Brother!!! I still do the same thing with wheat bread that I dip into my soup, stew, or chili!
And God forbid you leave your loaf of bread in the car where the sun can hit it for any length of time. You’ll wonder how that puddle of water formed in your unopened loaf of bread.
It’s amazing how things change over the years. When I was a kid I would reluctantly eat wheat bread only when white wasn’t available. A few years back I was visiting my in-laws and I tried to use some Wonderbread to make a sandwich and I just couldn’t scarf it down.
I once worked in a bakery (early 1980’s). Although it was a very hip artisanal bakery (long before anybody thought up that descriptive) we still subscribed to the industry journal. It had a name like Bakery Today, a Vogue-sized periodical thick with ads for things like stabilizers, volumizers, puffers, lifters, softeners, browners and other surprising ingredients that we didn’t use. None were, you know, food. Commercial US white bread shares little with homemade bread except the name.
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As a kid, I’d tear the crusts off a slice of white bread, then squish the whole thing into a doughball to nibble on while watching TV.
Now I’m fairly sure that real food doesn’t do that.
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Another “real food doesn’t do that” thing is that your plumber may use Wonder-type bread now and then when soldering water pipe joints.
If there’s a dribble of water in the pipe, it won’t get hot enough to melt the solder, so they take some bread, wad it up and stuff it in the pipe to make a temporary dam. Now they can solder the joint - the heat from the torch toasts the bread in the pipe, and when the water is turned back on, the crumbs are washed away.
It’s got to be cheap white bread. Fancy bread won’t wad up the way you need to plug the pipe and it also might not wash away cleanly when you’re done.
The standard wonderbread style loaf wasn’t actually created by private industry, but by government scientists at the USDA in the 1950s after exhaustive market testing to determine the most desirable bread for the average consumer at the time. Time after time in market testing, even with tasters who claimed to not prefer soft bread, people consistently bought the softest loaves, leading to the extreme airiness of the modern American loaf.
Another strong factor was in making the most affordable bread possible and, in the bread world, that meant making the fastest bread possible. Modern American white bread rises in as little as 12 minutes compared to the multi hour or overnight rises that give traditional European Breads their complex flavors.
Believer had an excellent article on the modern American loaf a few years ago that’s well worth reading.
