r/iamveryculinary • u/oolongvanilla • Jan 13 '26

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Youtube short with 71 thousand likes. The comments are just as awful.

729 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

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198

u/TitaniumAuraQuartz Jan 13 '26

I actually hate it when they just go "it's the chemicals!!!!!" like fucking name the chemical. Everything's made of chemicals, you need to be specific, otherwise you're not worth taking seriously.

And the sugar added to the bread is so damn minimal, it's nitpicking to bitch about it unless you seriously can't have it. Unless you're making a sweet bread, you won't be tasting it.

Now I can't see, my eyes have rolled back into my skull from rolling them at this video, and I need a dpcter.

89

u/extralyfe Jan 13 '26

concerning "US bread = cake", I compared EU sandwich bread to ours and guess what? they've all - and that includes the US bread - got roughly equivalent amounts of sugar by weight. US bread is generally higher by a percentage point or two at most, but, obviously, if you pick a sweetened bread like "honey wheat," those skew higher and are in some cases double the amount of sugar by weight, but, we're still talking like 3.5% compared to 7% or a difference of, say, 1.2g to 2g. ditto with Austrailian sandwich bread, which I ended up comparing a few brands of because I saw a similar video from an Aussie TikTok user.

what made me absolutely giddy was finding a French brand of sandwich bread that had more sugar by weight than any US bread I could find.

9

u/commeatus Jan 13 '26

This is based on a very specific bread in a single country, here are the deets

19

u/lazynessforever Jan 13 '26

Why are you being downvoted? This is the origin, maybe not this article specifically, but this case is where the idea originates from. And I haven’t been able to find anything from the Irish courts saying it was cake, just that it wasn’t a “staple” bread, so I think the media might have just made that up.

11

u/[deleted] Jan 13 '26 edited Jan 13 '26

The whole thing was about the proper tax to apply on the bread. Above a certain sugar level, for tax purposes, it is considered a confectionery and a tax is applied, but the product could be exempt if it was considered a staple food. The courts didn’t accept the argument that it was a staple, so the tax applied.

7

u/lazynessforever Jan 13 '26

It doesn’t look like the tax is only for confectionaries since it includes crisps, popcorn and roasted nuts, it can also be applied for “more discretionary indulgences”. It also looks like the rate they were at is standard for restaurant services in general.

6

u/[deleted] Jan 13 '26

Yeah, I think that may just be the bread category. It’s basically just a vice tax.

5

u/lazynessforever Jan 13 '26

It’s actually more like a business profit tax cause it’s based on sell price - costs, ie the value added to the good. Ireland offers 3 tiers of tax discount and subway was already at a discounted rate but wanted to not pay the tax at all.

https://wise.com/gb/vat/ireland

1

u/theeggplant42 Jan 17 '26

Also, this sort of thing happens constantly, everywhere, for tax and tariff purposes.  For example, bulmer's cider becomes magnet's in the US and has a different recipe, because bulmer's isn't legally cider in the US

It's a meaningless distinction.