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| ▲ | pazimzadeh 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | 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” | | |
| ▲ | bruce511 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | bruce511 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | This is from more than a decade ago. Nice to here things are improving:) | | | |
| ▲ | thatfrenchguy 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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. Eh, I mean, sure, if you go to a Whole Foods or Trader Joe, you’ll find cheese that might rival a discount chain in France at premium prices. If you go to Safeway, Target or Walmart, the cheese will not be anywhere near what a French (or I assume, a Swiss) person would find acceptable. | | |
| ▲ | com2kid 3 days ago | parent [-] | | My local QFC (Kroger), for all the complaints I have about it, has a pretty darn good cheese selection. So does my local co-op that I can walk to. Or the other bougie store less than a mile away from me. Within a 1 mile radius I probably have over 200 varieties of cheese to choose from! |
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| ▲ | CrimsonCape 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It is increasingly trendy for grocery stores in America to have a "fancy cheese" section because the unit cost (eg dollar-per-ounce) of cheese makes it profitable. I'm guessing Europeans are paying high unit cost too, but don't mind because it's more socially engrained to seek out "quality" foods like fancy cheese. In the USA, cheese is either a salad topping, a sandwich/burger topping, or a pizza topping, and not much else. I once bought some pecorino romano to make cacio-e-pepe and regret doing that, it's an overhyped dish. |
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| ▲ | elzbardico 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I hate Hershey’s with passion. | | |
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| ▲ | Gabriel54 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's an observation, not a value judgement. Try finding a fresh loaf of bread in the average American suburb. | | |
| ▲ | cm2012 4 days ago | parent [-] | | American suburbs tend to have excellent bread in middle class neighborhoods or higher. This isn't the 90s. | | |
| ▲ | Insanity 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | kstenerud 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Yup, agreed. The first thing my gf complained about when coming to North America for 6 months was the food. And she never stopped complaining. Then we went to Germany and I finally understood. Not only can I pop in to the local bakery on the corner (or the next corner, or the next) for the most amazing breads ever, but I could also go to a Rewe or Edeka and get quite good bread that's still head-and-shoulders above anything in America. My fav right now is a walnut spelt bread roll that I get for 90 cents apiece at Edeka. A bit pricey but it's worth it. Put on some President butter [1] and some cheeses and it's divine! [1] https://www.president.de/produkte/butter/meersalzbutter-250-... | | |
| ▲ | Insanity 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, I was like that. It’s been almost 5 years so complaining is to a minimum, I got used to a lot of the food, but bread is one of those “staple foods” to me that still has me complaining every now and then haha |
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| ▲ | slibhb 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | thomasmg 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | What one considers a "good bread" or "good bakery" depends on the person. I'm from Switzerland. When I was in the United States (Bay Area, San Francisco), in 2000-2003, I did _not_ find what I consider a "good bread". I did find "bakery". | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > When I was in the United States (Bay Area, San Francisco) The good bread is in the Santa Cruz mountains. In San Francisco, I’ve only had it in wealthy homes where home staff made it fresh that day. | |
| ▲ | thatfrenchguy 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I mean, in San Francisco, you’ll find plenty of good bread and pastries, it’s the only mid size city in the US that has enough French people to have two competing French language schools for kiddos. |
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| ▲ | chipsrafferty 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I live in the largest city in the US and saying that the average bread/pastry quality even comes close to Europe is insane. Sure, you can get good bread here. However it's going to cost you 5x what it costs in Europe and it might take you up to 30 minutes to get too depending on where you live. Most bread in the US is low quality. Most bread in Europe is high quality. There is good bread to be found in the US, and there's bad bread in Europe. But the average bread just isn't even close to being equal. | | |
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| ▲ | trenchpilgrim 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I can walk five minutes to a local grocery store and get fresh bread from their bakery. Immigrant bakeries are also great, I had some buns from a chinese bakery last weekend that were a "if this is what food is supposed to taste like, what have I been eating until now???" moment | | |
| ▲ | Insanity 3 days ago | parent [-] | | My partner is Chinese and so we get Chinese (and bread-like products from other Asian countries) quite often. In my opinion, it’s tasty but also not quite what I would expect bread to be like, mainly because it’s so soft. It is a running joke between us that Chinese teeth can’t chew through European bread (like an actual French baguette). But agreed, Chinese bread > American bread for flavor at least! |
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| ▲ | hulitu 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Bread is one of the easiest, most plain things to make, yet finding high quality bread isn’t straightforward in the States Finding high quality bread isn’t straightforward anywhere in EU. It either has sugar or additives or it is cooked at a too low temperature to be useful. | | |
| ▲ | watwut 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > or it is cooked at a too low temperature to be useful In what way is that bread "not useful"? | | |
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| ▲ | cm2012 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | https://www.ibfoods.com/locations/ Long island new york, here is a a store chain with out of this world bread. | |
| ▲ | murukesh_s 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Wondering why someone did not solve the problem already? Of all the countries in the world US is brimming with entrepreneurs who want to "solve" a consumer problem, and with modern population I assume there is enough demand on fresh/healthier products - why on earth someone wouldn't try to fix it there? | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > why someone did not solve the problem already? Most Americans are fine eating stale or preserved bread. (Almost all pre-sliced supermarket bread is the latter.) You just don’t have enough people to spread the cost of baking fresh bread throughout the day outside wealthy communities. That said, a lot of European bread is also trash. There are simply some bread-loving ones where it isn’t. Similarly, there are places in America with great bread (New Orleans, New York and Miami), and places without (Northern California and the Midwest). | | |
| ▲ | hansenzhang 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > That said, a lot of European bread is also trash. Yes thank you for pointing this out. I've noticed even the bakeries around me (in Switzerland) aren't that great; for me the best are from the farmers markets and even still you have to be discerning for which are actually good. On the other side I've had some fantastic bread in the US from specialty bakeries. |
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| ▲ | plorkyeran 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Solving the problem of european tourists being unable to figure out that they have to walk to the bakery section of the supermarket rather than the shelf-stable bread-like products section if they want something they consider bread does not sound like much of a business opportunity. | | |
| ▲ | Ylpertnodi 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | >Solving the problem of european tourists being unable to figure out that they have to walk to the bakery section of the supermarket rather than the shelf-stable bread-like products section if they want something they consider bread Every supermarket I can locally go to has a bread-on- the shelf section, as well as a very fresh bread section. Not to mention 'bread shops' exist. Don't underestimate the ability of tourists from anywhere to not understand how to look around a shop. Finding bread in America that isn't over-overloaded with sugar is very difficult. Quite a few of my family take their own bread to the US.
Of late, the problem has been solved as, apart from work, people just aren't travelling there anymore - for non bread-related reasons, of course.
For the US fam that now travel back to the eu (an awful lot) more, they go wild for eu bread: it just doesn't taste like cak, /sp - i mean cake. | |
| ▲ | enaaem 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | You think Europe does not have supermarkets? |
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| ▲ | panick21 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Because this isn't the sort of problem some tech bro entrepreneur can solve. Its a systematic problem in the whole supply chain that end with consumer demand. And this is harder to do, once that whole supply chain has been destroyed. You need to shift the whole culture in terms of what they value and how it works. | |
| ▲ | baobun 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Next up on Show HN: Uber for baking |
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| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > where? Wealthy communities. Upper-middle class, maybe. That, or an immigrant bakery. (Mexican. Korean. Taiwanese. Japanese.) |
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| ▲ | ericfr11 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | chipsrafferty 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | No they don't, lol The garden variety baguettes in Spain that go for 50 cents are superior to $8 "gourmet, artisanal" bread in the US. | |
| ▲ | fragmede 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | they said bread, not sugar fluff with a brown outside. Don't get me wrong, shit's delicious. It's just not what bread should be. | | |
| ▲ | cm2012 4 days ago | parent [-] | | If you can only find wonderbread I am surprised. Example of great bread: https://www.ibfoods.com/search.php?search_query=Bread | | |
| ▲ | rendx 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | None of the breads listed there I would consider to be of the category "bread" as a German, and what I would be looking for when I wanted one. Yes, a French baguette-type soft white bread is formally "bread", but it is treated as a different/single category here, as "white bread". With examples of typical bread being, say: https://www.hofpfisterei.de/download/Hofpfisterei-Sortiment-... And I don't think the images really carry across the difference (and variety) in texture and density, to someone who simply never had this kind of "non-soft" bread. You can spread cold butter from the fridge on it without breaking it, maybe that gives away a hint towards the difference. Also note the variety of grain: rye, spelt, wheat, barley, oats, in different compositions and degrees of fineness. And this is just one brand/bakery. Some more "typical German bread" images. I picked types that maybe convey the difference to "white bread" the best in viewing: https://5-elemente.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/rheinische... https://heicks-teutenberg.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Honi... https://img.chefkoch-cdn.de/rezepte/2468131388854443/bilder/... | | | |
| ▲ | hnhg 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | You've proven their point for them. |
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| ▲ | dietr1ch 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | | |
| ▲ | panick21 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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 But if you want the elite stuff, it looks like this: 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 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > 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 3 days ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | Magmalgebra 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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.) | | |
| ▲ | pclmulqdq 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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 4 days ago | parent [-] | | 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 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > 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.) | | |
| ▲ | pclmulqdq 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Most good bakeries everywhere stock multiple times a day as stock gets low. Even the ones selling American baked goods and things like cupcakes because all of these things have shelf lives of hours. Do you believe that New York is the only place in the US where you can get a baguette or a loaf of French bread? Do you think it's the only place you can get a cake? Having high foot traffic and understanding supply and demand are not unique to New York. The specific type of bagel is, though, because it's a preference rather than a sign of quality. You have fewer bakeries per square mile outside New York, but you have fewer of everything per square mile outside New York. Many cities around the US are plenty dense to support people who make high-quality baked goods. | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > Most good bakeries everywhere stock multiple times a day as stock gets low The stuff that sells. In most bakeries, that doesn’t cover bagels. > Do you believe that New York is the only place in the US where you can get a baguette or a loaf of French bread? Nobody claimed this. > high foot traffic and understanding supply and demand are not unique to New York It absolutely is. New York has entire American cities’ worth of people in single city blocks. That drives niche culinary diversity in a way that’s impossible to sustain anywhere else in America. > Many cities around the US are plenty dense to support people who make high-quality baked goods Again, never contested. But not as wide a variety. You can’t profitably make every sort of baked good fresh every few hours in a town smaller than a few hundred thousand. You can find that within walking distance for bagels, cubanos, naan and dumplings in a lot of Manhattan. |
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| ▲ | sunrunner 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > bred by familiarity Bread by familiarity, surely? Sorry for the awful bun. I mean pun. |
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| ▲ | rootusrootus 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > 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 4 days ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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 I love this! | | |
| ▲ | com2kid 3 days ago | parent [-] | | There is a near 5 star restaurant in Duvall Washington called Flavor Bistro. If you ever find yourself in Duvall for whatever reason, go eat there! The chef is super nice and the food is amazing. Random lolwtfbbq quality restaurants are some of the best finds. |
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| ▲ | MiddleEndian 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Which bagel shop in Newton is this? | | |
| ▲ | com2kid 3 days ago | parent [-] | | 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! |
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| ▲ | chamomeal 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The American population as a whole is definitely less discerning when it comes to Swiss cheese than the Swiss | |
| ▲ | karlgkk 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | No? I’d say it’s fair to trash about 300 million of us tbh | |
| ▲ | watwut 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Why does "being less discerning" equals "inferior" in your eyes? People from different cultures like different things and care about different things. | |
| ▲ | fransje26 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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 3 days ago | parent [-] | | tbh for food in general, the farther the product from the source of production, the lower the quality. and lower the diversity too. |
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