Ok, it's interesting that the law in Ireland requires a 2% or less baker's weight of sugar. And I do enjoy a good sourdough, which isn't made with any sugar, or just a pinch.
But my favourite sandwich bread is Japanese milk bread, it's soft, lovely crumb, and it browns beautifully in the pan.
It's got a lot of sugar in it, that's the secret. A random recipe I found says 18% baker's weight, which seems accurate.
Are we pretending that polysaccharides are the staff of life, but when you get down to disaccharides they become the Devil? The glycemic index of white flour is dire, I doubt adding sugar is going to move the needle.
Sugar in dough makes it soft, with a giving crumb, and a crust which can be brown without becoming hard.
Exactly what you want in a sandwich filled with toppings, so that they don't shoot out the back when you bite into it.
Clutch your pearls all you want about 'Subway misrepresenting healthy food'! They publish the macros of their sandwiches. It's not nearly so healthy as eggs scrambled in butter, there's a ton of carbs and not nearly enough fat.
Unless you think it's the other way around that's healthy. It's your stomach, you get to pick.
> Are we pretending that polysaccharides are the staff of life, but when you get down to disaccharides they become the Devil?
Devil or not devil is off topic: it's not about not-devil or devil, it's about the difference between bread and cake. Which isn't a value judgement at all. But that is a line that will unsurprisingly be drawn differently in different cultures.
The legal issue isn't putting too much sugar in a product, it's putting much sugar in there and then labeling that product in a way that is deceptive in the local language (and in this case a tax angle, but it could be a court issue even without that).
Very well constructed argument. Please see here that the court is preventing subway from claiming tax breaks by classifying their product as staple food (bread). They are not preventing people from eating it.
Ah yes, I did read the article, and even comment that the Irish tax angle is of some interest.
My riposte here is that the Irish definition of bread doesn't comport with many delicious baked goods I would be happy to call bread, and eat with cheese and some cold cuts. I'm glad you appreciated it.
This isn't that unusual; Germans refuse to call many tasty beverages 'beer', and I'm sure this suits the Irish just fine.
The point of the classification is to not unduly burden the poor by taxing staple foods, such as bread. It's not about being snobby, everybody can agree that on the outside of a subway sandwich there is bread. But subway is fast food. The ingredients are selected to make you buy and buy more. I wouldn't really call it a staple.
We could just tax it all equally (plenty of folks making good money eat at Subway) and ensure that the people have enough money to get by. But instead, governments around the world create these Rube Goldberg machines that require a court to define what bread is.
My reading is that rather the Subway franchisee tried to define what a "staple food" is, saying that Subway sandwiches are "staple food" because bread. The court decided that, no, they're not, because we have a legal definition of what "bread" means and the stuff in your sarnies is not that.
You wouldn't need legal definitions for obvious things like that if people didn't constantly try to wring every last drop of profit out of each other by twisting things this way and that. Them's the roots of the "Rude Goldberg" machines in your comment: people getting creative to make a pig's meal of perfectly sensible laws that are there for a reason other than help folks maximise their profits by selling hot bullshit on a stick.
In the Netherlands there are two levels of sales tax (BTW); the high one for "luxury" goods - 21%, and a low (9%) one for necessary stuff. A lot of goods are necessary, and there is no need for the country to profit from (after all, the sales tax goes to the government, not to the shop owner).
You can also use sales tax to nudge people into buying more healthy food. The fact that hamburgers and chips are cheaper than a salad and fruit is something you can correct somewhat by moving junk food to the higher sales tax.
And I personally also think that the judges might have taken into account that this seems like yet another multinational that wants a tax cut over the heads of the normal companies. The news that Mr President pays nickles and dimes as income tax where John Doe pays tenfold nicely paints the picture...
Why not both? Ensure people have enough money to get by and don't levy sales tax on staple foods. People value cheaper food over conceptual simplicity of the tax system.
But your comment essentially boils down to fix poverty.
People have been trying to do that for a long time. Situation is improving in some places but we are still not even close to be there.
So until we fix poverty, workarounds like this provide real help to real people.
Just like software systems legal systems should probably get "refactored" once in a while. But just like managers don't really understand that need, politicians don't either.
Besides being unfair to both managers and politicians, that analogy doesn’t work. Refactoring by definition does not affect the visible behavior of a program. The judicial system is not a computer and cannot just happily start executing a newly refactored program. This is doubly so in common law jurisdictions that lean heavily on precedents and case law.
A thing can be good and also not bread (or beer or whatever). You can even eat a thing with cheese and it may still not be bread – shocking, I know. Crackers are not bread. Coffee is good too and it’s not bread. It would be strange to insist that it should be considered bread on the basis that it’s a perfectly good food product. Or that it’s also made from a seed. Or any other arbitrary similarity it might have. The word “bread” still has a specific meaning.
Anytime you give something a legal definition, there’s no requirement that it has to resemble the common use of the word, and it often won’t. You can see the issue play out in the self-sustaining cycles of ever increasing complexity that you get with pretty much any regulatory framework.
Take the FIA’s technical regulations of F1 as a non-political example. They’re long and get longer every year, primarily because they have to address issues like having a mass damper mounted inside the chassis defined a “moving aerodynamic part”, but a giant fan on the back of the car not defined as a “moving aerodynamic part”.
I think it’s important for people to pay attention to, because when you hear somebody like a politician speaking, you might think that you know what all the words they’re saying mean, but there’s a good chance that you actually don’t.
Right. This is just one of those cases where people get confused about different definitions in different contexts.
This is about the "statutory definition of bread" for the purposes of being considered a "staple food" for tax purposes.
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. "Your bread's so sweet the Irish government doesn't consider it bread!" Which is a fun point that I wholeheartedly endorse, but it doesn't make any difference to what we call "bread" in everyday life.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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’.
>> All of the ingredients in mass-produced bread exist to improve the quality of the product.
Nothing in mass-produced anything exists to improve quality. The economics of mass-production only work if quality is reduced with respect to small-scale production. Because when you mass-produce something, you want to sell it to as many people as possible. And in order to sell something to as many people as possible, you have to make it as cheap as possible, or most people won't buy it. But, to make something cheap you have to reduce its quality, because good quality costs a lot of money - and if you're mass-producing something you have real low margins because you're counting on selling as much of it as possible to make a profit, so you have to choose the cheapest ingredients. And so quality goes out the window.
>> 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.
I don't need to recreate the texture of fake bread. I can make my own bread and it has a great texture that is exactly like the texture of the bread I've eaten all of my life, straight from the baker's. I don't know why you need to improve the moisture content of bread either, the moisture content of real bread is just fine. As to fortifying bread with vitamins- why ever would I need that? I eat plenty of vegetables and fruit, as well as meat and pulses and so on and I don't need my diet supplemented with vitamins in bread, of all things. As to shelf life, the only reason that fake bread lasts longer is so that it can stay on the shelf longer and be sold for longer. I don't care about that, neither does anyone I know. Like I say it's only meant to maximise the seller's profit.
Like I say in my other comment, fake bread is fake and real bread is real and I'm afraid that the only reason we're having this conversation is because fake food is so common it's taken the place of real food and many people think it's normal. It isn't- it's overprocessed shit of the lowest possible quality.
Also, please note that I never said anything about seeds, or yeasts, etc,
ingredients that are common in real bread.
I see we've narrowed your definition of "fake bread" down to "bread that's different from the bread I prefer to eat".
Also, just to point out a factual error. Most of the sliced bread in the supermarket is sold the same day it’s baked. The added shelf life is so that it lasts longer once you’ve taken it home.
I personally love to bake, but I don’t bake bread that often because I can’t eat a loaf of homemade bread before it goes stale.
>> I see we've narrowed your definition of "fake bread" down to "bread that's different from the bread I prefer to eat".
What an awful conversational style. I specifically said that sliced bread in particular is fake bread, not that the bread I don't like to eat is fake bread. You keep over-interpreting my comments and coming up with things I never said.
And what you say about fake bread being baked the day it is sold is wrong, or at least it is in my neck of the woords (the UK).
In germany, being allowed to call yourself "beer" has quite a few legal requirements. Imported beer is largely exempted on account of EU law if they don't write "brewed according to german purity law" on the bottle, but locally brewed beer must adhere to strict rules on what is permitted to be put into it.
Originally that essentially meant hops, wheat, water. Nowadays it may also include sugar, natural color enhancing, salt and simple preservatives.
Many "tasty beverages you would call beer in the US" barely qualify for a drink in germany, either because it tastes like water with a drop of beer or has almost no real taste at all (ie, tastes artificial with flavor). That's on top of the poor water quality in the US that contributes to a (IMO) chalky and flat base taste.
> Many "tasty beverages you would call beer in the US" barely qualify for a drink in germany, either because it tastes like water with a drop of beer or has almost no real taste at all (ie, tastes artificial with flavor). That's on top of the poor water quality in the US that contributes to a (IMO) chalky and flat base taste.
Honestly, this whole paragraph sounds incredibly ignorant from most any perspective. Most US generalizations have a certain amount of truth to them, but you seem to have picked the wrong ones. You have no idea what tasty beverages they were referring to, or that the US and many other countries have incredibly fast-growing craft brewery scenes, or that tap water isn't centrally managed across the US so poor water quality "in the US" is undefined.
I've been to the US and no matter the place I've been, the tap water is terrible compared to what I get from my own tap at home. Maybe this is different in some very rural and remote mountain regions in the US.
While the US has a fast growing craft brewery scene, the german one has about 800 years head start in experience and market depth.
Tasty beverages for me as a german boil down to either a soda or beer. ANd granted, I've tasted the american versions of various sodas and softdrinks. Even our coca cola tastes better and less artificial.
> the tap water is terrible compared to what I get from my own tap at home.
I suspect this is just because it's not what you're used to rather than an actual quality judgment. I feel this about my home city when I travel elsewhere, and I complained about my current home city when I first moved here from a different country. For instance, I've felt the same about the water in many German cities whether I visited from Switzerland or the US.
> While the US has a fast growing craft brewery scene, the german one has about 800 years head start in experience and market depth.
I agree that this difference probably exists, but no one's starting from scratch these days and there's no reason to indicate it would continue at the same pace as Germany in the 1200s anyway, so I would presume it's far from a 800-year headstart (if there's any at all). In many cases, there may be no advantage besides the cultural recognition of certain concepts that have been more pervasive in Germany for a long time. Have you actually tried a decent variety of North American craft beers?
This is certainly a matter of taste. When I was in Germany for months, I had to buy bottled water to make tea, because what I got out of the tap was undrinkable.
Germans appear to love their mineralwasser. I find it tastes like soap. If that's what you like, then the stuff out of my tap will also be undrinkable.
No arguments about the soft drinks, though. I go out of my way to get the Coke with sugar rather than corn syrup -- I don't think I'm just fooling myself that I can taste the difference.
I remember Denver (or anyway Jefferson County) water as quite good. It is true that there are other regions where it's hard to say much good about the water.
I wasn't thinking of the many world-class microbrews in the USA, nor the proletarian pisswater either; most of them qualify as beer in Germany, that bitterness you're tasting comes from your palate, not the water.
Rather of lambics, which, being not much of a beer drinker myself, I prefer. The sweet ones are alright, but a dry cherry lambic, now, that's what I call a beer.
Barley isn't used much in my region, historically because while beer initially contained barley, the taxes were expensive so people lobbied for wheat. So nowadays, my region is largely wheat-based beers and barley isn't as common.
>Many "tasty beverages you would call beer in the US" barely qualify for a drink in germany, either because it tastes like water with a drop of beer or has almost no real taste at all (ie, tastes artificial with flavor). That's on top of the poor water quality in the US that contributes to a (IMO) chalky and flat base taste.
And this is why so many travelers to the US buy "imported" beers at bars without knowing that they've been tricked into overpaying for our mid-tier national brands.
I think this maybe boils down to how Ireland wants to tax sugar in general and has little to do with subjective definitions of what's a preferable foodstuff to them or those abroad.
Are you very much against calling them cake or any other way than bread?
I'd like to know if the thing that I'm going to buy will taste sweet or not and I treat, it having name 'bread', as a good indicator that it will taste rather salty than sweet.
If only the entire planet would fall under your whimsical notions of categorization, maybe we'd have semblance of delicious order. At least in your mind.
Not to veer off on too much of a tangent, but I find Germany’s notoriety for beer odd. They’re main claim to fame is that that they have old beers... but you can find more diversity in locally brewed beers in 40 square city blocks in Portland (Ore.) than you can in all of Germany. I loved living in Germany, and love beer, but hype re Germany being exceptional for beer is just wrong and, I imagine, stems mostly from Oktoberfest and legend.
Germany has great beers and many tiny “micro breweries” before that was even a trend, old and new. Germany just doesn’t do the style of craft beer that’s popular in the US. You won’t find “apricot IPAs” or whatever but there’s plenty of diversity in the different regions and styles of beer. I think the reputation is mostly justified especially in the south.
I don't think it's entirely true in the south either, there is plenty of breweries around here, though granted a lot of them sell their own brew + brew from a distributor to balance their sheets. Many small towns have their own brewery, even if it just services the local tavern/restaurants with local + brand brew.
There is about 25 local breweries in my area in germany. Half of them predate WW1, some are almost as old or even older than the United State of America. The town I was born in had a "micro brewery" run by monks since around the 1200s, the only reason they write "196x" is in part because it was destroyed during the thirty year war in the 17th century and then again during WW1 and WW2. The church never had much more than 20 people there and since atleast a hundred years the brewery is run by less than 3 people.
The large industrial breweries and their products dominate the market and the majority of German beer drinkers probably don’t really care about (and likely couldn’t tell apart) the type or specific taste of their beer, as long as it’s beer.
However, the quality of German industrial beers is still very good. It’s just that they mostly taste the same, especially those of the Pilsner variety.
Nevertheless, even though they don’t dominate the market there’s a flourishing, often centuries old, tradition of highly diverse, local brews and plenty of different types of beers.
In the last decade or so, mostly due to the craft beer trend in the US and the UK, there’s also been a growing number of modern craft beer and micro breweries.
The main claim is not that our beer is old. The main claim is that the ingredients adhere to a strict standard: Hops, malt, yeast and water, nothing else is allowed.
So there are still thousand ways to brew a beer, and as another commenter said, there are so many breweries in my vicinity I can't even count them.
But German beer having a bad reputation in the world? Which part of the world would that be? Really curious.
What do you think about the argument that in wine there is just one ingredient, still no real wine connoisseur would claim that there is narrow spectrum of wines.
Same for beer, there are countless varieties of hops, malts and yeasts and by combining them and using different temperatures, brew durations and a multitude of other parameters you could still achieve a wide variety of different flavours that one could probably never try all of them in a lifetime.
I my view the "Reinheitsgebot" as it is called is just a way to ensure that this is a basic product where everybody knows what's inside, so more of a quality standard than a taste standard.
Sugar isn't just a glucose disacharide, its got fructose, which is functionally not a carb. It can only be metabolized in the liver, and in large enough quantities your liver is forced to metabolize fructose into fat, which taken far enough leads non alcoholic fatty liver disease. Glucose won't do that to you.
Fructose is definitely a carb. It's not a direct reactant in Kreb's cycle, but there are plenty of ways to move fructose through the metabolic pathways so the oxidation of those carbons results in the production of ATP.
Also, I wouldn't use "It can only be metabolized by the liver" as evidence of fructose's carbohydrate status: a) that has nothing to do with the definitions, and the statement is true for a very large number of molecules.
Could you elaborate? I'm reading this on wikipedia:
> Under one percent of ingested fructose is directly converted to plasma triglyceride.[2] 29% - 54% of fructose is converted in liver to glucose, and about a quarter of fructose is converted to lactate. 15% - 18% is converted to glycogen.[3] Glucose and lactate are then used normally as energy to fuel cells all over the body.
I can't find my source[1], but the amount of fructose converted to glucose is highly dose dependent. Over 30 grams (if i remember correctly) it basically all gets shunted to fat.
Yes, I'll grant you that fructose and glucose aren't bio-identical foods. A human can only absorb about 30 grams of fructose in an hour, and it looks like if we get well north of 120 grams in a day, bad things can happen.
That's sixty grams of sugar, or about 55 of high fructose corn syrup. Can't be more than 200 grams of flour in a twelve-inch subway, so twenty grams of sugar?
You'll be fine. Just, maybe don't get that fountain drink to go with it...
> human can only absorb about 30 grams of fructose in an hour
Absorb or metabolize?
I'd be interested in seeing any references for what you're talking about. I've heard before that fructose can lead to problems in excess, so it would be great to know some quantative guidelines for safe consumption.
Not OP, but I think by "(not) functionally a carb" OP means "(not) processed as carb by your body".
Functionally => how it functions, how it interacts with something else, c.f. "functional testing" :)
Unsure if this is nutritional terminology or just HN-reader terminology.
Because your body processes fructose through a different potentially more damaging pathway than glucose. It’s a carb if you like but it’s the worst carb for you by a huge margin, especially when eaten without fibre.
industrial sugar is a cheap filler. it is the rightful role of government to regulate the externalities imposed on consumers by producers that use asymmetries of information to sell adulterated staple foods like "bread" with a large amount of corn syrup in it. it is now necessary for buyers to spend a considerable amount of time and intellectual energy to avoid such things, and that imposes a real cost on consumers. if i want to know whether my food has added sugar, i now have to read the labels of every atomic "ingredient" that i buy, like canned tomatoes, or corn.
i only trade with subway because it is the closest thing to food i can buy at the airport or by the freeway. without consumer access to complete information, i doubt that i will have access to products that are not adulterated with cheap, harmful ingredients.
this seems to me like a canonical example of the sort of case where regulation would make a more efficient market.
Just because it has bread in its name does not mean anything. Or you consider shortbread a bread? Certainly the Irish won't. Pleased stop taking things literally.
I can't stand Japanese bread, mainly for the sweetness. No thanks... Give me a nice crispy and freshly baked French baguette any time. I'd even eat it without any toppings as the main meal!
For a bread that's gonna last more than a few days, yeah milk + more sugar seems to help with the flavor a _lot_. For freshly baked bread like that you're gonna eat within a few hours of baking, it's still pretty tasty even without it.
That only true if you want pure white bread. If you bake with more whole grain (> 30%) higher hydration (> 70%) and use preferments or even better sourdough, a bread can easily last a week, as long as you can toast it once it's more than 2-3 days old.
If honey is used rather than sugar, you get more sweetness per unit weight, and also get more browning. This is good or bad depending on what you like. Thick dark crusts are what I’m after, so honey is a straight win.
Because after that it’s technically not a bread, it’s a brioche. As much as applesauce starts to be an Apple jelly.
Yes it’s your stomach and you pick what you want to eat but it is deceiving. The Irish court is not saying to stop to eat at Subway but to give the right info to me as a customer about what I am going to eat.
Also, the glycemic index is bullshit, as it won't predict the blood glucose response of an individual to a meal, because that depends on the person's health (diabetic or not), time of day (e.g glycogen stores depleted or not), or food combinations.
Also, eating sugar in a healthy person (non-diabetic) is only bad when it leads to overeating calories, not because of the blood sugar response, which is perfectly normal.
There's nothing wrong with getting some sugar in your blood, and avoiding foods on such meaningless criteria is a recipe for eating disorders (orthorexia). The carbohydrate-insulin model is complete bullshit.
Its about legal definitions. In Germany a lemondaid is getting banned (not allowed to be called lemonaid) because of too low sugar. These were introduced a long time ago to protect the consumer.
On one hand I agree with you, but I also think it's besides the point.
What you and I call it doesn't matter - for legal (and tax) purposes, bread with too much sugar stops being a "staple food" and becomes cake. It's just the way the law is written, and whether it's a good idea or not, it's common for tax laws to promote certain lifestyle choices like eating healthy or not smoking.
The business in the article tried to use a loophole to avoid taxes and got slapped down by another loophole.
It depends on the fructose quantity when the saccharide is cut fown. 1-1 fructose-glucose is objectively worse than 3-4, even if it's not much, but objectively better than 4-3. So, sugar is objectively worse than white flour.
The title is a little misleading... Subway can still call it "bread" but it cannot have the tax-exempt status of a staple food, because the weight of the sugar in the bread is 10%, which is above the 2% limit.
As a note, this is "baker's percentages", where the amount of flour is defined to be 100% and all other ingredients are measured by weight relative to the flour - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker_percentage
I have known Europeans to criticize American bread for being too sweet but if you live and shop here it's easy enough to find better bread.
Not quite. Bananas have a lot of sugar, by weight. The Subway bread is something like 8%. Bananas are more like 12-16%.
People are often surprised by the proportions of ingredients in restaurant food anyway. The reason that restaurant food tastes "better" than home cooking is often down to added sugar, salt, and fat.
Given that baker's percentages are given as a percentage of the flour content of an item[0], you could argue that the baker's percentage of sugar in a banana approaches infinity.
2:1 flour to sugar ratio in banana bread and that's not counting the sugar in the bananas. But banana bread is only named bread. It is technically a cake.
I was just looking into recipes of Brioche [0] (French bread, very soft "fluffy" internal structure) and the recipes I've seen use no sugar at all, though could be added. From Wikipedia:
> Brioche dough contains flour, eggs, butter, liquid (milk, water, cream, and sometimes brandy), leavening (yeast or sourdough), salt, and sometimes sugar.
So I guess sugar shouldn't be required to make bread with a very soft internal structure (as mentioned in case of the Japanese Milk Bread).
Challah is one of my favorite breads. I remember my grandma buying it in the morning and giving it to us for breakfast (we were around 8) and having it with only butter. Because it was still hot, butter would start to melt a bit... Mmmmmmm I can still taste it.
I verify the yeast with warm water + honey, then I throw the whole mess into the bread machine and let it mix/wait/punch down/rise etc. Then I take it out of the machine, form the challah, let it rise again on a sheetpan, egg wash, and bake it in the oven.
You can add more yeast for faster rising but since I use a bread machine I don't bother.
You can throw raisins in without affecting the rest of the recipe. Traditionally challah with raisins was for rosh hashana, and was in a circular shape rather than braided, like polish paska.
As ingredients don't list the bakers percentage of sugar, what does that mean on the nutrition label? Most of the 'bread' in my supermarket lists "carbohydrates of which sugars" as 2g to 5g per 100g.
Europe has plenty of 'sweet bread' with sugar in similar quantities. I don't begrudge resistance to industrial 'bread products' but this is just a performative headline.
I don't know anyone that would eat Subway every day. The point is that the sugar content of Subway 'bread products' is not sufficient to call it bread and I pointed out the facts.
The issue is precisely that Subway is positioning themselves as a health-conscious brand, and the sandwiches are frequently consumed daily by the office worker crowd without cafeteria access.
If they were promoting it as a brioche sandwich, that'd be one thing.
health means different things to different people. there is not one size all to healthy. a lot of people equate healthy to calorie count, not just grams of sugar. subway has good food for calories. i think some of their items do qualify as a health conscious sandwich
Subway advertising explicitly or implicitly describes its food as being healthy, not an occasional treat.
(Edit: receiving down-votes and I'm curious to know what's controversial about the above. Perhaps Subway is advertised differently in your country? Would be interesting to know.)
European countries vary vastly in regards to bread. German bread is not comparable to what the Dutch or French call bread. I might biased as a German, though.
Europe has plenty of industrial bread products that do not taste anywhere near as sweet as US bread. It was something that really threw me when I arrived here, that if I went to a supermarket and bought any old loaf of bread it would taste distinctly sweet. Just a matter of taste, and as others have pointed out it's not difficult to get a non-sweet loaf (sourdough, etc) it's just not the standard.
Saying bread tastes like something in Europe is simply weird. Each European country has their own bread types usually and they have next to nothing in common.
For example, while rye bread might taste sweet, it's not because of added sugar (for example, only certain types of Finnish rye breads have syrup added to them, but most do not). The sweetness comes naturally from the rye when it's processed for enough long time. Just like the sourness.
I grew up in Italy. Over there[1], it's rare for people to use sugar in savoury foods (maybe just a pinch here and there, at most).
When I moved overseas (I moved around a bit then settled down in Australia), it was really hard for me to get used to the fact that most commercially made food had sugar in it. I couldn't stop thinking "why there is sugar in my sandwich", "why there is sugar on my pizza" and so on.
Then I eventually moved over the poverty line (as a new migrant I was broke at first) and started eating "better" food, and I realised that the sugar thing was not a trademark of all Australian food, but just a trademark of Australia's junk food.
Nowadays, in my head I associate the "sugary" feeling to junk food, and the "non sugary" to higher quality food. (Obviously all of the above only applies to savoury dishes).
I'm told that in other countries the average sugar contents tend to be even higher (usually in the form of corn syrup). What is the commercial motivation behind the widespread use of sugar in cheaper food? I personally find it unpleasant but perhaps I'm in a minority? Or maybe there are other factors at play maybe related to food processing etc.?
[1] (not really everywhere though because of regional differences)
Because sugar is addictive. It's not really about taste, per se.
Sugar is metabolized quickly, and then is followed by a huge insulin spike shortly after. The whole process is up in 4-5 hours. While you're eating, it feels like you're getting something--those are the same signals that trigger the insulin.
More substantive foods containing fats and proteins (probably, that's the stuff you like) take much much longer, >8hrs, and correspond to a more muted, but longer term, insulin response.
So, if you eat a bag of chips with a sugary coating, you get a signal of "oh this is super fulfilling!" while the insulin is spiking, and then a "my stomach is empty again" in 4 hours when the whole thing ends.
This makes you buy more of whatever thing had a bunch of sugar in it.
Sugar is cheap calories and cheap "tasty", so junk food will have a lot of it. For me, also an immigrant, lots of US foods are too sweet and some sweets are plain intolerable for being oversugared (yes, cake or pastry is supposed to be sweet, but not that sweet, there should be a balance!)
But sugar is a cheap way to make something feel tasty, especially to an unsophisticated taste, and people get addicted to it. I know because I was a sugar addict once. I drank liters of cola, and ate tons of junk food. And then when my blood sugar started to approach the red zone, I stopped and now I avoid added sugar foods at all, except an occasional pastry once in a while. And it does change how you taste things. The cheap high of added sugar is replaced with rich gamut of actual food taste.
Side-side note, but I am disturbed by the fact that the bread is called by Subway "Italian".
There is normally no sugar at all (or much less than the 2%) in "common" Italian bread though there are particular kinds of bread that do contain it.
Traditionally (at the time where there were not any children snacks at the supermarket, and even if there were noone bought/used them) it was traditional to give children as a mid-afternoon snack a slice of bread briefly soaked in water wirh some white sugar on it (as an alternative to an even more traditional slice of bread with some olive oil and a pinch of salt).
When the kid was grown enough, like - say - 10 or older sometimes a few drops of (red) wine might have been added to the bread and sugar.
Subway's "wheat" bread also used to be white bread with caramel coloring. They changed it to be whole grain under the US FDA definition (minimum 51% whole grains) in 2014.
I did a gig for a statewide public school cafeteria purchasing portal and all of the wheat bread they bought was 51%. I think there was some mandate around supplying “wheat” and this met the threshold.
Yes, you're right. The FDA allows the following health claim to be used for marketing "whole grain foods" that "contain 51 percent or more whole grain ingredient(s) by weight per reference amount customarily consumed (RACC)":
> Diets rich in whole grain foods and other plant foods and low in total fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol, may help reduce the risk of heart disease and certain cancers.
Products that are 100% whole grain almost always explicitly say "100% whole grain" (or wheat) on the packaging.
All foods served in school breakfasts and lunches in the US must be "whole-grain rich" as of the 2014-15 school year, with the presence of the FDA health claim being one of the approved ways to confirm that a food is "whole-grain rich":
Subway has always been marketed as a healthy fast food option, but its "9-Grain Wheat" bread was carefully named and advertised without being described as "whole grain" or "whole wheat". Many consumers assumed that "9-Grain Wheat" was whole wheat bread, when the ingredients told a different story before 2014.
"Multigrain" is the most confusing term. A bread can have more than one type of grain and still not be whole-grain. Most multigrain breads in the US that are also whole-grain will specifically say so.
The Whole Grains Council (which created the Whole Grain Stamp icon used on the labels of US food products) has a guide for determining which words refer to whole-grain foods, and which do not:
Ah, good old penny pinching corporate behavior! Reminds me of Taco Bell and their “beef”. How much meat needs to be in a product to be meat? More than 35%! https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_813185
According to Taco Bell, it's 88%, not 35% -- and the plaintiffs in that suit settled without disputing the 88% figure, changing their story to say, more or less, "all we wanted was for Taco Bell to actually give us the real number."
12% seasoning is still a lot by weight, to be sure -- it's something like four tablespoons per pound of ground beef -- but a lot of these "fast food companies aren't using real food!" stories get overly sensationalized, and this one never came across like it had a whole lot of there there.
At least beef is the only meat in it. If a restaurant wants to reduce the amount of beef in something to save money, as a lacto ovo bovo porco vegetarian I'd much rather see them compensate with more seasoning than by adding some cheaper meat like turkey or chicken like many places do.
It still boggles my mind that wheat is considered a health food. Even so called ‘whole wheat’ is mostly sugar in the form of starch polysaccharides combined with a bit of protein and unremarkable amounts of fibre.
I'm not saying that sucrose isn't worse than starch. Obviously pure sugar is worse. Fructose is significantly worse. But it's wrong to think of bread as some kind of health food when in reality it's predominantly composed of well-disguised glucose.
Though I won't have a bad word said about broccoli. Lightly stir-fry your broccoli in coconut oil, pinch of salt and half a lemon and it's easy to get to 2,000 calories—and makes a satisfying meal alongside a modest portion of protein.
If you need calories, you can always wash your broccoli down with a block of chocolate.
Seriously though, there's plenty of calories in the coconut oil, half a lemon and a modest serving of protein. And it's not like you're going to have broccoli for every meal. Between the eggs and avocado you might have for breakfast and whatever convenience food you'll probably have for lunch, you're unlikely to need more calories for dinner anyway.
I buy whole wheat bread with very little sugar, although it is easier to find wheat bread with lots of added sugar and even more so in restaurants. I guess I would consider it as a good part of my balanced nutrition, not so much healthy by itself.
Your "low sugar" bread is only low sugar until you eat it. Whole wheat is mostly polymers of glucose sugar and it's turned into sugar when your body digests it.
Bread is a good source of calories but offers little in the way of nutrition. In fact, in terms of its phytic acid content, wheat germ is functionally an anti-nutrient because it impairs bodily absorption of iron, zinc and calcium.
And while bread can be included in a healthy diet, few people in the western world are suffering from a lack of dietary calories. For anyone who is currently consuming more calories than they need, bread has no nutritional upside.
Pseudo-science, seriously? Tell me then, what about bread qualifies it as a health food? It's mostly glucose polysaccharides that are rapidly digested by your body into plain old glucose. Yes, there is also some amount of protein and fibre, but not in remarkable quantities. Not to mention the non-trivial amounts of phytic acid in wheat germ which can impair bodily absorption of iron, zinc and calcium.[0]
Most people in the western world already have access to far more calories than they need. Many already consume more than they should. For these people, bread would be a net detriment since it's mostly empty calories.
The only health argument you can make for bread is if you need calories and you literally don't have a better source of calories.
I've noticed almost all typical US breads have way too much sugar. Maybe I'm weird, but I generally hate sweet flavors and sugar, so it's very noticeable to me. Bread making is a hobby of mine (with zero sugar, or very little depending), and a good bread has such intricate tastes. Why do we instead just hammer it with sugar, is that what people really prefer? I'm not intending to be condescending, just curious.
When I first got to the US I found it hard to find non-sugar-y bread. The main issue for me was that even the "hippie bread" often has a bunch of "hidden" sugar (it's there, but listed as malt, or honey, or something secretly sugary) - and I'd always miss it on the label!
After the Xth time I got tricked into buying sugar-bread I started making my own... have been baking once a week for 5 years now. It's the most satisfying accidental hobby I've ever had.
The weird thing is, I also started dialing down the salt a bit - and now I really notice how much salt is in bread too. Which sucks as I can easy give up sugar, but salt... oh no!
Bread made without salt also doesn’t work. You get a brick.
I’ve settled on 9g for 440g flour. Focaccia recipes use a ton of salt, and are particularly delicious (see recipe below, for which I half all quantities).
>> Bread made without salt also doesn’t work. You get a brick.
A relative of mine has kidney disease so I've been baking them wholemeal breads without any salt at all for the last few months. They come out fluffy and springy, like orindarily salted bread.
I have heard what you say before, many times. I've looked around at bread-making forums to find bread recipes and there's often discussions about "can you make bread without salt"? Curiously, most of those threads are full of comments that state categorically that bread can't be made without salt (because it will turn out bland, it will over-ferment, it won't have the right texture and so on) but I very, very rarely have seen any comments saying that someone tried to actually make bread without salt and somehow failed. Pretty much the only case I could find was of a lady who ended up with very sticky dough and then realised she hadn't used any salt.
Bottom line, "you can't make bread without salt" is some kind of traditional wisdom that people repeat often but attempt to test very rarely. I've tested it thorougly for several months and it's false.
Edit: Oh, actually now that I think of it- you don't have to take my word for it. Traditional Tuscan bread has been made for generations without salt:
Thanks for this - interesting.
My experience of bread without salt come from my various errors. I make bread 3 or 4 times per week and have forgotten to add salt on occasion.
I’ll try your recipe. Again, thanks.
Note that I use wholemean flours, a combination thereof, which definitely helps the taste. Also, I tried the papa di pomodoro recipe in the link above and it's actually quite delicious and very easy to make.
I don't really have a recipe, as such. I usually mix, say, 100g of dark rye flour, 200g of hard white flour and 200g of wholemeal, einkorn, barley or spelt flour with a big dollop of my sourdough and add water until I feel it's right. I leave it for a couple of hours to autolyse (normally done before adding yeast, but I find that's too much hassle to mix in the sourdough later) then give it a good knead for 10-15 minutes. I let it sit overnight, say 12 hours, to rise in a covered glass bowl, then I take it out of the bowl very carefully (because it's a big sponge of dough at that point) and bake it at 230 degrees C (which just happens to be the maximum temperature in my mini-oven) until it makes a hollow sound when I hit it with a wooden spoon (about 60 minutes, it's a weak oven). I let it sit for 20 minutes before cutting into it. And avoid putting any pictures on Instagram whatsoever, very important for the success of the bake, that :P
My flour proportions are completely non-standard, I fear, that is I don't follow any standard baker's percentages or anything. In general, I make it up as I go along, so I'm most likely doing something at least unorthodox. But it seems to be working, probably because it's hard to make really bad bread with good, organic, wholemeal flours.
Edit: really sorry for the vagueness of the recipe. This is how I cook, in general, making it up as I go along. I like to surprise myself, I guess.
Hey it's fine, my wife is mainly similar and I finally "made" her write it down since so many people kept asking for her recipe and her answer was about like yours :). We have a sourdough going so will give it a try, thanks a lot.
I've noticed this in Asian bakeries in the US. Everything is made with the same very sweet, fluffy pastry. That includes savory items like green onion buns or those ones with a cold hotdog in them. It's an interesting but somewhat unsettling combination of flavors.
Of the various chains in China, I found Paris Baguette to have the most bread-like bread. Other chains mostly offered some kind of pastry/bread hybrid with sweet dough and various fillings, with perhaps 1–2 kinds of proper bread products hidden away somewhere.
This reminds me of the Mitch Hedberg bit about Subway in Ireland:
In Kilkenny Ireland, they don't have anything American over there, it's very cool. But they did have a Subway sandwich shop. That was the one thing they had American, and that became the American Embassy to me. I would go out to a bar and piss off an Irish dude and have him chase me to the Subway. I said, "Dude, I'm sorry, but you're out of your jurisdiction. But you can have a cold cut combo, though."
I can't really criticize Subway much. During an "interesting" period in my life lasting slightly more than an year, they were my daily dinner. Eventually the staff basically asked me "option A or B tonight?". Never had a stomach problem, kept my weight in check. IMHO, their bread might not be comparable to a freshly baked high quality bread, but its clean, consistent with predictable calories and gets the job done reasonably well.
In my opinion it's fine as an alternative to other fast-foods, if a little over-priced.
It's not as healthy as it sells itself as (the company is even called "Doctor's Association" or something like that); but it's fine compared to say McDonald's or random Chinese food that are usually at the same locations, at least in Europe.
> the company is even called "Doctor's Association" or something like that
"Doctor's Associates Inc" I believe.
I worked at a Subway in high school.
Yea, it's maybe not health food, but the bread is fresh-baked every day. (Different from fresh-made in that it comes in pre-formed frozen loaves that you slowly thaw and rise usually over the course of about a 24 hour period)
And the toppings are basically what you would put on a sandwich you made at home. Granted they are now branching into more sugar-laced fancy meats, but the basics: roast beef, ham, turkey, bacon, two or three kinds of a cheese, basic vegetables. It's a pretty basic deli sandwich that you would make at home or buy somewhere else.
The prices do seem to have gotten a lot steeper than I remember them being a decade ago. Part of that may be that employees or friends of employees tend to see a lot of free food coming their way, so maybe I never thought much about the cost.
For the longest time they had a 2 footlongs for $6 (then $7, $8, $9) special. I think it was maybe only certain days of the week.
One summer when I was interning in downtown LA, I had footlong veggie subs most days for lunch.
I managed to get my hands on a stack of coupons for $4 footlongs (veggie only). They were cheap, relatively healthy, and close to the office. Perfect for an unpaid intern!
Subway is in the business of opening more Subway stores. They have low franchise fees to lure in owners, which is why there are more Subways than McDonalds in the world. They then use corporate inspections to hijack profitable restaurants, forcing out the franchisees.
It's a borderline pyramid scheme. The product is an afterthought, like all pyramid schemes.
I was really shocked moving from Europe to the US how all but very select bread tasted like cake/brioch. First thing I always did getting back to England was buy a loaf of Hovis seeded multigrain and make a decent ham sandwich.
When so first went to the UK years ago I was so surprised with the lack of bread you had over there. Stores would have a small bread section.
In the Netherlands the bread section in the supermarket is like half the store. And there's bread in every choice you want. White, whole-grain, sugared, with seeds, with nuts, with patterns, and funny shapes.
Really depends which supermarket and which location. The large supermarkets have a large choice (though you are right, not on par with the French, Dutch and Germans!). We do have a lot of local bakeries though which fill in the gap left over.
Now compared to the US (and I'm sure there are areas where you can be well served) it is a desert for bread. You may get the odd 'artisanal sour dough loaf', but the very fact it's shipped from california and will last 2 weeks makes you wonder!
I went to London last year and the selection has definately improved compared to when I first went there 15 years ago.
Just to clarify. Our supermarket bread tends to be pretty shit (some exceptions). It'll be dry, flavourless, and void of all nutrition. So it's not like all the bread here is amazing.
But if I look up the supermarkets in the area here there's always at least one practically right next to it. And sometimes the supermarket and the bakery do a partnership and they'll have the artisinal bread in the supermarkt itself. Which is great.
Well, to be honest, when I moved to the UK from Greece I was shocked at the awful quality of supermarket bread like Hovis and the almost complete absence of an alternative from a proper baker's (where I lived, in any case).
Although the FDA has approved the use of azodicarbonamide as a whitening agent for cereal flour and as a dough conditioner, it is also found in yoga mats, shoe soles, and synthetic leather.
And this is enough to conclude whoever wrote this article is a hack and should not be trusted. Same chemical found in different places, what a surprise! We breathe oxygen, and it's also found in sulphuric acid, so we probably should all panic now! And what about the dihydrogen monoxide, which is also found in sulphuric acid btw!
To the main topic - Irish government chose to have definition of "bread" for tax reasons and Subway's recipe didn't qualify for tax exemption. Big deal.
Sugar is a perfectly fine part of a lot of foods. All the kinds of cakes for example. But for this kind of foods, you would know that it is a sugary food. What I get more and more angry about is the tendency of the food industry to put sugar into almost any food to sell more. This isn't only somewhat shady and detrimental to our food culture, but most of all a danger to public health. Overeating of sugar has been linked to many health concerns beyond obviously, getting fat. I fully support any food regulations, which require labelling the sugar content and prevent to use food type names which usually suggest no sugar content. In this case, collecting tax breaks for "bread". Call it "sweet bread" and pay the normal taxes, and everyone is happy. It would also be a servicd to your customers to tell them, that you are not serving them "bread". They have a right to know.
As a side note: beyond any possible health concerns, we have wonderful traditional foods, which can be made without any fancy ingredients. Bread, beer, pasta, so many more. Done well, they are absolutely delicious. It always makes me sad, if they get perverted by industry adding stuff which doesn't belong into those foods for a quick sell. I am not against innovation. Put any new ingredient into your product, but don't claim it is any of the traditional foods. There is nothing wrong with "sweet bread" for example, unless it tries to hide the sugar.
They're biscuit-sized cakes. If you supersize a Jaffa Cake, it makes sense to call it a cake. That's also allegedly what they did in order to prove that it was a cake in court.
I only eat subway a few times a year, since you can find them anywhere. 2am in a hospital, 100 miles from anything else in a little gas station off the highway...
The bread is often the worst thing about the sandwich. It can be dry, or soggy, burnt...the people that ‘bake’ the bread don’t really care much about it and often can’t take it out when the oven is done because they are making sandwiches.
On the other hand, my favorite place to get a sub sandwich buys bread from a bakery in town, and when they run out of bread, they close for the day. Why have someone who’s not skilled at making bread, make mediocre bread?
Really? I mean, I can certainly understand not liking the bread, but my experience has been the exact opposite - the bread has been "industrial quality control" consistent whenever I've been to a Subway, meaning it always tastes exactly the same.
In line with the article, I also think it's too sweet for sandwich bread, but I've never had it soggy or burnt.
Subway also got those toasters because Quizno's had 'em, but Subway didn't really alter the sandwich recipes and what you end up with is some hot, dried-out bread that cuts your mouth.
Last I checked Quiznos uses an electric broiler, while Subway is a combo broiler + microwave. The microwave is faster, but makes the sandwich unappealing (though hot).
My Quiznos experience is now years old and maybe they've gone the microwave route too; I hope not.
It just wouldn’t be peak corporatism without outsourcing the core elements of a business to those least qualified. I think it’s a natural thing, companies get senile, makes room for hungry upstarts.
I used to be a land surveyor. That means eating out a lot for lunch and I noticed a lot of the other staff surveyors loved Subway because I'm from a part of the US (Philadelphia) where Italian deli sub sandwiches are a thing, and there isn't usually a long wait so you can dash in, grab one, and get back to the truck fast. So Subway is hugely popular among land surveyors and probably anyone doing outdoor work.
Anyway, I knew that the bread had high sugar content but after reading this article it all makes perfect sense to me: they liked it mostly because their work is physical and the afternoons are slump time when you're trying to keep up your energy and push through to the end of the day. So they were getting Subway sandwiches and then, boom. All of a sudden you have sugar energy until quitting time!
Most sandwiches seem to have around 7g of sugar in them. This might not appear too bad (and indeed it isn't quite as bad as the title and article may suggest), but they should have close to zero grams if you ask me.
This reminds me of how difficult it is to find simple products like bread that don't have 1-4g of added sugar in them. Last time I was looking for bread crumbs, the first three brands I looked at all had corn syrup and oil in them!
As I recall one doctor stated it: 'the food supply of our nation is poisoned'.
Honestly, we all know the reason there's sugar. It's cheap, it's tasty and provokes addiction so I'm pretty happy they don't get the tax cut from other denominations. These foods are not healthy anyway, so the more expensive they are, the less they are consumed.
Like the BBC did, Food and Wine, the Irish Times, and the Irish Independent got the law wrong. It's actually the Finance Act 1985 that makes "bread", subject to limitations on its ingredients, zero rated.
I'd encourage everyone to try each individual component of junk food one time. McDonald's is really bad. The bun is as sweet as a cake. The only ingredient with any real flavour is the gherkin. There's no need to eat such bland junk.
As for Subway, did anyone actually think that stuff was bread. It doesn't even look or feel like any bread I know.
I've always found Subway's bread to be strange in some way, could be for this reason, could be for a different reason. The only bread I'll get at subway is the flatbread, and basically just treat it like a pita wrap. The bread-bread there is just awful IMO. You are better off going to a local or gourmet sandwich shop.
The bread is one thing, but the amount of meat, cheese, sauce and other stuff people put on Subway sandwiches is just insane.
I never really understand how people can feel the urge to eat at the subways. It's not a place you would go during the day and not after a good evening with drinks.
For a place that sells sandwiches and makes the bread in the ovens there, no Subway I have been too marginally smells like a traditional bread making bakery. You walk past a bakery and you get a warm heavenly smell. Not with Subway, they smell more like a regurgitated lunch from a bakery
Would be interesting to see how this works out with EU regulation Brioche vendéenne is a protected origin food item and is classified as bread which means that it can be zero/low rate VATed.
The sugar content is ten percent of the weight of the dough. It's crazy when put in such clear terms. I bet a lot of the bread we eat here in the US is similar, unfortunately, if not worse.
It's 10% relative to the flour, not 10% of the whole. The number itself isn't nuts. The sponge recipe I usually use is 100% sugar (eg, 200g sugar, 200g flour). They just don't reach the 0% tax bracket if it's over 2%.
Sure but you're making cake. You can make bread with flour and water. Yeast is already in the room around you, and while salt helps, it's not necessary.
The amylase enzymes in the flour will break down the starche into sugar when you add water, which then feeds the yeast. Adding extra sugar is an optional step.
[edited for clarity] baguettes in France contains no sugar, by law.
Right, I was just trying to provide some context to the number. My regular sponge mix is equal weights of flour, sugar, butter and egg. So the proportion of sugar would be described as 100%, but it's actually 25% of the wet weight.
Yes, 10% is high for bread, which is precisely why this court ruling. But it's a misleading number if you're not used to reading this as a ratio rather than a volume.
(Although they didn't say it's not bread, they said it's not bread as defined in tax law. There's a very specific tax exemption for bread, and 10% doesn't meet it. You can see this exemption in Part F of http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2010/act/31/schedule/2/en... )
It appears the Finance Act doesn't replace the Value-Added Tax act; a large part of the case verbiage came down to the VAT Act citing "food or drink" vs and the Finance Act citing "food and drink". I believe both acts implement EU directives so the same exception had to be carved into each; one doesn't replace the other.
It's actually a fairly interesting judgement to read. It's almost entirely either balancing one act against another, or nitpicking the grammatical constructs towards the principle of doubtful penalisation. I especially liked the detours into whether hot tea and cold tea are the same thing, and whether tea and coffee can be said to have been cooked. Whether bread is bread is a relatively small part of the argument, with the percentages only being relevant to 2 points of the 99 (and it wasn't disputed, they were rather disputing the legal construct of a sandwich. I kid ye not.)
"This seems a very cumbersome and unnatural description of a hot meatball sandwich."
Zero mention of food, drink, or bread. As I said, those are in the Finance Act 1985 (and in an earlier Finance Act, sans bread, if I recall correctly). The Finance Act 1992, also referenced by the judgement, tweaks the Finance Act 1985 wording, and doesn't alter the definition of zero-rated "bread", except to extend it to bread that is uncooked or fried, rather than baked.
"French bread" might be what people who buy Safeway's execrable facsimile of a baguette call it, but baguettes definitely don't define French bread; it's just the most famous of them. The French are pretty great at all kinds of bread.
Indeed, I was intending to explain my mistake, not to make the claim that baguettes and French bread are actually the same thing. You are of course correct, apologies for the confusion.
Sugar has caused massive harm to public health because it is added in almost everything we buy that is processed.
Not salt, not fat but sugar.
We are being poisoned by stupidity and greed.
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
It is kind of an ancillary type of post for HN, but there's a lot of people here who love anything that talks about business legal loopholes, even if it's food related and not tech related.
I haven't eaten a Subway sandwich in a few decades. I don't know what all their "smeat" is made with (probably mostly water by weight) but I know it didn't provide any real fuel for work. That stuff is about as fake as food gets.
I haven't seen or heard anything about them improving the quality of their meats. But, if you think they're good I have very good reason to believe you don't know what quality meat is.
I have raised and butchered cows, pigs, and chickens. I can assure you what I've produced is far superior to Subway. That's why I won't eat their stuff anymore.
you can get rid of liquids in the meat by heavily pressing it. The reason why aged meat is expensive is time and special conditions that let specific mold grow
There seems to be some doubt about rather water is added to the meat we purchase from fast food providers and in the grocery stores here. Truth is this has been going on for a very long time and for the most part it says this right on the packaging. For example, the turkeys we buy for Thanksgiving dinner are bloated up with added water. Read the labels.
Ok, it's interesting that the law in Ireland requires a 2% or less baker's weight of sugar. And I do enjoy a good sourdough, which isn't made with any sugar, or just a pinch.
But my favourite sandwich bread is Japanese milk bread, it's soft, lovely crumb, and it browns beautifully in the pan.
It's got a lot of sugar in it, that's the secret. A random recipe I found says 18% baker's weight, which seems accurate.
Are we pretending that polysaccharides are the staff of life, but when you get down to disaccharides they become the Devil? The glycemic index of white flour is dire, I doubt adding sugar is going to move the needle.
Sugar in dough makes it soft, with a giving crumb, and a crust which can be brown without becoming hard.
Exactly what you want in a sandwich filled with toppings, so that they don't shoot out the back when you bite into it.
Clutch your pearls all you want about 'Subway misrepresenting healthy food'! They publish the macros of their sandwiches. It's not nearly so healthy as eggs scrambled in butter, there's a ton of carbs and not nearly enough fat.
Unless you think it's the other way around that's healthy. It's your stomach, you get to pick.