10 ms·

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

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?

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> It is arrogant, at least. Are you trashing just the 340 million people in the US with this comment, or everybody not-Swiss? 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.)
- rootusrootus 1y ago
  I'm definitely not on the same wavelength as you this evening. > 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 ;).
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > are you saying that the rest of the country does not have anybody who makes fresh bagels? 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.
    - com2kid 1y ago
      A minor correction to your base premise - There is a bagel shop in Newton MA that is open for a few hours in the morning that has bagels just as good as NYC. 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.
      - MiddleEndian 1y ago
        Which bagel shop in Newton is this?
        com2kid 1y ago
        I think it is Rosenfeld but that is just random Google search, I haven't been to Newton in probably a decade. My fiancée (now wife) used to live there and I'd fly out every other month to visit her. 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!
- pclmulqdq 1y ago
  I'm not a fan of New York bagels. They're generally too doughy and "white bread" tasting for me. Plenty of places have excellent bagels that are pre-boiled with lye. The lye boiling process is not special. What is unique is the particular taste and texture, and it's just one kind of bagel that you can prefer or not prefer. 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.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > The lye boiling process is not special 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.)
    - pclmulqdq 1y ago
      Almost every city has several bakeries that make lye-boiled bagels and plenty of other things that are baked and stocked daily. Most bakers I know will donate their stock of all breads to a homeless shelter at the end of the day and start fresh on new bread in the morning. You don't need extremely high volume for that.
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > that are baked and stocked daily 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.)
dietr1ch 1y ago
It's arrogant, but have you travelled to Europe? Food is generally a lot better than in the US, and I mean this starting from the ingredients themselves, so it might have some snarky truth to it.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
Gabriel54 1y ago
It's an observation, not a value judgement. Try finding a fresh loaf of bread in the average American suburb.
- cm2012 1y ago
  American suburbs tend to have excellent bread in middle class neighborhoods or higher. This isn't the 90s.
  - ericfr11 1y ago
    Most suburbs have very artificial breads. Best bread would be in NY or DC, with a big population of foreigners ready to pay the price for fresh bread.
  - Insanity 1y ago
    Honest question.. where? Most bread seems to be high in additives and promoted as a “healthy food”, like additional vitamines etc. 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.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > where? Wealthy communities. Upper-middle class, maybe. That, or an immigrant bakery. (Mexican. Korean. Taiwanese. Japanese.)
    - slibhb 1y ago
      Search Google maps for "bakery" and sort by rating. 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.
      - 1y ago
karlgkk 1y ago
No? I’d say it’s fair to trash about 300 million of us tbh
chamomeal 1y ago
The American population as a whole is definitely less discerning when it comes to Swiss cheese than the Swiss
pazimzadeh 1y ago
Most Americans aren’t exposed to enough quality foods of certain types at a young age to develop the taste for them. 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”
- elzbardico 1y ago
  I hate Hershey’s with passion.
  - dietr1ch 1y ago
    I, too hate vomit
- bruce511 1y ago
  I think this is certainly the root of the misunderstandings in this (and other) spaces. 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.
  - com2kid 1y ago
    > 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). 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.
Magmalgebra 1y ago
Standards come from a mixture of culture and attention. The reason SF pizza is so much worse than NY pizza is that SF does not have culture of high quality pizza (I say this as an SF native). Conversely we have higher standards for Sourdough. Seoul has higher standards for Kimchi, you get the idea. Everywhere is like this to some extent - no people can be an expert in all things.
watwut 1y ago
Why does "being less discerning" equals "inferior" in your eyes? People from different cultures like different things and care about different things.
panick21 1y ago
Good cheese is hard to like, and even here we are judgmental. People who buy the cheap Emmentaler from the supermarket vs the more fancy one from the cheese shop. Most American 'swiss cheese is garbage' sorry. Then the 'Mild' here isn't that good. 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 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/Emmentaler-AOP-Le-Roi-30-mt.php 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.
- robocat 1y ago
  > literally has a thick salt crust inside of the holes. 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). Yes, your language might transliterate to salt or salt crystals in English but it is misleading to call them salt in English. To me this is very obvious when you eat the crystals (they don't taste salty, and they have only a very soft crunch).
  - panick21 1y ago
    Sorry that I called something that is called salt salt. I guess I shouldn't have said 'literally'. And that doesn't really change any argument I made in my post.
fransje26 1y ago
> 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? 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.
- uwagar 1y ago
  tbh for food in general, the farther the product from the source of production, the lower the quality. and lower the diversity too.

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?

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

> It is arrogant, at least. Are you trashing just the 340 million people in the US with this comment, or everybody not-Swiss? 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.)

rootusrootus 1y ago
I'm definitely not on the same wavelength as you this evening. > 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 ;).
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > are you saying that the rest of the country does not have anybody who makes fresh bagels? 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.
  - com2kid 1y ago
    A minor correction to your base premise - There is a bagel shop in Newton MA that is open for a few hours in the morning that has bagels just as good as NYC. 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.
    - MiddleEndian 1y ago
      Which bagel shop in Newton is this?
      - com2kid 1y ago
        I think it is Rosenfeld but that is just random Google search, I haven't been to Newton in probably a decade. My fiancée (now wife) used to live there and I'd fly out every other month to visit her. 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!
pclmulqdq 1y ago
I'm not a fan of New York bagels. They're generally too doughy and "white bread" tasting for me. Plenty of places have excellent bagels that are pre-boiled with lye. The lye boiling process is not special. What is unique is the particular taste and texture, and it's just one kind of bagel that you can prefer or not prefer. 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.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > The lye boiling process is not special 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.)
  - pclmulqdq 1y ago
    Almost every city has several bakeries that make lye-boiled bagels and plenty of other things that are baked and stocked daily. Most bakers I know will donate their stock of all breads to a homeless shelter at the end of the day and start fresh on new bread in the morning. You don't need extremely high volume for that.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > that are baked and stocked daily 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.)

dietr1ch 1y ago

It's arrogant, but have you travelled to Europe? Food is generally a lot better than in the US, and I mean this starting from the ingredients themselves, so it might have some snarky truth to it.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

Gabriel54 1y ago

It's an observation, not a value judgement. Try finding a fresh loaf of bread in the average American suburb.

cm2012 1y ago
American suburbs tend to have excellent bread in middle class neighborhoods or higher. This isn't the 90s.
- ericfr11 1y ago
  Most suburbs have very artificial breads. Best bread would be in NY or DC, with a big population of foreigners ready to pay the price for fresh bread.
- Insanity 1y ago
  Honest question.. where? Most bread seems to be high in additives and promoted as a “healthy food”, like additional vitamines etc. 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.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > where? Wealthy communities. Upper-middle class, maybe. That, or an immigrant bakery. (Mexican. Korean. Taiwanese. Japanese.)
  - slibhb 1y ago
    Search Google maps for "bakery" and sort by rating. 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.
    - 1y ago

karlgkk 1y ago

No? I’d say it’s fair to trash about 300 million of us tbh

chamomeal 1y ago

The American population as a whole is definitely less discerning when it comes to Swiss cheese than the Swiss

pazimzadeh 1y ago

Most Americans aren’t exposed to enough quality foods of certain types at a young age to develop the taste for them. 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”

elzbardico 1y ago
I hate Hershey’s with passion.
- dietr1ch 1y ago
  I, too hate vomit
bruce511 1y ago
I think this is certainly the root of the misunderstandings in this (and other) spaces. 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.
- com2kid 1y ago
  > 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). 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.

Magmalgebra 1y ago

Standards come from a mixture of culture and attention. The reason SF pizza is so much worse than NY pizza is that SF does not have culture of high quality pizza (I say this as an SF native). Conversely we have higher standards for Sourdough. Seoul has higher standards for Kimchi, you get the idea. Everywhere is like this to some extent - no people can be an expert in all things.

watwut 1y ago

Why does "being less discerning" equals "inferior" in your eyes? People from different cultures like different things and care about different things.

panick21 1y ago

Good cheese is hard to like, and even here we are judgmental. People who buy the cheap Emmentaler from the supermarket vs the more fancy one from the cheese shop. Most American 'swiss cheese is garbage' sorry. Then the 'Mild' here isn't that good. 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 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/Emmentaler-AOP-Le-Roi-30-mt.php 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.

robocat 1y ago
> literally has a thick salt crust inside of the holes. 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). Yes, your language might transliterate to salt or salt crystals in English but it is misleading to call them salt in English. To me this is very obvious when you eat the crystals (they don't taste salty, and they have only a very soft crunch).
- panick21 1y ago
  Sorry that I called something that is called salt salt. I guess I shouldn't have said 'literally'. And that doesn't really change any argument I made in my post.

fransje26 1y ago

> 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? 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.

uwagar 1y ago
tbh for food in general, the farther the product from the source of production, the lower the quality. and lower the diversity too.