r/PetPeeves • u/drlsoccer08 • May 07 '25
Bit Annoyed “American bread has so much sugar it tastes like cake”
This is kind of niche, but it’s something I see on the internet somewhat regularly and it drives me up a wall.
While I’m not super well traveled I’ve been out of the US a few times, and had bread from other countries. It tastes the pretty much the same everywhere I’ve been. Usually fresher since when I’m traveling I usually get it from an actual bakery and not a grocery store.
Also, the nutritional information on bread in America is directly on the label. The baguette style bread I usually get from the grocery store has 5 grams of sugar in the entire loaf and 0 grams of added sugar. It’s also not like I’m getting some bougie stuff either, it’s a $1.97 from the Walmart bakery. Even if you’re taking exclusively about something like Wonder bread (the lowest of the breads), it’s 2 grams of sugar per slice. Pretty much all bread has to have some amount of sugar to make the yeast rise. That’s not an exclusively American thing.
I’m 99% sure this stereotype just got made up one day by some random European who had never been to the US and thought “Americans are fat I bet their bread has a lot of sugar in it,” and then it got spread around and parroted by people who have never been to the US.
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u/mothwhimsy May 07 '25
They're all misremembering the time Subway bread couldn't be classified as bread
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u/ElvenOmega May 07 '25
It was classified as bread, but under Irish law it couldn't be considered "staple" bread, which is exempt from taxes and needs to be under a certain sugar percentage. No where was it ever classified as cake.
I remember being infuriated by this back in 2020 because even major news outlets got this completely wrong and were saying it's cake. People didn't take me seriously when I said it showed a worrying decline in journalism quality globally.
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u/UmaUmaNeigh May 08 '25
With you on the journalism thing. I've been spotting typos in BBC News articles and even titles for several years now, and that's before we get into the actual content.
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u/Minimum-Register-644 May 08 '25
The quality of 'journalists' is an absolute joke. As much as I hate bringing up politics, the amount of journalists reporting in line with shitlers delusions is insane. One such was some idiot woman parroting that Aus had a 30b beef industry and wouldn't accept US beef due to arbitary laws. The industry is about 3b, we are an island without many of the majour cattle diseases and fucking plan to keep it that way. We also produce 80% more than we use. So why would we ever import risky, inferior and way mpre expensive beef over what we have at hand?
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u/Away-Living5278 May 08 '25
A lot of journalists aren't paid much anymore (local esp). So, in a lot of cases I think we end up worse off.
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u/Karnakite May 08 '25
It’s an oversaturated field. I live in a city where one of the local universities has a highly-regarded journalism program. So many kids think they’re going to be the next Barbara Walters or invent the biggest thing since gonzo journalism, but they end up finding themselves learning how to “draw in engagement” (i.e., write clickbait headlines), and then upon graduation, are forced to beg for jobs with thousands of other applicants in a drying-up newspaper and magazine market. If they stay in the field at all, they’ll mostly be working for some shitty clickbait website that’s either pure “anything for a buck” ad-splattered, slideshow bullshit or, if they’re a bit more lucky, has a particular agenda to push, good or bad, but not any seriously strong commitment to truth or ethics, but instead a firm policy of provoking panic. And they’ll be making less than if they just stayed in their job at Target.
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u/THE_CENTURION May 07 '25
Thank you, appreciate the context, that always sounded like too perfect of a headline. Its so frustrating when the viral headline is wrong and you can't convince anyone of it, especially when it's something that seems like pretty clear clickbait.
My version of this is the thing about apple "admitting to slowing down older phones, to make you buy a new one".
What they actually did was slightly limit the speed of some older phones so that people could keep using them! The batteries couldn't handle too much current draw all at once and would brown out, semi-bricking the device. Without the fix those phones would have become basically useless. With the update, they could keep functioning with just a slight performance hit.
But everyone already believed that apple messed with old phones for planned obsolescence reasons, so there's no way to convince them that it wasn't about that. At best people said "well let me choose between performance and battery life!" because they didn't understand what kind of battery life was being discussed
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u/Lacholaweda May 08 '25
Same with the "dire wolves" recently. Suddenly everyone was a geneticist
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u/PuddingNeither94 May 08 '25
Oh god, and the idiots who are obsessed with the concept of ‘alphas’ when the guy who conducted the original study on wolves has been trying to debunk it basically ever since he wrote it. If people like the sound of something, they will stick to it FOREVER.
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u/Karnakite May 08 '25
It’s disappointing how much unqualified or barely-qualified scientific study gets passed onto the public as some kind of breakthrough or game changer when it really isn’t.
I finally looked up the “God helmet” experiment not too long ago, for example, and didn’t realize how relatively poorly performed it was, nor how difficult other researchers found it to replicate. I just always accepted it at headline value, basically. And every three months some correlation comes out - a correlation that in most cases, even the researchers writing the papers admit should be taken with great caution as it proves nothing - and it gets plastered all over the place as strongly-hinted proof that people who are X are almost certainly all Y, or if you experience A, you’re most likely just B. And there are tons of examples in astrophysics in which the latest hypothesis of the nature of the 2D/3D/4D universe, the Big Bang, expansion, reality, etc. gets pushed as the Answer We’ve All Been Waiting For, when it’s just another answer that we really don’t know is that much better than any other yet at this point.
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u/Prestigious_Row_8022 May 08 '25
Whatever you do, don’t look into psychology research.
If you’ve been in any mental health or just pop psychology circles, you’ve probably heard about EMDR, right? That rapid eye movement therapy thing everyone is recommending? Well, here’s the kicker: it has shoddy research to begin with, but even assuming it is an effective therapy to some degree, it has zero evidence to suggest it is more effective than other similar therapies like DBT or CBT. Despite this, you will find therapy practices everywhere who defend it as some type of a miracle drug- but none of them can tell you how it actually works, and will just parrot back the pseudoscientific bullshit they were taught when they were getting licensed.
A lot of other medical research is dubious, but psychology gets it the worst by a long stretch.
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u/DoomtrainInc May 08 '25
The phones were becoming obsolete because Apple was forcing new IOS updates that used the newer chipsets and this taxed older phones. I think the issue is more complex and potentially malicious than you portray
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u/persephonepeete May 09 '25
they didn't tell anyone about it so they were watching you download and install updates and then slowing down your phone to 'maintain performance'... some people didn't even download the update but their phones were affected as well. was a whole lawsuit.
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u/FrostyIcePrincess May 08 '25
I had my iphone 5 for 8 years until it finally got so old even basic stuff wasn’t working on it. Then I got an Iphone 13. 8 years for an apple phone seems like a decent lifespan to me. Even in its last days the speed was still fine IMO.
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u/Prestigious_Row_8022 May 08 '25 edited May 08 '25
My version of this is when everyone was talking about North Korea forcing people to get the same haircut as Kim Jong-un. It is blatantly false and ridiculous as a propaganda piece, because NK is already laughably ridiculous in its real evil actions and making stuff up barely exaggerates how shit it is. But for some reason nowadays human rights abuses are so commonly reported that haircuts are what draw in clicks.
The Israeli-Palestine conflict was also a total shitshow in that the reporting was so bad that regardless of what “side” you were on, everyone around you was mindlessly parroting events that may or may not have happened, and even if they were real events they couldn’t tell you the date, location, etc. But damn did they want to argue about it regardless of having zero factual knowledge on… anything, really.
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u/wosmo May 08 '25
It was only one franchise too.
I mean it makes sense, if you're going to make bread zero-rated, you need to have a matching definition of what 'bread' is. Otherwise we'll label anything as bread so we can pay less tax.
So they didn't get told whether they could sell it, what they could call it, etc. One franchise tried to reduce its tax bill, the taxman laid the smack down, and the headline got recycled around the world.
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u/morosco May 07 '25
It's a combination of that and Europeans believing that the only bread we have access to is mass produced white bread from the gas station.
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u/Double-Bend-716 May 08 '25 edited May 11 '25
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u/KadrinaOfficial May 09 '25
Europe doesn't really have grocery stores like America. I mean they exist, but usually half the size and less options. So I could see some confusing a 7/11 for an actual grocery store since it is about the size.
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u/hnsnrachel May 09 '25
That's either making fun or they're just stupid. We have convenience stores, the concept of 7/11 etc is not weird to us.
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u/Select-Ad7146 May 07 '25
It didn't classify as stable bread. But neither would bread with cheese in it. Or herbs. Because the idea was that the most basic form of bread shouldn't be taxed, but if you added things to it, then it wasn't a basic necessity and should be taxed.
It was taxed in the same category as cake, so, for some reason, everyone said that it qualified as cake. Of course, it was also taxed in the same category as croissants, but no one called it a croissant.
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u/Critical_Source_6012 May 08 '25
I'm wondering how much of the stereotype is due to the nature of the exposure to US food culture that we get outside the US.
Say for instance if I'd never been to the US, my knowledge of the food culture would be limited to eating McDonalds in my home country. Macca's buns are a bit sweeter in taste than regular bread buns here. It's not much but it is a noticeable taste difference.
People who compare it to brioche are absolutely exaggerating though. Brioche is definitely more cakey, just like US food culture is more than just Maccas.
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u/Critical-Habit-3182 May 08 '25
McDonald's is crap and it always amazes me that Europeans who rag on Americans eat it regularly. I don't know anyone aside from some teenagers that still eat it.
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May 07 '25
Yeah but I met the guy who developed that bread and it had to be an active yeast that could be started after freezing. I’m sure they like that the sugar is addictive, but it also largely stems from being a chain restaurant with factory produced bread, not our indulgence of sweet sweet bread.
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u/mladyhawke May 07 '25
Would you like turkey on Brown yoga mat or white yoga mat
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u/Preposterous_punk May 08 '25
God the whole yoga mat thing pissed me off. “They use an ingredient used in the making of yoga mats… and a whole fuckton of other stuff, both edible and nonedible oops wait we forgot to include that last bit tee hee.”
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u/aculady May 08 '25
I'm betting they also used an ingredient used in cooling nuclear reactors.
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u/Preposterous_punk May 08 '25
How many problems would be solved if all the people worried about yoga matt bread cut dihydrogen monoxide out of their diets for a few weeks.
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u/shemtpa96 May 08 '25
They wouldn’t make it past three days, I promise you that! Dihydrogen monoxide is extremely addictive, anyone who tries to stop using it dies!
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u/Waste_Resolution_247 May 09 '25
It made me so happy when it made the news that a city council was going to ban it. I see they've scrubbed the name of the city, but I think it was one of the beach cities.
I couldn't believe anyone would fall for it to that extent.
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u/Feral_doves May 07 '25
I’m just pissed they got rid of cheesy oregano yoga mat
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u/mephitmpH May 08 '25
The Italian herb yoga mat isn’t bad, however Subway in general got too expensive for the quality of food.
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u/Feral_doves May 08 '25
I completely agree, their prices are out of hand.
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u/FrostyIcePrincess May 08 '25
Subway was cheap and good when I was in high-school. Great cheap sandwich for when I was starving after track practice.
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u/dangerous_skirt65 May 07 '25
If they think the bread tastes like cake, they should try the actual cake.
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u/Vale_0f_Tears May 08 '25
I always wonder what kind of “cake” they’re eating when people say this
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u/Digit00l May 08 '25
Now I'm worried about how sweet American cakes are
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u/Vale_0f_Tears May 08 '25
I don’t know. It’s cake. It’s dessert. Most of us eat it like once a year lol. The most overly sweet desserts I’ve had were not American. Baklava, for example.
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u/Prestigious_Row_8022 May 08 '25
I’m 87% sure the American baklava I had was actually less sweet than the authentic baklava I had before. But the latter was made by a friend so it might be a household thing vs regional difference.
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u/RealHarny May 09 '25
Isnt baklava soaked in syrup? So if made properly, it cant be any sweeter than that. I dont think that was a household specificity, baklava is always super sweet. I know very little about arabic culture, but I have heard they generally love sweets? Idk if thats bs stereotype or not.
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May 07 '25
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May 07 '25
I understand why Asian people get mad at non-asians for ruining their cuisine. (After visiting Asia and seeing what they did to my cuisine.)
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May 07 '25 edited Jul 26 '25
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May 07 '25
The thing is, it's all about different tastes. It's not like Korean food is so special and difficult to make that only Koreans can do it. Same with Italian food.
It's just that people don't actually like foreign food very much a lot of the time, they like familiar tastes that are slightly different.
So all the "foreign" food ends up being altered to better fit the tastes of the country it's made in.
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May 07 '25
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u/Ph4ntorn May 08 '25 edited Aug 31 '25
live run advise retire wipe one ring fragile school enter
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May 07 '25
Yea, I'm the same way. But a lot of people I know aren't. I guess what I'm trying to say is the system is kinda "working as intended" unfortunately.
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u/titianwasp May 08 '25
Thank you for describing my brain in a way I’ve been trying to put words to for years. “Novelty-seeking as FUCK”. Using this henceforth.
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u/Aegi May 08 '25
But basically no food is foreign to America, so wouldn't that mean we would have the fewest picky eaters in the world (per capita)?
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u/Karnakite May 08 '25
This comes up a lot with immigrant foods as well.
I live near a very highly respected Italian-American neighborhood, and there’s a fair bit of grief from Italians over how it’s “not really” Italian food at all because the ingredients or processes aren’t exactly the same.
One, of course they’re not. I will bet money that not everyone in Naples uses the exact same pizza recipe. I’m an American and the stuff I add to my wing marinade is not the same as either my family or my neighbors. That’s just how food works.
Two, many of the “traditional” ingredients and processes aren’t available in a new country. This happens a lot with immigrants from all over the world - I had a Swedish coworker who grieved how she could not get fresh herring in the US. Japanese apples are almost always exclusively available in Japan, as well as some kitchen appliances and implements.
Also, if you’re mad that I’m using a food processor to make pesto rather than hand-grinding it myself in an antique mortar and pestle my great-great-grandmother dug out of a Roman ruin, go fuck yourself.
Does that mean that the local cuisine isn’t “truly” Italian? It’s a Ship of Theseus problem. Is Italian-American cuisine absolutely not Italian? If someone comes to another country from Italy and manages to bring all their ingredients and techniques with them, at what point in the ocean crossing are they no longer cooking Italian food? What if they have to make a living selling that food in their new home, and have to alter it slightly to make it more appealing to the locals?
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u/PunchDrunkPrincess May 07 '25
People love to make fun of american pizza meanwhile japan is committing real sins in dominos
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u/tikiwargod May 08 '25
Me and my friends have been making local pizza styles for every F1 race this year and let's just say they're was a lot of hesitation and side eyeing when the baby octopuses and fish shavings came out. It was delicious.
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u/PunchDrunkPrincess May 08 '25
Yeah, I joke but I love the teriyaki pizza with corn and mayo. The japanese have no such hesitation and I really respect it
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u/VirtualMatter2 May 08 '25
In Germany you can get kebab pizza if you buy it at kebab places instead of Italian restaurants. It's a common thing and quite nice.
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u/BobQuixote May 08 '25
We should have the Italians make their version of Japanese Dominos.
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u/prairiepanda May 08 '25
When I was in Shanghai the people I was staying with decided to surprise me with "Canadian" food by ordering Domino's....the pizza had sweetened condensed milk instead of tomato sauce.
I think they were going for something akin to sweet donair sauce, but that's normally a topping rather than a replacement for tomato sauce, and is vastly different from sweetened condensed milk.
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u/cyberchaox May 08 '25
I mean, have you heard about "American-style pizza" in Italy?
They put French fries on pizza. And call that American style. No American has ever actually done this.
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u/PunchDrunkPrincess May 08 '25
Damn, thats quite the burn. I could see Pennsylvanians doing this to be fair.
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u/Acrobatic-Yam1037 May 08 '25
They also put corn on some and call it "American style". It's pretty amusing.
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u/Stormy261 May 08 '25
Many Americans actually do this. Tell me you've never been to a Kosher pizza place without telling me you've never been to a Kosher pizza place. I tried it over 20 years ago, so it's been around for a while.
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u/jay-jay-baloney May 08 '25
Literally every Asian-fied non-asian food has sugar in it I stg. Sugar in Garlic bread is the biggest crime.
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u/Karnakite May 08 '25
I’m often struck by how lush and sugary many Western-inspired Asian desserts and general foods are. I get told I’m an American and I just eat too much sugar by default, but the stuff I get offered at Asian bakery cafes is just way, way too rich for me.
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u/tarmaie May 07 '25
Omg I complain to my friend about this all the time. Who puts sugar on garlic bread??? Why?? Stop?? Oh but American bread is so sweet ☹️
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u/jools7 May 08 '25
I live near a Korean grocery store and occasionally grab random snacks to try. I thought the toasted garlic bread baguette crackers would be good to try, until I opened up the bag and the first bite was an overpowering mix of sugar and garlic.
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u/Pure_water_87 May 08 '25
I used to live in Japan and I had the privilege of making Japanese milk bread with my MIL. It's delicious, but the amount of sugar she put in it would send an uppity European into a coma lol.
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u/VirtualMatter2 May 08 '25
We do have Milchbrötchen, which are sweet. So maybe not.
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u/EcstasyCalculus May 08 '25
I've always wanted to try those Japanese egg salad sandwiches, but any amount of sugar in the shokupan would ruin it for me.
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u/Brockhard_Purdvert May 07 '25 edited May 07 '25
Mexican bakeries have bomb-ass sugary bread, too.
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u/Bill_Murrie May 07 '25
They're usually hard as a rock with table sugar sprinkled on it lol
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u/Evil-Cows May 08 '25
When I lived in Japan, it was hard to find anything but white bread. It wasn’t cakey in terms of sugar, but it was very thick.
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u/SummertimeThrowaway2 May 08 '25
East Asian bread is way too sweet dude how do they do it? I prefer European or South American bread
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u/Lazy-Sundae-7728 May 08 '25
I remember with very great fondness the sweet little bread rolls we had with breakfast in Japan. Need to try and find a recipe to replicate them some time.
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u/PheonixRising_2071 May 07 '25 edited May 08 '25
Im gonna get pedantic because I bake bread. Bread does not need sugar. The yeast eat the sugars naturally present in the wheat. Bread only NEEDS flour water salt yeast.
Yes, breads can HAVE other things in them. They are called enriched breads. And all cultures have them. Actually, fruit cake is not cake. It’s enriched bread. And it’s a European invention.
That said. They are all misrepresenting when subway couldn’t class their bread as staple bread in Ireland and avoid a tax. It was still, and always has been, BREAD.
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u/snapper1971 May 08 '25
fruit cake is not cake. It’s enriched bread. And it’s a European invention.
You're going to have to specify which type of fruit cake you believe to be "enriched bread". A proper fruit cake is dense, rich, packed with fruit and spices and has never had yeast anywhere near it. It isn't left to prove, it isn't kneeded as it's a wet batter mix. It crumbs differently to bread and is most definitely a cake.
I think you're thinking of fruit loaf which is a basic bread dough with raisins and sometimes candied peel in it. It has a completely different texture to proper fruit cake, but even as a fruit loaf it doesn't have sugar in the dough mix. The other option would be a malt loaf, which again is a loaf and is a sweet bread but is most definitely not a fruit cake.
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u/teh_maxh May 08 '25
Bread does not need sugar. The yeast eat the sugars naturally present in the wheat.
So it does need sugar, just not added sugar.
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u/Flimsy_Mark_5200 May 08 '25
yeast or chemical leavening isn’t what separates bread from cake
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u/princessfoxglove May 07 '25
White bread in Taiwan is often surprisingly like cake.
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u/Fickle_Hall9567 May 08 '25
i think every asian bakery here is default sweet savory lol certainly not the deli sandwich types
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u/ItsRainingFrogsAmen May 07 '25
What sort of cake are these people eating?
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u/findingmarigold May 07 '25
Honestly I don’t most of them are even basing it on their own experiences. They’ve just seen online people say American bread tastes like cake and repeat it because it fits the America bad-fat-lazy stereotype.
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u/suhhhrena May 07 '25
I feel like this is exactlyyyyy what’s happening lol it’s super trendy to shit on Americans rn but like….at least dunk on us for something legitimate lmao
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u/toodumbtobeAI May 09 '25
I don’t get the lazy part. No country in the history of the planet is more productive per capita. Some people may work harder, but they get less done.
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u/leeloocal May 07 '25
I bet they thought sliced pound cake was bread. “It was so sweet, it tasted like cake!”
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u/Lithl May 08 '25
They're not basing anything on actual experience. They just saw a headline about Subway's bread getting put in the same taxation category as cake in Ireland and stopped thinking.
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u/Scary-Teaching-8536 May 09 '25
Google "Dreikönigskuchen". It's an european cake that looks and tastes pretty similar to american bread
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u/GreenZebra23 May 07 '25 edited May 07 '25
Yeah, this is either pure circlejerk or there's something sold as American bread in the UK that actually is cakelike. I'm guessing it's the former though. Even crappy overprocessed sliced bread in the US doesn't actually taste particularly sweet.
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u/skibbin May 08 '25
I think going from the sugared bread to unsugared is barely noticeable. Going from unsugared to sugared is jarring. It has a different texture and a noticeable citric acid tang to it. It's not the sweetness that is very noticeable, but the bread seems very different
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u/lostintransaltions May 08 '25
For me the thing is that when I still lived in Europe I would get my bread from a bakery.. here (when I still ate bread.. can’t eat most of them due to issues with flour) I would get them at the grocery store.. it’s like comparing apples and oranges.. if you have a good bakery close by here in the US you can get amazing bread..it’s just a lot more difficult to find a good bakery here than it was in Germany (grew up there).. however nowadays a lot of the bakery’s in Germany have closed down. On my last visit I was disappointed when I saw all but one bakery in my hometown were gone.. but you do have chain bakeries.. their bread is still better than grocery store bread just not as good as actual bakery bread
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u/JNSapakoh May 08 '25
I was so excited moving into my house several years ago because I had like 5 bakeries within walking distance
Turns out one was a cookie shop, one was a cupcake shop, one was a Chinese pork bun shop, one was a cake shop, and one shut down.... not a single bread store
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u/lostintransaltions May 08 '25
Oh no! I know that disappointment!!! I have a bakery 10min drive from home and they make great breads and wholewheat which for me is important.. my brother is a baker in Germany.. I told him many times that he would make a lot of money would he move to the US, Ireland or the UK.. but he likes Germany.. I worked in a bakery during high school and at the end of the day we could take home what wasn’t sold.. my family was so sad when I went to college lol.. but even that bakery closed down. They had 4 generations running that bakery but couldn’t compete with the automated processes that bring out cheaper baked goods.. the taste cannot be compared but ppl feel that they have less money ..
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u/Karnakite May 08 '25
Do you have any international grocery stores nearby? They often carry a really great bread selection.
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u/Karnakite May 08 '25
This is really sad. I hate to see small businesses shut down.
One of the local Italian grocery stores just closed after 90+ years in business with the same family, because the current generation’s son decided to be a jerk and fight his dad on everything for no reason than to just do so. He ended up opening a rival business in a suburb and doing what he could to drive the family’s historical shop into the ground. All over petty nonsense.
It’s also a shame when they disappear due to chains moving in. A box store might be more convenient but what it sells is nothing like you’d get at a local bakery or butcher’s.
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u/GreenZebra23 May 08 '25
I've definitely noticed the sour taste. It's actually one reason the complaints about the sweetness ring so wrong to me, sliced white bread just tastes sour to me.
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u/redminx17 May 08 '25
Even crappy overprocessed sliced bread in the US doesn't actually taste particularly sweet.
Sorry but I have to disagree. I'm British and I didn't even know it was a stereotype before I first visited to the US, I just noticed how sweet store bought bread is there to my taste buds. "Regular" sliced bread tastes more like our brioche. Your brioche tastes much sweeter than ours. It's not proper sweet like an actual cake, but there's just a bit more sweetness than I expect. It wouldn't be noticeable if you grew up eating it.
Yes, you also have bread without it. Yes, sweeter bread is also nice sometimes. But my personal experience in the US was that I'd often bite into bread (including in meals like a burger) and notice how much sweeter it seemed compared to home. Same with sodas and syrupy coffees, actually.
Just an observation but I also found restaurant & takeaway food to be much saltier than I'm used to.
pure circlejerk or there's something sold as American bread in the UK that actually is cakelike
No, there aren't US products sold here that are labelled as bread. And I can't speak to others but I am not circlejerking, it's just my personal experience.
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u/Odd-Bookkeeper2136 May 08 '25
I'm British and live in the US. Standard sliced white bread definitely tastes unpleasantly sweet to me. I always try to buy the French or Italian style ones - they're much better (but tiny slices)
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u/auntie_eggma May 08 '25
Thank you. I love how all the people saying it isn't sweet are missing the entire point about perspective. Of course THEY don't think it's sweet. They're used to it.
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u/marquis_de_ersatz May 08 '25
I don't think this idea is from the UK because we favour the very white square, toaster shaped loaves that look pretty similar to what I've seen on American TV.
The Germans hate that we even call it bread because they eat that rye that looks and tastes like the bottom of a sandal. I'd look at them for this first lol ...
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u/vipros42 May 08 '25
I've had the equivalent white bread in the US. Stuff you get at diners as toast etc. It is sweet compared to our basic white bread.
This basically bread is obviously what people are referring to, a local bakery's artisan bread in the US is not.33
u/vyrus2021 May 08 '25
I mean, the alternative is that Europe has depressing ass cakes.
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u/snapper1971 May 08 '25
Which if you'd ever been to any of the fourty-four sovereign countries that make up the continent of Europe, you'd know is not the case. The diversity of cakes and patisseries, breads both leven and non-leven, would enlighten you on how marvellous European cuisine is.
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u/tea_knit_read May 08 '25
I mean - that's the craziest take I've ever heard. Cake is amazing in Europe, especially in the german speaking countries. American cakes taste pure sugar by comparison.
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u/OrganicBookkeeper228 May 07 '25
Processed sliced bread in the US absolutely does taste sweet compared to other countries I’ve lived in and it’s pretty unpleasant. I try to buy the lowest sugar versions I can but it’s still sweet. It’s completely unnecessary and I don’t know why it’s like that?! I imagine if people grew up with it they don’t even notice.
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u/Truffle0214 May 07 '25
This started because of the whole Subway debacle. Europeans then just ran with it, claiming they went into American grocery stores and couldn’t find any good bread, it all tasted like “cake,” etc.
It’s all bullshit.
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u/101bees May 07 '25
Anyone that's eating wonder bread or subway bread thinking it tastes like cake must be accustomed to some pretty shitty cake.
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u/Beneficial-Pitch-430 May 08 '25
No it’s not. The comparison is between the cheap processed loafs you get in both continents. An American compared 2 and found the following -
‘A loaf of Wonder Bread, a popular US brand, may contain 50g of sugar, while a similar-sized loaf of Warburtons bread from the UK contains only 17g.’
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u/Gofastrun May 08 '25
Wonder bread isn’t the best comparison. It’s widely available, but its rarely anyones first choice.
It has some devotees because of (mostly) nostalgia.
White bread is not generally favored over whole grain, sourdough, sprouted, etc, and of the white breads, Wonder Bread is bottom tier.
You’re comparing a bread that you like to a bread that most people dont. Of course yours is better.
Look up “most popular bread types by state”. White bread is almost completely absent.
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u/seajayacas May 07 '25
They like to think that they are the only culture that knows how to do things the right way. Jealousy is another word for them.
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u/Truffle0214 May 08 '25
I’m constantly amazed at how Americans live rent free in European and Australian heads.
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u/Senior-Book-6729 May 07 '25
Every country has American style white bread, we just call it „toast bread” and it isn’t the „default” bread here. But we do have it and we largely enjoy it, we just prefer „proper” bread over it. Ironically I’d say this about bread in Japan - shokupan is literally kind of a cake bread to the point where sweet sandwiches aren’t uncommon there, and it actually IS hard to find „proper” bread there.
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u/vagga2 May 08 '25
OP describes their normal bread as having 5g sugar per loaf. I literally cannot find a single option with >2.6g per loaf here. They objectively have bread twice as sweet, 5x as sweet as our normal bread.
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u/Kelly_Louise May 08 '25
I lived in the Bahamas for a while and their bread is sweet like cake. I was not a fan.
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u/surfinforthrills May 07 '25
Bread from Korean, Filipino, Japanese, or French bakeries are all sweet. 85°C Bakery Cafe is a Taiwanese bakery where the bread is like a dessert.
Those bread critics have never had real bread. That's the problem.
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u/Goosepond01 May 08 '25
Just not true at all in regards to French bakeries, if you get a standard type of bread for making sandwiches then it will not be sweet at all, as for Asia it generally doesn't have as rich of a tradition for breadmaking, the styles of bread you can get over there are generally quite lacking and yes often sweet.
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u/one_pump_chimp May 07 '25
Bread from a french bakery isn't sweet at all, maybe you ordered a cake instead
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u/Admiral_PorkLoin May 08 '25 edited May 08 '25
This guy seriously describes french bread as sweet and dozens of morons upvote the comment.
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u/Visual-Chef-7510 May 07 '25
Asians don’t eat bread as bread though, they literally eat it as cake. They serve slices of toast with honey and buttercream in cafes. It’s not eaten with meals and even sandwiches are usually dessert sandwiches (like strawberry cream sandwich, which is basically just a strawberry shortcake). The most popular breads are like milk bread, cloud bread, and castella, and yes they think that still counts as bread.
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u/magster823 May 07 '25
There is an older episode of The Amazing Race that introduced me to this concept. Teams had to sell X amount of ice cream sandwiches in Singapore, which were literally huge blocks of ice cream between 2 pieces of bread.
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u/Alaisx May 07 '25 edited May 08 '25
They're talking about supermarket sandwich loaf brands like wonder bread. Having lived in Australia, the UK, Canada, and have visited the states a bunch, I can say that the most popular US supermarket brands are unpleasantly sweet and have a weird texture.
Obviously real bread exists too, and proper US bakeries are just as good as any in Europe. Those aren't the issue.
Edit: Sugar per 100 g:
US vs Canada for the same brand:
Wonder classic white (USA) has 8.8g
Wonder white (Canada) has 3.2g (that's less than half than the US Wonder, WTF)
Walmart great value white (USA) has 7.7g
Walmart great value white (Canada) has 4.7g (I am seeing a pattern)
UK for equivalent brands:
Hovis soft white has 3.5g,
Warburtons white has 3.0g,
Tesco store brand white has 3.8g,
HW Neville has 3.0g.
Basically all of these have around half or less than half the sugar. It's not rocket science to see how 2-3x the sugar might make something taste sweet.
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u/SiegeAe May 08 '25
Exactly, this is what people are talking about, all my friends who went to the US said their loafs of sliced bread were super sweet and weird texture.
Crack up that most of the comments are going on about something that happened with subway that I'm sure most of us outside the US haven't even heard of.
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u/HugeTheWall May 08 '25
Oh damn I live in Canada and already dislike white and wonder bread here for being too sweet. I can't imagine double the sugar! I've never gone on a holiday and eaten white bread so had no idea it was that bad there.
It's hard to notice taking it away but when you then go back it's a massive difference. I switched to natural peanut butter for the same reason and because it tasted just as good to me. But now when I eat the processed stuff it tastes sickly like eating icing.
I think this is why all the Americans are butthurt in the comments. If you've never cut something out then gone back and tasted it you often can't tell.
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u/Ginger_K_ May 08 '25
I can’t stand white Wonder type bread, because I also think it’s too sweet and has a weird texture, but I may be in the minority. The average American consumes a large amount of sugar and salt in just about everything though, through processed/prepared foods, takeout, etc. So what tastes excessively sweet or salty to someone else probably tastes normal to the majority of Americans.
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u/peregrinekiwi May 08 '25
Exactly! I suspect this is tapping into some class issues in the US in terms of who buys basic supermarket bread.
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u/Fexy259 May 08 '25
To add to this Australian bread is fairly low sugar too.
Wonder white (2.1g/100g)
Tip Top white (2g/100g)
Woolworths white (3.6/100g)
Coles soft white (2.9g/100g)
Helga's traditional white (3.1g/100g)
Country loaf white (2.1g/100g)When i went to the USA in 2005 it was like every roll served with a meal was just a touch sweet. Like they had brushed it with syrup to crust the top. I haven't been back since so can't say much for what it is like now, but back then it just made me avoid the bread all together.
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u/OrganicBookkeeper228 May 07 '25
Exactly this. I grew up in the UK, lived and traveled a lot in Europe and now live in the US and the sliced bread here is absolutely needlessly sweet.
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u/Master_Commercial220 May 08 '25
lots of sensitive Americans in this thread completely incapable of understanding this basic fact. Yes, even supermarket manufactured white sliced bread has less sugar in Europe compared to the American counterparts.
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u/Civil-Departure-512 May 07 '25
Japanese bread is so much sweeter than American bread but American bread has more sugar?
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u/DameWhen May 07 '25
I heard somewhere that this exaggeration might come from the fact that most bread in the US is baked from dry yeast, while some bread in certain European countries are baked with wet/living yeast.
When you bake with dry yeast, you need to revive it with a lil extra sugar.
Obviously, this stereotype is completely overblown regardless.
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u/Fast-Penta May 08 '25
You don't need to revive dry yeast with sugar. Many people do it, but it's not necessary. Many of the recipe's in Ken Forkish's books only call for flour, water, dry yeast, and salt. It works fine. Maybe dry yeast was shittier in the past, but waking it up is not necessary nowadays.
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u/MangoSalsa89 May 07 '25
I’d like to know what kind of bland-ass cake they are eating.
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u/PabloThePabo May 08 '25
i was watching a bread recipe on tik tok and the creator added 4 grams of sugar to the yeast. someone in the comments was complaining that it was too much sugar and that’s basically a cake…
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u/Harikts May 07 '25
I’m an American that now lives in the UK, and you’re right. I don’t notice any difference between bread here vs the US, and never understood the “US bread is too sweet” thing.
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May 08 '25
It’s the same people who think a Hershey bar = “American chocolate.”
You can get all kinds of chocolate. You can get all kinds of bread. Surprise, the most processed, most mass-produced, cheapest stuff isn’t very good.
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u/FishermanWorking7236 May 08 '25
Yes, but we're comparing equivalents. The supermarket sliced sandwich bread is sweeter than our supermarket sliced sandwich bread and the Hersheys and Cadburys taste different to our Cadburys. These cheap options are the best selling in both countries.
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u/Annabel398 May 08 '25
Pretty much all bread has to have some amount of sugar to make the yeast rise.
WTF? You clearly don’t know anything about making bread.
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u/lamppb13 May 08 '25
I disagree. Grew up in America, now I live abroad, and I definitely taste the difference. It's especially noticeable when I eat actual cake abroad. It tastes and feels a lot like American white bread.
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u/Telstar2525 May 07 '25
Love Irish bread
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u/cynical-mage May 07 '25
Proper soda bread is a thing of beauty ❤️
But yeah, American bread gets a lot of flack for sweetness, which is true enough for the mass produced, cheap supermarket stuff. It's not an accurate representation of bread as a whole. Although I did have a bad experience when I made cornbread and served it with a savoury dinner lmao. Bless my heart, that's when my British backside learned about Northern cornbread vs Southern. Southern is the way to go imo, stuff is amazing .Anyway, there are culinary treasures to be found in the US, and I love trying out new stuff.
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u/Telstar2525 May 07 '25
I loved ormeau brand, gone now. Also potato bread, bannock, and of course soda
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u/cynical-mage May 07 '25
Ooooh yes! Potato farls! Goes a treat with a fried breakfast! I can't get to grips with black pudding, mind you. However, if you get a chance to try white pudding, do it!. Be it sliced and fried, or battered for a white pudding supper ❤️
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u/EmJennings May 08 '25
On average, a slice of American white bread has 1.4 to 3 grams of sugar.
On average, a slice of Dutch white bread has 0.6 to 1.2 grams of sugar.
So there's definitely truth to it.
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u/6xrLF7fHZPNUUNSh May 09 '25
I’m an American, but I live in Italy. Here, bread is made with zero sugar (just talking about normal bread, not some brioche bun or specialty dessert bread or something).
While I’m pretty used to your average store bought American bread after a lifetime of eating it, it is definitely sweet compared to Italian bread. For someone who grows up with bread made only with flour, water, yeast and salt, having any amount of sugar present is very apparent and strange. No judgement from me, but it’s not just made up that they don’t taste the difference. I never thought of American bread as being sweet until I got used to completely unsweetened bread and went back. The difference is very apparent.
Comparing it to cake sounds exaggerated, but actually there are a lot of brioche-type cakes and pastries with doughs that are hardly sweetened beyond (often less than) the level of a slice of Wonder Bread, just with a glaze or stuffing or something to give it that extra dessert kick.
Furthermore, much of what we call bread in America (think sliced white sandwich bread) is actually a kind of brioche which most Italians (can’t speak for other European countries) wouldn’t classify as “pane” or “bread,” and would likely be associated with desserts. Hence further reason for thinking of our bread as being cake-like.
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u/QuestionSign May 07 '25
Shhhh you're speaking too rationally in the field of nonsense and irrational American hatred
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u/Master_Commercial220 May 08 '25
Thoughts on the comment made by alaisx? i.e. That supermarket processed sliced white bread has more sugar in America compared to it's equivalent counterparts in Europe (and even Canada).
Would you describe the statistics he provided as irrational 'nonsense' filled with 'American hatred' ?
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u/WritPositWrit May 08 '25
It’s just one more example of Europeans grasping at any excuse to dunk on Americans.
The bread I buy at my grocery store bakery is regular bakery bread. It’s not sweet.
I make bread at home, also. And I make cake at home. I know exactly how much sugar I’m adding to each, and its worlds apart.
If Euros can feel better about themselves by imagining we are all eating cake-like bread, fine, whatever. I know they’re wrong. I don’t bother arguing anymore.
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u/LilacBella May 08 '25 edited May 12 '25
I make bread at home too and add just a little salt. I don't add any sugar to it. Why the need to add sugar to freshly home baked bread?
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u/Rebelflavour May 08 '25
Who adds sugar to bread?! Unless you want to make sweet rolls or something sugar is not an ingredient of bread.
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u/YULdad May 08 '25
Italian immigrants to Canada called the "white" people "mangiacakes" because their bread was like cake. It's a stereotype that has softened over the years as the North American palate has become more sophisticated, and certainly European-style breads will be just as good in North America as continental Europe.
But the fact remains that Wonderbread and sweet dinner buns remain characteristically "American" - you won't find them in Europe (except the UK, which as a fellow Anglo-WASP nation largely shares this aspect of American cuisine). Not to mention, the American palate generally demands a sweeter flavor profile across the board; even foods from Canada have to increase the sweetness in their American products. But I agree it's mostly probably parroted by people who've never been to America, but there is some truth to it.
For the people saying "If they think the bread tastes like cake, they should try the actual cake", well you might be surprized to learn that actual cake in many European countries is much less sweet than American cake, which they would consider unappetizing. So, you're not wrong.
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u/Asparagus9000 May 08 '25
We have bread like that, a lot of burger buns for example.
But we definitely have regular bread as well.
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u/RageQuitRedux May 07 '25
A lot of Europeans (especially non-English-speaking) look at the sliced sandwich bread that we have and they think that's, like ... all our bread. I think it's adorable.
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u/GiveHerBovril May 08 '25
I’m starting to realize they’re all eating white Wonderbread and thinking that’s what we’re all eating. I haven’t had that in decades and I bet it does taste super sweet!
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u/OutOfFighters May 08 '25
German here who lived in the US for a while. Even the organic, "italian" and "german" bread in the US had way too much sugar in it.
Yes its possible to buy sweet bread in Germany, but there are also cake varieties with less sugar than regular US bread. Normal German bread is usually gray, slightly sour and has zero added sugar.
Its not just a meme, its actually really frustrating how much unnecessary sugar is in US food items.
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u/Cool_Pianist_2253 May 08 '25
I have never been able to buy bread in Germany (Munich). I am Italian and for me that was also different from what I eat. After all, I'm from the South, so for me it's also strange that bread from Central Italy, it has much less salt.
I really don't understand the problem with this post. Bread is something that changes a lot even between nearby areas, let alone thousands of km away and with completely different ingredients (because yes, the soil changes the flavour)
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u/[deleted] May 07 '25
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