse. But it's wrong to think of bread as some kind of health food when in reality it's predominantly composed of well-disguised glucose.
I wouldn't call wheat a health food quite like vegetables, but it's tough to get 2,000 calories eating only broccoli.
See, that's what makes it so healthy
Though I won't have a bad word said about broccoli. Lightly stir-fry your broccoli in coconut oil, pinch of salt and half a lemon and it's easy to get to 2,000 calories—and makes a satisfying meal alongside a modest portion of protein.
Seriously though, there's plenty of calories in the coconut oil, half a lemon and a modest serving of protein. And it's not like you're going to have broccoli for every meal. Between the eggs and avocado you might have for breakfast and whatever convenience food you'll probably have for lunch, you're unlikely to need more calories for dinner anyway.
Bread is a good source of calories but offers little in the way of nutrition. In fact, in terms of its phytic acid content, wheat germ is functionally an anti-nutrient because it impairs bodily absorption of iron, zinc and calcium.
And while bread can be included in a healthy diet, few people in the western world are suffering from a lack of dietary calories. For anyone who is currently consuming more calories than they need, bread has no nutritional upside.
The Whole Grains Council (which created the Whole Grain Stamp icon used on the labels of US food products) has a guide for determining which words refer to whole-grain foods, and which do not:
https://wholegrainscouncil.org/whole-grains-101/identifying-...
Yeah, n-grain and multigrain have nothing to do with whole grains, but people think they do.
That's hilarious. And also a total indictment of US mass market food culture.
After the Xth time I got tricked into buying sugar-bread I started making my own... have been baking once a week for 5 years now. It's the most satisfying accidental hobby I've ever had.
The weird thing is, I also started dialing down the salt a bit - and now I really notice how much salt is in bread too. Which sucks as I can easy give up sugar, but salt... oh no!
What sort of bread do you make?
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/thiswayup/audio/20...
A relative of mine has kidney disease so I've been baking them wholemeal breads without any salt at all for the last few months. They come out fluffy and springy, like orindarily salted bread.
I have heard what you say before, many times. I've looked around at bread-making forums to find bread recipes and there's often discussions about "can you make bread without salt"? Curiously, most of those threads are full of comments that state categorically that bread can't be made without salt (because it will turn out bland, it will over-ferment, it won't have the right texture and so on) but I very, very rarely have seen any comments saying that someone tried to actually make bread without salt and somehow failed. Pretty much the only case I could find was of a lady who ended up with very sticky dough and then realised she hadn't used any salt.
Bottom line, "you can't make bread without salt" is some kind of traditional wisdom that people repeat often but attempt to test very rarely. I've tested it thorougly for several months and it's false.
Edit: Oh, actually now that I think of it- you don't have to take my word for it. Traditional Tuscan bread has been made for generations without salt:
https://www.thegrandwinetour.com/en/popular-foods-of-italy/w...
My flour proportions are completely non-standard, I fear, that is I don't follow any standard baker's percentages or anything. In general, I make it up as I go along, so I'm most likely doing something at least unorthodox. But it seems to be working, probably because it's hard to make really bad bread with good, organic, wholemeal flours.
Edit: really sorry for the vagueness of the recipe. This is how I cook, in general, making it up as I go along. I like to surprise myself, I guess.
https://www.breadtalk.com.sg/products/bread/whats-new
Of course, in China even the bacon (肉干) and beans (豆沙) are sweet.
Apparently it's a Korean company: https://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/3092449/kore...
In Kilkenny Ireland, they don't have anything American over there, it's very cool. But they did have a Subway sandwich shop. That was the one thing they had American, and that became the American Embassy to me. I would go out to a bar and piss off an Irish dude and have him chase me to the Subway. I said, "Dude, I'm sorry, but you're out of your jurisdiction. But you can have a cold cut combo, though."
It's not as healthy as it sells itself as (the company is even called "Doctor's Association" or something like that); but it's fine compared to say McDonald's or random Chinese food that are usually at the same locations, at least in Europe.
"Doctor's Associates Inc" I believe.
I worked at a Subway in high school.
Yea, it's maybe not health food, but the bread is fresh-baked every day. (Different from fresh-made in that it comes in pre-formed frozen loaves that you slowly thaw and rise usually over the course of about a 24 hour period)
And the toppings are basically what you would put on a sandwich you made at home. Granted they are now branching into more sugar-laced fancy meats, but the basics: roast beef, ham, turkey, bacon, two or three kinds of a cheese, basic vegetables. It's a pretty basic deli sandwich that you would make at home or buy somewhere else.
The prices do seem to have gotten a lot steeper than I remember them being a decade ago. Part of that may be that employees or friends of employees tend to see a lot of free food coming their way, so maybe I never thought much about the cost.
For the longest time they had a 2 footlongs for $6 (then $7, $8, $9) special. I think it was maybe only certain days of the week.
I managed to get my hands on a stack of coupons for $4 footlongs (veggie only). They were cheap, relatively healthy, and close to the office. Perfect for an unpaid intern!
It's a borderline pyramid scheme. The product is an afterthought, like all pyramid schemes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/business/subway-franchise...
In the Netherlands the bread section in the supermarket is like half the store. And there's bread in every choice you want. White, whole-grain, sugared, with seeds, with nuts, with patterns, and funny shapes.
I'll admit we eat way too much bread here.
Now compared to the US (and I'm sure there are areas where you can be well served) it is a desert for bread. You may get the odd 'artisanal sour dough loaf', but the very fact it's shipped from california and will last 2 weeks makes you wonder!
Just to clarify. Our supermarket bread tends to be pretty shit (some exceptions). It'll be dry, flavourless, and void of all nutrition. So it's not like all the bread here is amazing.
But if I look up the supermarkets in the area here there's always at least one practically right next to it. And sometimes the supermarket and the bakery do a partnership and they'll have the artisinal bread in the supermarkt itself. Which is great.
Although the FDA has approved the use of azodicarbonamide as a whitening agent for cereal flour and as a dough conditioner, it is also found in yoga mats, shoe soles, and synthetic leather.
And this is enough to conclude whoever wrote this article is a hack and should not be trusted. Same chemical found in different places, what a surprise! We breathe oxygen, and it's also found in sulphuric acid, so we probably should all panic now! And what about the dihydrogen monoxide, which is also found in sulphuric acid btw!
To the main topic - Irish government chose to have definition of "bread" for tax reasons and Subway's recipe didn't qualify for tax exemption. Big deal.
As a side note: beyond any possible health concerns, we have wonderful traditional foods, which can be made without any fancy ingredients. Bread, beer, pasta, so many more. Done well, they are absolutely delicious. It always makes me sad, if they get perverted by industry adding stuff which doesn't belong into those foods for a quick sell. I am not against innovation. Put any new ingredient into your product, but don't claim it is any of the traditional foods. There is nothing wrong with "sweet bread" for example, unless it tries to hide the sugar.
The bread is often the worst thing about the sandwich. It can be dry, or soggy, burnt...the people that ‘bake’ the bread don’t really care much about it and often can’t take it out when the oven is done because they are making sandwiches.
On the other hand, my favorite place to get a sub sandwich buys bread from a bakery in town, and when they run out of bread, they close for the day. Why have someone who’s not skilled at making bread, make mediocre bread?
My Quiznos experience is now years old and maybe they've gone the microwave route too; I hope not.
In line with the article, I also think it's too sweet for sandwich bread, but I've never had it soggy or burnt.
Anyway, I knew that the bread had high sugar content but after reading this article it all makes perfect sense to me: they liked it mostly because their work is physical and the afternoons are slump time when you're trying to keep up your energy and push through to the end of the day. So they were getting Subway sandwiches and then, boom. All of a sudden you have sugar energy until quitting time!
Most sandwiches seem to have around 7g of sugar in them. This might not appear too bad (and indeed it isn't quite as bad as the title and article may suggest), but they should have close to zero grams if you ask me.
This reminds me of how difficult it is to find simple products like bread that don't have 1-4g of added sugar in them. Last time I was looking for bread crumbs, the first three brands I looked at all had corn syrup and oil in them! As I recall one doctor stated it: 'the food supply of our nation is poisoned'.
* http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1985/act/10/section/50/en...
As for Subway, did anyone actually think that stuff was bread. It doesn't even look or feel like any bread I know.
Can't seem to buy anything without added sugar.
I love good bread, and a good sandwich.
The amylase enzymes in the flour will break down the starche into sugar when you add water, which then feeds the yeast. Adding extra sugar is an optional step.
[edited for clarity] baguettes in France contains no sugar, by law.
Yes, 10% is high for bread, which is precisely why this court ruling. But it's a misleading number if you're not used to reading this as a ratio rather than a volume.
(Although they didn't say it's not bread, they said it's not bread as defined in tax law. There's a very specific tax exemption for bread, and 10% doesn't meet it. You can see this exemption in Part F of http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2010/act/31/schedule/2/en... )
It appears the Finance Act doesn't replace the Value-Added Tax act; a large part of the case verbiage came down to the VAT Act citing "food or drink" vs and the Finance Act citing "food and drink". I believe both acts implement EU directives so the same exception had to be carved into each; one doesn't replace the other.
It's actually a fairly interesting judgement to read. It's almost entirely either balancing one act against another, or nitpicking the grammatical constructs towards the principle of doubtful penalisation. I especially liked the detours into whether hot tea and cold tea are the same thing, and whether tea and coffee can be said to have been cooked. Whether bread is bread is a relatively small part of the argument, with the percentages only being relevant to 2 points of the 99 (and it wasn't disputed, they were rather disputing the legal construct of a sandwich. I kid ye not.)
"This seems a very cumbersome and unnatural description of a hot meatball sandwich."
* http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1972/act/22/schedule/2/en...
Zero mention of food, drink, or bread. As I said, those are in the Finance Act 1985 (and in an earlier Finance Act, sans bread, if I recall correctly). The Finance Act 1992, also referenced by the judgement, tweaks the Finance Act 1985 wording, and doesn't alter the definition of zero-rated "bread", except to extend it to bread that is uncooked or fried, rather than baked.
* http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1992/act/9/section/195/en...
The definition of "bread" was disputed, moreover. It was the whole of III(C) of the judgement.
And your 2010 Act does not apply, and isn't mentioned in the judgement at all. (-:
And not a little, they add a lot. There is a huge difference between the water added and real meats.
I have raised and butchered cows, pigs, and chickens. I can assure you what I've produced is far superior to Subway. That's why I won't eat their stuff anymore.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2006-08-16-060815...