For breakfast we get Peruvian-style French bread (Hint: it aínt even remotely French bread, but we call it “pan francés”), but it goes stale very quickly. The workhorse is name-brand white bread because nothing is better than white bread when you simply want a 1-minute sandwich.
I love sourdough, but here in Peru you can only find it one bakery, it’s far away and ridiculously expensive, so it’s a once-in-a-blue-moon treat. Also, some German Vollkornbrot is nice, but also an acquired taste in Peru. There is no tradition of whole-grain bread in Peru. Most is done with wheat although cornbread is also eaten (very different from what an American would call cornbread).
Genuine sourdough is my favorite (but there’s no good source around here, and making my own isn’t a practical option at the moment). I guess it’s white, but it’s not soft.
I’d rather eat no bread at all than the mushy white Wonder Bread type.
I’ll sometimes pick up the generic store brand of wheat bread, but never white and never Wonderbread. (I wonder if it is bread.)
The closest I come to white bread will be sourdough, something crusty from the bakery section, or something like a hot dog or hamburger bun.
I like the Oroweat brand as my overall go-to, especially their ryes, Oatnut and 12-grain.
Unless I’m getting some kind of baguette or other crusty bread, I avoid bakeries. They can’t do sliced sandwich bread to save their lives even when they’re charging twice as much for it. I really don’t understand.
White bread for me. I got turned off of “whole grain” breads when my mother went on a years-long “specialty bread” kick (she loves that Poulsbo Bread). These are breads that I call “birdseed bread” because they’re stuffed full of seeds and grains that haven’t even been ground into flour.
My problem with these breads is their overpowering (and usually, to me, bitter) flavor. I take the position that the bread is mainly there to keep my fingers out of the mayonnaise and peanut butter. When I make a sandwich, I want to taste what’s inside the sandwich. So many of these “specialty” breads are so overpowering on their own that I can barely taste the PBJ or the meat.
The one exception I’ll make is rye bread. And then only if it’s filled with pastrami/corned beef and appropriate condiments (mustard, sauerkraut, etc.) Fillings that have strong enough flavors of their own to balance out and compliment the strong flavor of the bread.
I have kids, and buy them wheat bread. I don’t care for bread in general myself. Wheat isn’t exactly exotic and high priced these days. Grocery stores have many mass produced breads made with whole grains and even some without HFCS. The difference between the worst white value bread and the highest end bread I encounter in a typical grocery story is perhaps 10 cents per slice. I am not wealthy but I will gladly waste 10 cents to feed my kids something other than loaves of melty sugar.
Always have a bag of loaf bread for sammies. Usually 100% whole wheat store brand or Natures Own. Don’t eat much bread otherwise. Haven’t bought regular white loaf bread in what 30 years?
I buy 100% whole wheat (or other whole grain) bread for sandwiches the rest of the family makes - I don’t think of it as specialty bread because it’s really not that different from the white bread as far as texture and flavor go, although the fiber content is way better. I bake my own all-whole-grain bread for my own use, even for grilled cheese or pb&j, because I really, really like strong-flavored bread. The only white breads I ever get are french or sourdough loaves to have with Italian food (whole wheat garlic bread is a little weird even for me) and one loaf of mass-produced supermarket-brand white bread per year to round out the stuffing at Thanksgiving.
Dimitri Shostakovich slept fully-dressed through the 1930 because he could be dragged off to the Gulag at any moment for his art. The guys who baked bread for Stalin had to bake really good bread, but they didn’t have those kinds of worries. Go ahead and call it “craft bread,” like craft beer. But I’ve yet to bite into a slice of bread that gave any stunning radical insights into to human condition. And I’ve had good bread.
The poll says a lot about the sdmb. Very few plain white bread people hear. The stores still have a large display of the stuff. Somebody is buying it. I’d guess for families on a tight budget.
I’ve yet to see a painting “that gave any stunning radical insights into to human condition” - it’s all variations on a theme and need to be considered in relation to other works. Therefore there’s no art?
Ignorance, not tight budget. That drawing of the blonde girl biting into Sunbeam bread was done 50 years ago, and the woman who modeled for it still has bits of the undigested bread in her colon. There is store-brand wheat (albeit with HFCS in it, but even the shampoo and tampons have HFCS in them) right next to store-brand white, at identical prices. It’s due to an ancient claptrap that the poor ate brown bread and the rich ate white.
Unless she was shot right after eating the slice, no trace of the bread would be found after a day.
I’d love to eat more whole-wheat but name-brand whole bread is simply not nice to eat, it has no taste or something close to cardboard.
White bread tastes delicious and, apparently, any run-of-the-mill bajer can produce a good loaf. Most whole/multigrain stuff is mediocre catering more to health conscious that thos looking for taste.
Realy tasty multigrain (because 100% whole wheat bread CANNOT be tasty) is expensive and goes stale like it’s in a hurry-
Here in Peru there is no rich/poor white/whole claptrap, in fact, whole is the realm of the well-to-do. Still, white bread rulz.
This reminds me of the scene in Hannah and Her Sisters, I think, where Woody decides to become Catholic and starts taking his purchases out of a bag - a crucifix, rosary beads, and a loaf of Wonder Bread.
I mostly buy various types of wheat bread, though we get great crusty bread from our Costco which gets it from a local bakery. Sometimes we get rolls from the stand in the farmers’ market. I used to work a few blocks from the Orowheat bakery which had a thrift shop which sold an amazing diversity of breads and Entemann’s for half price. Orowheat rye is okay, but nothing like the rye we got from the bakery when I was young.
30 years ago when our kid was little my wife baked bread, and even sold some to a local restaurant, but no time for that now.
I remember I wouldn’t eat anything but white as a child, so I’ve never given my children an opportunity to get a taste for it. We only buy white bread if there is literally nothing else left on the shelf (which does happen a couple of times a year… no fresh bread delivered to the supermarkets on the weekend).
We usually buy wholemeal or light rye because my other half dislikes wholegrain. Before I met him, it was wholegrain all the way.