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Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

The title is a little misleading... Subway can still call it "bread" but it cannot have the tax-exempt status of a staple food, because the weight of the sugar in the bread is 10%, which is above the 2% limit.

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.

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10% sugar?! That's bananas.

No, Bananas is 53%

Not quite. Bananas have a lot of sugar, by weight. The Subway bread is something like 8%. Bananas are more like 12-16%.

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.

Ok I just want to say I love that you took my statement literally.

This is fantastic.

How much sugar in Banana bread?

2:1 flour to sugar ratio in banana bread and that's not counting the sugar in the bananas. But banana bread is only named bread. It is technically a cake.

Technically I'd call it a quickbread (muffin). Cake has more even ratios and more defined mixing techniques (creaming, foaming).

Given that baker's percentages are given as a percentage of the flour content of an item[0], you could argue that the baker's percentage of sugar in a banana approaches infinity.

Baker's percentage (foo) = 100% * weight(foo) / weight(flour)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker_percentage

Dividing by zero, result is (ba)NaN(a)

Is challah bananas? Brioche?

challah isn't made for sandwiches...

There are obviously a ton of different challah sandwiches.

Challah isn’t made for sandwiches. Its traditional purpose is for the sabbath and other Jewish holidays. It’s usually eaten on its own.

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.)

There are obviously a ton of different challah sandwiches.

I've never needed so much sugar in challah - mine is usually egg rich instead.

I use basically this recipe:

https://smittenkitchen.com/2008/09/best-challah-egg-bread/

Ya I don't see the need for sugar there. I looked through my babas recipes and even her raisin challah didnt have sugar.

I bet it's tasty but not interesting to me.

No recipes have been passed down in my family but a single recipe for a weird mac-n-cheese. Share your babas recipe! :-)

4-1/4 cups flour

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.

Challah is one of my favorite breads. I remember my grandma buying it in the morning and giving it to us for breakfast (we were around 8) and having it with only butter. Because it was still hot, butter would start to melt a bit... Mmmmmmm I can still taste it.

A ton of sandwiches? Worldwide? That would be a ridiculously small amount, there must be many tons of sandwiches of any type.

Challah makes some amazing grilled cheese, especially if you use a pan or a panini press.

The ultimate is french toast, though, which definitely isn't a sandwich.

I was just looking into recipes of Brioche [0] (French bread, very soft "fluffy" internal structure) and the recipes I've seen use no sugar at all, though could be added. From Wikipedia:

> 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).

---

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brioche

The King Arthur recipe, which is one of many but certainly one you can trust more than Wikipedia, is over 10% sugar (bakers).

Milk has sugar.

Note that the starches in flour turn to sugar in your mouth when they come into contact with enzymes in saliva.

Just because it doesn’t taste sweet doesn’t mean it’s not basically equivalent to eating raw sugar, nutritionally.

Bread definitely tastes sweet if you chew it long enough.

As ingredients don't list the bakers percentage of sugar, what does that mean on the nutrition label? Most of the 'bread' in my supermarket lists "carbohydrates of which sugars" as 2g to 5g per 100g.

Quick and dirty search for "moisture content of bread" gives a range of 35%~40%, so in a pinch multiply that by 2.5~3 for rough baker's percentage.

Europe has plenty of 'sweet bread' with sugar in similar quantities. I don't begrudge resistance to industrial 'bread products' but this is just a performative headline.

That sweet bread would be speciality bread, one wouldn't eat it every day and use it for regular sandwiches.

I don't know anyone that would eat Subway every day. The point is that the sugar content of Subway 'bread products' is not sufficient to call it bread and I pointed out the facts.

Subway advertising explicitly or implicitly describes its food as being healthy, not an occasional treat.

(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.)

The issue is precisely that Subway is positioning themselves as a health-conscious brand, and the sandwiches are frequently consumed daily by the office worker crowd without cafeteria access.

If they were promoting it as a brioche sandwich, that'd be one thing.

health means different things to different people. there is not one size all to healthy. a lot of people equate healthy to calorie count, not just grams of sugar. subway has good food for calories. i think some of their items do qualify as a health conscious sandwich

Sugar content is often far more relevant. Sugar is not good for humans.

Eating Subway everyday is exactly what they market or at least used to with pedo Jared.

What’s wrong with a country exempting plain bread from sales tax but not exempting baked sugary treats?

I'd like to see Subway start selling a sandwich built on a foundation of Zöpf. Without raisins just to start.

That phrase means something else: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweetbread

"Sweet bread" and "sweetbread" are two different things.

Yay English.

Europe has plenty of industrial bread products that do not taste anywhere near as sweet as US bread. It was something that really threw me when I arrived here, that if I went to a supermarket and bought any old loaf of bread it would taste distinctly sweet. Just a matter of taste, and as others have pointed out it's not difficult to get a non-sweet loaf (sourdough, etc) it's just not the standard.

Saying bread tastes like something in Europe is simply weird. Each European country has their own bread types usually and they have next to nothing in common.

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.

European countries vary vastly in regards to bread. German bread is not comparable to what the Dutch or French call bread. I might biased as a German, though.

Yes, and they don't qualify for zero-rate VAT either.

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