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Comment by istorical | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I think the like lowest end bread at an Italian grocery store is going to be way better than the lowest end "bread" at an American grocery store, but the difference is at the American store there is literally (I shit you not) 50-100 varieties of bread and a lot of them are decent (actually by a lot I mean like 4-10).

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In my experience almost none of the US supermarket breads are decent. They almost all have added sugar and don't taste good compared to UK/French/Italian bread. There is one brand called "The Rustic oven" that has come out recently that has no added sugar and isn't bad, but that's the exception.

That sounds like mostly just catering to local tastes

Yeah, complaining that Americans on the whole prefer their bread sweeter is like being mad at the French for liking bread with big air pockets.

Like it’s a super weird thing where American food culture is almost universally shit on despite being just as rich, rooted in history, and varied as any other. Like if the story was that say Albanians preferred sweet breads the preference would be respected to the point of being mythologized but for American’s it’s just “oh those fat uncultured Americans with unrefined taste.”

Which I think generally means you have to be more savy on wha to buy. But tbf. specifically regarding bread, coming from German speaking region, I could never get happy in my (limited) US experience. The standard there seems to be adding sugar and that just straight up ruins bread for me.

That's all going to depend on where you are. Bread seems like a big division - shelf-stable bread is a lot less of a thing in Europe, likely because of a longer tradition of bakers. If you're in a major US city though, I've never had an issue finding French/German style breads, and usually at a normal grocer, if not at a specialty baker.

> shelf-stable bread is a lot less of a thing in Europe, likely because of a longer tradition of bakers.

I don’t think tradition of bakers has anything to do with it. In France going to buy a baguette every couple of days is the norm (or was when I lived there as a kid). In the US, we generally do one weekly grocery shopping trip, so shelf-stable bread becomes the convenient default.

But that's why bakers were relevant. When I was young there was bakery reachable by foot near anyone's home. Kids would get fresh bread on Sunday, the bakery was a place where you met people.

That changed. They all closed. But as you said people still consume their bread fresh here in central Europe.

It still matters what is the standard, even if you can find alternatives. It admittedly may matter more to a traveler who goes through airports and middle class hotels though, than to people living there.

For sure. I just hear the "I went to the US and there was no REAL bread to be found" and I'm always a little confused. Even the local grocer in my fairly poor neighborhood growing up had a section of bread loaves in various styles. I'm sure the selection is worse if you're in a more rural part of the US, but that's probably also towns that maybe never had an actual baker even when they were founded, assuming they were founded in an era that would have been reasonable.

I just think bread is one of these things that are central to each European culture. Germans miss their bread even in France and vice versa.

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