How The U.S. Ruined Bread

Why Bread in the US is So Bad

I wanted to know why the bread in Europe tastes so much better than the bread in America, so I went to Paris to find out.

A big thanks to Peter Reinhart for sharing his bread expertise with us for this video.

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Johnny Harris is a filmmaker and journalist. He currently is based in Washington, DC, reporting on interesting trends and stories domestically and around the globe. Johnny's visual style blends motion graphics with cinematic videography to create content that explains complex issues in relatable ways. He holds a BA in international relations from Brigham Young University and an MA in international peace and conflict resolution from American University.

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[henningbartels]

As a German I was first triggered by taking France as point of reference. Yes, France has great baguettes and pastries, but it is mainly wheat bread. Germany has a much larger variety of types of grains, doughs, shapes and colors. This has geographical reasons being in a transition zone where not only wheat grows, but also rye, oats and barley. I give it to the French: they are sometime better in presentation of baked goods.

[thefili]

As a German, the "steamy" packaging broke me. Half the joy of bread (for me) is crunchy crust. Moisture in the packaging absolutely ruins that.

[sebastiansandvik]

Car culture is a big part of this too. In a lot European urban environments it's a lot more common to buy bread during your commute, or by simply walking or biking past the bakery. It's easy and effortless, since there are so many of them. In the US grocery shopping is something you do maybe once a week, and the bread is designed around that.

In my home country of Finland we have a bit of the same problem, but due to the climate. You simply have very few areas where you want to spend the extra time outside walking in the winter. Our solution has been a bit different though. Our traditional breads are often rye breads that are baked until almost completely dry, which hold naturally for a week or longer, or crispbreads, which can last a year or more. There are ways to achieve a bread that can be eaten for quite some time without a lot of additives, but it makes for a very different bread.

[spatnaspolecnost]

Just a heads up - it's extremely easy to make your own bread. Here is how:

225 g of water
3 g of live yeast or 1 g of instant yeast
9 g of salt
350 g of flour (should be fine grind and have around 12 g of protein, the more the better)
parchment paper
iron cast post with a lid or a pot you can safely bake in oven

1) Mix yeast and salt into the water until dissolved, add all of the flour at once and mix/mash with wet hand until you get rid of all the dry bits in the dough and it feels evenly wet throughout.
2) Cover the bowl with a lid so the dough doesn't dry out and wait 30 minutes.
3) Stretch and fold the dough a couple of times and make a somewhat smooth ball out of it. (Technique is called stretch and fold, it's an easy replacement of kneading). Cover it again.
4) You can wait another 15-30 mins and repeat the stretch and fold, or skip this step if you're lazy.
5) Let it sit covered until the dough doubled in size and starts to smell with a hint of alcohol. This should take about 4-12 hours depending on the room temperature and amount of yeast you put.
6) Open the bowl and sprinkle with flour, prepare parchment paper and GENEROUSLY sprinkle it with flour. Plop the dough out of the bowl onto the parchment and try to not flatten it too much - we want the gases to stay in it. Ideally you want the top of the dough from the bowl end up facing upwards on the parchment - basically bottom of dough when it was in the bowl will be touching the parchment paper.
7) Put the iron cast pot with a lid into oven at maximum temperature (I use 240°C, which is 464°F) and preheat until both the pot and the oven are hot.
8) Get rid of all the excess flour around the dough and transfer the parchment paper together with the dough into the hot iron pot. You can use scissors to score / cut open the top surface of the dough. CLOSE the iron pot with THE LID and put to bake (top and bottom) for about 45 mins. Again the exact time will vary depending on your oven.

It may seem complicated, but takes about 15 mins to make the dough and you have to plan to come back to it couple of times. Putting it to bake is like 5 mins. This bread is on par with any artisan bread I ever had. Btw this is basically 65% hydration pizza dough.

[kareliask]

My pet theory is that the rise in zoning, suburbs, etc, encouraged people to shop once per week by car, requiring bread pumped full of preservatives to last that week and beyond. Unlike Europe, many in the US don't have a corner shop (a convenience store surrounded by housing, serving a small neighbourhood that doesn't warrant a full strip mall, nor require that amount of space or population) that they can walk to to get fresh bread several times a week that will go stale after a day or two, so we instead get a lot of abominations pretending to offer the same experience. The zoning/housing/lack of pedestrianisation and local stores issue has a lot of knock-on effects on America's health and quality of food (it also diminishes the demand for local produce, quality farmer's ingredients, etc).

[ratioetscientia]

fun fact: American bread is called Toast in Germany (regardless of whether it’s toasted or not)…because it’s considered to be only edible in it’s toasted form so we figure it was toast all along 💁‍♀️

[DarrellBucket]

The cost of US bread is insane. In my experience, if you want a loaf of packaged bread that’s not completely awful, you’ll pay at least $5 for it. Bread bakeries in the US are so uncommon they are considered specialty shops where a loaf of bread costs $8-10 and it still might not be that good. In comparison, European bread is mostly every-day affordable, and has the quality you always hope to find (but rarely do) in the US.

[marilynleslie]

Some grocery stores in the US are starting to offer artisanal breads that baked fresh every day. I grew up in fifties and sixties. We still had neighborhood bakeries, but they focused on cakes and pastries. It wasn’t until I was a newlywed that I discovered neighborhood bakeries that had good bread.

[paulmurphy]

Fun Fact: Here in Ireland, Subways bread has actually been legally stripped of actually being classed as bread due to the additives and ridiculously high sugar content.

[patrickhayes]

Fun fact, in Ireland, Subway arent allowed to arvertise their subs as bread because the sugar content is too high

[melanieg]

Fun fact: France does have industrial sliced loaf bread sold in plastic bags... One of the most common brands in supermarkets is "Harris"😅 -
(But since it's more expensive than a regular fresh bread from the bakery, french people only buy it occasionally)

[anthonyantoine]

This is why I bake my own bread. It has 4 ingredients: flour, water, salt, and yeast. When I share it with people, they go absolutely wild for it. You are absolutely right about the fact that this kind of bread is only really available to people in large urban areas in the US, and at an unfortunately inflated price due to its rarity even in those urban places. I live in a rural area and love to stop and grab some amazing bread while in one of these urban areas, but I am otherwise forced to bake my own bread, which is quite time consuming, if I want to have any semblance of decent bread. It is incredibly unfortunate that nearly everyone is left to eat the trash heap of overly sweetened, processed breads which are the only breads really available on a mass scale.

[littledoseTM]

On my first visit in the USA i bought a "bread" and you could literally press the whole loaf into a Pingpong ball size lmao

[AndreiMorar]

Adding insult to injury, every EU country has its local, traditional type of bread. You could literally tour the European countries and eat each day a different, tasty, traditional type of bread.

[mk.]

I stopped eating fresh bread about 10 years ago because i fell into the conceive trap of buying bread from the supermarket, and using a toaster at home. My parents didn't like it, never even tried it, they were still old school and prefer to buy bread from the bakery. 10 years later I'm now a mother who still buys bread from the supermarket and i give it to my son as well, he loves it. I watched this video last year when it first came out and you managed to change my whole attitude towards bread, i no longer felt keen to buy it from the supermarket, so i learned how to make it at home instead, i now make my own bread once a week, i make a big loaf of bread, cut it into 4 quarters and freeze and thaw on demand, every week i make a new one, it tastes much better than supermarket ones, and we've also saved alot of money in the process.
I can't thank you enough for making this video, while I'm not American and our supermarket bread here is still much healthier and doesn't have all those ingredients that you have in America, i felt like i should give my son something that is more traditional.

[Tekukuno]

Where I live (not America) there's practically a bakery on every block. They're everywhere, selling fresh-baked loaves that are also so much more inexpensive than the store-bought stuff (which we have too). It's wonderful and people love it. I do. The best bakeries will sometimes have lines out the door as people buy their loaves and pastries for dinner at home.

[philip]

I recently saw an Australian baker respond on youtube to some American millennial "influencer" on vacation here in Australia, who was whining about the quality of our local bread, asking her audience "why does the bread here taste sooo different from the bread we have back home (in the US). The Aussie baker gave a succinct, two sentence reply to her enquiry in his broad Aussie accent; "It's because we don't load it up with sugar like you guys do. It's BREAD, not cake!!!"

[friestyler]

So im from Germany... it stings a bit, that you chose France for the "Culture of Bread" video, but I get it. The thing that struck me most was the detail Nathaniel mentioned: The "checking in on each other on your almost daily visits to the boulangerie". When I was spending a year at university in Paris, the two ladies that ran the boulangerie on my street were the first genuine connections I made in France. They remembered, when I told them I had scary exams comming up the next day and asked me the next day over how it went. They noticed I wasn't doing well, when I was missing my long distance girlfriend and cheered me up almost every morning. I know my current neighbourhood baker on a firstname basis. But I sometimes miss Margot et Hélène. It was truly special. Probably not despite but more so because Paris is a big city where you can sometimes feel lost. I still try to visit them when I get the chance to go to Paris and they still remember too.

[Eddyforshort]

Who could have guessed mass produced gas station bread wouldn't be as good as a loaf from a bakery in a major city?

[anantimelrifle]

My favorite part of the video is where you walked to the bred isle, instead of looking at the fresh baked bread in the bakery (the store is target, so most likely the bakery was about 20 meters from the bread isle).
Bad bread is popular because its cheap and its texture fits the role of making sandwiches, which it is superior for compared to authentic bread. If you want authentic fresh bread and if you want to make artisan bread sandwiches, most grocery stores still offer that type of bread.