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> The only reason this is of any interest at all is because it makes fun of how sweet mass-market American bread tends to be I just went and looked at the Iris

> The only reason this is of any interest at all is because it makes fun of how sweet mass-market American bread tends to be I just went and looked at the Irish Tesco’s website, and plenty of the sliced bread they’re selling exceeds 2% sugar by weight. So if you were an Irish voter and you once heard a politician say “I’m going to make bread 0% VAT”, you could have easily been fooled into thinking that included the bread you get in your grocery shopping, when perhaps it doesn’t.

YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
To be fair, sliced bread (the square stuff that's used to make sarnies and toasties) should not be called bread. Never mind the legal definition. It's a mess of supplements and emulsifiers and stabilisers and whatever. Yet, you can make perfectly good, delicious bread with only flour and water (not even salt, let alone sugar). Why are all that other stuff in sliced "bread", then? Probably because they improve shelf life or make the product resemble some ideal of "bread" that has been created by marketing teams and promoted by advertisements showing fake bread behaving in a certain way in different cooking conditions (oooh, look at how crisp those bread slices are as they pop out of the toaster!) (wait, why does your toaster have a strobing red light slit?). In short, that sliced "bread" is not bread, it's a product that masquerades as bread for the purpose of being sold to people who want to buy actual bread. It's like a, a, a mimetic parasite that pretends to be one kind of animal when it is another so that it can more easily approach its host. It's like a cookoo egg that will hatch to a cookoo fledgling that will throw all other eggs outside the nest so it can hogg their parents' attention. It's like a synthetic hormone, or protein, that binds onto the receptors that are meant for the real thing and inhibits the real thing's action. It replaces true bread in the baskets and the bellies and the minds of people, until nobody buys true bread anymore becase it looks ...weird and not like what they're now used to call bread, and everybody buys that fake bread shit instead, that the fake bread makers prefer to sell over true bread, because it makes them more money. Sure, that sort of stuff should not be allowed to be sold as bread in the first place. It should be forced to have big, red labels on its packaging stating clearly "THIS IS NOT REAL BREAD". When consumer goes to supermarket to buy bread, because they want to buy bread, they should be informed that what they are about to buy is not bread- then they can make their choice whether to buy it or not.
- AmericanChopper 6y ago
  This is a pretty extreme stance. Supermarket bread is real bread, box cakes are real cakes, etc... Refining a recipe in a lab, to better meet some criteria doesn’t make something not bread. That’s a bit like saying Nikes aren’t real shoes because they weren’t made by a wise old Italian cobbler over a period of 3 months. There’s fairly obvious qualitative difference between a handmade sourdough and a loaf of supermarket bread, but they’re both bread. Also, it’s pretty easy to make a fantastic, lovingly crafted loaf of bread by hand that ends up having more than 2% sugar.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
    I think what's extreme is the amount of extraneous ingredients that are added to sliced "bread". These recipes are not "refined" to meet any criteria that have to do with quality of the product- they're only there to improve the ability of the product to return a profit. In any case, let me be clear: I didn't say anything about Nikes not being true shoes. My comment is about fake bread. I also didn't say anything about who makes bread and for how long it's made. My comment is about ingredients added to fake bread that are not needed to make bread and are only needed to produce a product of inferior quality to true bread so that this product can be sold at a cut price and displace true bread in consumers' baskets etc.
    - AmericanChopper 6y ago
      > These recipes are not "refined" to meet any criteria that have to do with quality of the product This comment is just ignorant of how modern food science works. All of the ingredients in mass-produced bread exist to improve the quality of the product. They exist to improve the texture (try recreating that texture at home, you won’t be able to), to improve the moisture content, to improve the nutritional value (eg, all of the vitamins added to fortified flour), and to improve the shelf life. You’re free to not like it, and it would be reasonable to say it’s not ‘traditional bread’. But traditional bread didn’t contain yeast monocultures either, so most breads won’t meet that standard. What you have is a very niche opinion, and it would be equally valid to say that adding extraneous ingredients like seeds or yeast makes something ‘fake bread’.

YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago

To be fair, sliced bread (the square stuff that's used to make sarnies and toasties) should not be called bread. Never mind the legal definition. It's a mess of supplements and emulsifiers and stabilisers and whatever. Yet, you can make perfectly good, delicious bread with only flour and water (not even salt, let alone sugar). Why are all that other stuff in sliced "bread", then? Probably because they improve shelf life or make the product resemble some ideal of "bread" that has been created by marketing teams and promoted by advertisements showing fake bread behaving in a certain way in different cooking conditions (oooh, look at how crisp those bread slices are as they pop out of the toaster!) (wait, why does your toaster have a strobing red light slit?). In short, that sliced "bread" is not bread, it's a product that masquerades as bread for the purpose of being sold to people who want to buy actual bread. It's like a, a, a mimetic parasite that pretends to be one kind of animal when it is another so that it can more easily approach its host. It's like a cookoo egg that will hatch to a cookoo fledgling that will throw all other eggs outside the nest so it can hogg their parents' attention. It's like a synthetic hormone, or protein, that binds onto the receptors that are meant for the real thing and inhibits the real thing's action. It replaces true bread in the baskets and the bellies and the minds of people, until nobody buys true bread anymore becase it looks ...weird and not like what they're now used to call bread, and everybody buys that fake bread shit instead, that the fake bread makers prefer to sell over true bread, because it makes them more money. Sure, that sort of stuff should not be allowed to be sold as bread in the first place. It should be forced to have big, red labels on its packaging stating clearly "THIS IS NOT REAL BREAD". When consumer goes to supermarket to buy bread, because they want to buy bread, they should be informed that what they are about to buy is not bread- then they can make their choice whether to buy it or not.

AmericanChopper 6y ago
This is a pretty extreme stance. Supermarket bread is real bread, box cakes are real cakes, etc... Refining a recipe in a lab, to better meet some criteria doesn’t make something not bread. That’s a bit like saying Nikes aren’t real shoes because they weren’t made by a wise old Italian cobbler over a period of 3 months. There’s fairly obvious qualitative difference between a handmade sourdough and a loaf of supermarket bread, but they’re both bread. Also, it’s pretty easy to make a fantastic, lovingly crafted loaf of bread by hand that ends up having more than 2% sugar.
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
  I think what's extreme is the amount of extraneous ingredients that are added to sliced "bread". These recipes are not "refined" to meet any criteria that have to do with quality of the product- they're only there to improve the ability of the product to return a profit. In any case, let me be clear: I didn't say anything about Nikes not being true shoes. My comment is about fake bread. I also didn't say anything about who makes bread and for how long it's made. My comment is about ingredients added to fake bread that are not needed to make bread and are only needed to produce a product of inferior quality to true bread so that this product can be sold at a cut price and displace true bread in consumers' baskets etc.
  - AmericanChopper 6y ago
    > These recipes are not "refined" to meet any criteria that have to do with quality of the product This comment is just ignorant of how modern food science works. All of the ingredients in mass-produced bread exist to improve the quality of the product. They exist to improve the texture (try recreating that texture at home, you won’t be able to), to improve the moisture content, to improve the nutritional value (eg, all of the vitamins added to fortified flour), and to improve the shelf life. You’re free to not like it, and it would be reasonable to say it’s not ‘traditional bread’. But traditional bread didn’t contain yeast monocultures either, so most breads won’t meet that standard. What you have is a very niche opinion, and it would be equally valid to say that adding extraneous ingredients like seeds or yeast makes something ‘fake bread’.