I don't know what to make of that statement. It is arrogant, at least. Are you trashing just the 340 million people in the US with this comment, or everybody not-Swiss?
For example, most Americans think Hershey’s is what chocolate is supposed to taste like, because they grew up with it.
Same with the mushy Chorleywood processed bread and most American “cheese”
At the very-local level of course there are exceptions, but generally speaking US food is terrible compared to European food. The US optimizes for volume and cost, Europe leans more towards quality.
Yes, there's a lot of cheap rubbish food in Europe, but those consuming it know it's cheap rubbish.
By contrast, and to your point, most Americans have never experienced really good food, and so it's harder to grasp that their "regular" quality is so low. We don't miss what we've never had.
My local, nothing special, supermarket stocks over 100 species of cheese. I remember going to the US and being confronted either 3 (American, whatever that is, Swiss and Cheddar. Um, which is unlike any cheddar I've ever had. Frankly the biggest difference seemed to be the color (which is artificial).
Think is, you can't describe sailing to someone who has never seen the ocean.
Increased travel, the growth of "American in Europe" YouTube videos, have slowly started permeating though and quality food is starting to appear here and there. But (naturally) its more expensive, so most Americans will be slow to adapt.
When was this comparison done?
In the last decade or so American grocery stores have dramatically improved their cheese selections. I don't know if it is 100 different cheeses, but it is pretty darn close. And unusual regional cheeses come in all the time.
Eh, I mean, sure, if you go to a Whole Foods or Trader Joe, you’ll find cheese that might rival a discount chain in France at premium prices. If you go to Safeway, Target or Walmart, the cheese will not be anywhere near what a French (or I assume, a Swiss) person would find acceptable.
So does my local co-op that I can walk to.
Or the other bougie store less than a mile away from me.
Within a 1 mile radius I probably have over 200 varieties of cheese to choose from!
In the USA, cheese is either a salad topping, a sandwich/burger topping, or a pizza topping, and not much else. I once bought some pecorino romano to make cacio-e-pepe and regret doing that, it's an overhyped dish.
And even when buying natural bread without these added “benefits”, it often has high levels of sodium (up to like 200mg per slice).
Bread is one of the easiest, most plain things to make, yet finding high quality bread isn’t straightforward in the States. But I do really want to know which shops and which brand you get, I’d love to find good bread lol.
Wealthy communities. Upper-middle class, maybe.
That, or an immigrant bakery. (Mexican. Korean. Taiwanese. Japanese.)
It's not hard to find a good bakery in any dense area in the US. I have to imagine people claiming otherwise are indulging in Yankee-bashing, a favorite European pastime.
The good bread is in the Santa Cruz mountains. In San Francisco, I’ve only had it in wealthy homes where home staff made it fresh that day.
Sure, you can get good bread here. However it's going to cost you 5x what it costs in Europe and it might take you up to 30 minutes to get too depending on where you live. Most bread in the US is low quality. Most bread in Europe is high quality. There is good bread to be found in the US, and there's bad bread in Europe. But the average bread just isn't even close to being equal.
Yes.
In my opinion, it’s tasty but also not quite what I would expect bread to be like, mainly because it’s so soft. It is a running joke between us that Chinese teeth can’t chew through European bread (like an actual French baguette).
But agreed, Chinese bread > American bread for flavor at least!
Every supermarket I can locally go to has a bread-on- the shelf section, as well as a very fresh bread section. Not to mention 'bread shops' exist.
Don't underestimate the ability of tourists from anywhere to not understand how to look around a shop.
Finding bread in America that isn't over-overloaded with sugar is very difficult.
Quite a few of my family take their own bread to the US. Of late, the problem has been solved as, apart from work, people just aren't travelling there anymore - for non bread-related reasons, of course. For the US fam that now travel back to the eu (an awful lot) more, they go wild for eu bread: it just doesn't taste like cak, /sp - i mean cake.
Most Americans are fine eating stale or preserved bread. (Almost all pre-sliced supermarket bread is the latter.) You just don’t have enough people to spread the cost of baking fresh bread throughout the day outside wealthy communities.
That said, a lot of European bread is also trash. There are simply some bread-loving ones where it isn’t. Similarly, there are places in America with great bread (New Orleans, New York and Miami), and places without (Northern California and the Midwest).
Yes thank you for pointing this out. I've noticed even the bakeries around me (in Switzerland) aren't that great; for me the best are from the farmers markets and even still you have to be discerning for which are actually good. On the other side I've had some fantastic bread in the US from specialty bakeries.
Long island new york, here is a a store chain with out of this world bread.
Then we went to Germany and I finally understood.
Not only can I pop in to the local bakery on the corner (or the next corner, or the next) for the most amazing breads ever, but I could also go to a Rewe or Edeka and get quite good bread that's still head-and-shoulders above anything in America.
My fav right now is a walnut spelt bread roll that I get for 90 cents apiece at Edeka. A bit pricey but it's worth it. Put on some President butter [1] and some cheeses and it's divine!
[1] https://www.president.de/produkte/butter/meersalzbutter-250-...
Finding high quality bread isn’t straightforward anywhere in EU. It either has sugar or additives or it is cooked at a too low temperature to be useful.
In what way is that bread "not useful"?
Don't get me wrong, shit's delicious. It's just not what bread should be.
Example of great bread: https://www.ibfoods.com/search.php?search_query=Bread
Yes, a French baguette-type soft white bread is formally "bread", but it is treated as a different/single category here, as "white bread". With examples of typical bread being, say: https://www.hofpfisterei.de/download/Hofpfisterei-Sortiment-... And I don't think the images really carry across the difference (and variety) in texture and density, to someone who simply never had this kind of "non-soft" bread. You can spread cold butter from the fridge on it without breaking it, maybe that gives away a hint towards the difference. Also note the variety of grain: rye, spelt, wheat, barley, oats, in different compositions and degrees of fineness. And this is just one brand/bakery.
Some more "typical German bread" images. I picked types that maybe convey the difference to "white bread" the best in viewing:
https://5-elemente.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/rheinische...
https://heicks-teutenberg.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Honi...
https://img.chefkoch-cdn.de/rezepte/2468131388854443/bilder/...
The garden variety baguettes in Spain that go for 50 cents are superior to $8 "gourmet, artisanal" bread in the US.
I would watcher most American literally have never in their live ever seen how 'rezent' Emmentaler is supposed to look. Honestly its hard to get even in Switzerland.
A proper 'rezent' Emmentaler literally has a thick salt crust inside of the holes.
This is typical even in Switzerland, and I wager its better then most 'Swiss' you get in the US:
https://www.migros.ch/en/product/210119408500
But if you want the elite stuff, it looks like this:
https://emmentaler-schaukaeserei.ch/en/shop/produkte/Emmenta...
But to get that, you are going to have to store it a long time, and that reflects in the price. The stuff sold in the US is usually stored much shorter.
It is hard to take you seriously when you spread misinformation.
The Calcium lactate crystals are technically a salt, but not what we would commonly refer to as salt (sodium chloride).
To me this is very obvious when you eat the crystals (they don't taste salty, and they have only a very soft crunch).
And that doesn't really change any argument I made in my post.
Everywhere is like this to some extent - no people can be an expert in all things.
You’re parsing discernment as a value judgement. Don’t do that.
New York City has America’s best bagels. This is because OG bagels are best fresh, and making them fresh multiple times a day takes a lot of work. (They stale super fast because gluten is a bastard. Hence toasting.) To pay for that work at a non-ludicrous cost per bagel, you need lots of reliable demand. That really only happens when you have an ecosystem of people who have been eating bagels all their lives made by folks who have been making them similarly.
You don’t find great bagels outside New York (at an affordable price) because the demand isn’t there. Meanwhile, if you haven’t spent time in New York, you probably don’t know (or care about) the difference. Which means you’re unlikely to give excess patronage to anyone who tries to do it right if they try to do it near you. That doesn’t make anyone outside New York who likes their local bagel wrong; it’s just that economies make it very difficult, and frankly pointless, to replicate the New York bagel elsewhere.
If the people in your town will pay extra only for great cheese and the guys across the pond will pay the same price for mediocre and great cheeses, the deck is stacked. (And to be clear, you can find great Swiss cheeses in America. What you can’t is great Swiss wines.)
> New York City has America’s best bagels
That's a big claim.
You say it's because they are best fresh -- are you saying that the rest of the country does not have anybody who makes fresh bagels? That's what I get from your first comment, but then you moved the goalposts a bit by qualifying "at an affordable price." So maybe other cities in the US do have bagels that are just as good as NYC but they are more expensive?
I see there is one final qualification you've made: "the New York bagel." In that case, obviously NYC has the best New York bagel ;).
Of the kind that stale in two hours? Yes. It wouldn’t be economical.
> maybe other cities in the US do have bagels that are just as good as NYC but they are more expensive?
Never say never, but I haven’t seen it. I have seen private chefs pull it off. But they basically required a sous chef to deal with the lye and boiling.
> there is one final qualification you've made: "the New York bagel." In that case, obviously NYC has the best New York bagel
Yup :). (I qualified the first reference with OG, btw.)
But I’m going further. You can’t make a New York bagel outside New York without hundreds of customers reliably streaming through the door who will fuck off if you try to take a shortcut.
Other cities have great bagels. (Montrèal.) But they’re not that. That’s what I mean by discernment. Literally, discerning one thing from another. If you’ve eaten New York bagels for a stretch, you can discern them from others. If you like that, you’ll seek it out, rewarding those who do the work and punishing those who dope them with preservatives. That creates symbiosis between the bagel eater and maker.
Same with cheese. Same with barbecue. Or chivitos or chaat or all the other local, perishable yummies that are peculiar in an infuriatingly-tedious way.
People line to before they open and the bagels are quickly sold out in a mad rush.
There is a French bakery close to me in Seattle there makes croissants in the morning and they sell out in less than 2 hours. IMHO they are the best croissants in the city, although we have quite a few good local bakeries.
I also remember Johnny's having pretty good corn beef hash. 90% of the corn beef hash here on the west coast is way under seasoned.
The bagels at Rosenfeld aren't the exact same as NYC (water yada yada) but they are quality wise really good and the toppings are amazing.
Random fact - to pay for my trips I'd right up a patent application on my Windows 8.1 tablet on the red eye JetBlue flight. My LD relationship is why I hold so many patents!
I love this!
Random lolwtfbbq quality restaurants are some of the best finds.
Your whole comment below about "discernment" and seeking New York bagels out sounds like a personal preference (bred by familiarity), not actually finding the creme de la creme of bagels.
The same goes for Chicago/New York pizza. It's not special. It's just the pizza you metaphorically grew up with.
It’s one element. The result, however, is highly perishable. You can make it last a full day in the counter, but that fucks with the texture.
> it's just one kind of bagel that you can prefer or not prefer
Sure. Same with various cheeses. Or beef.
Kobe beef is predominantly consumed in Japan. A bit makes it out. But you can generally serve someone who hasn’t spent a lot of time in Japan other wagyu and they’ll be happy. You won’t get away with that with a Kobe aficionado, and there are simply more of those in Japan for self-reïnforcing reasons. (I personally like a range of beef, and while Kobe is great, it’s not something I seek out.)
But not multiple times a day. A New York bagel noticeably stales after a couple hours.
Baguettes are the same, by the way. The little handies? If made plainly, correvtly, they change immeasurably once they cool.
When perishability is measured in tens of minutes’ intervals, your economics require a large city of aficionados. (Not applicable to cheese, obviously.)
Having high foot traffic and understanding supply and demand are not unique to New York. The specific type of bagel is, though, because it's a preference rather than a sign of quality. You have fewer bakeries per square mile outside New York, but you have fewer of everything per square mile outside New York. Many cities around the US are plenty dense to support people who make high-quality baked goods.
The stuff that sells. In most bakeries, that doesn’t cover bagels.
> Do you believe that New York is the only place in the US where you can get a baguette or a loaf of French bread?
Nobody claimed this.
> high foot traffic and understanding supply and demand are not unique to New York
It absolutely is. New York has entire American cities’ worth of people in single city blocks. That drives niche culinary diversity in a way that’s impossible to sustain anywhere else in America.
> Many cities around the US are plenty dense to support people who make high-quality baked goods
Again, never contested. But not as wide a variety. You can’t profitably make every sort of baked good fresh every few hours in a town smaller than a few hundred thousand. You can find that within walking distance for bagels, cubanos, naan and dumplings in a lot of Manhattan.
Bread by familiarity, surely? Sorry for the awful bun. I mean pun.
Not arrogant, just a fact of life.
In the same way that the average Dutch palate is content with food produce of mediocre quality and taste, and is satisfied with food that would make the average French or Italian wince.
Being discerning about the quality of your food is something you pick-up intuitively from birth. Some cultures have it, others don't.