Bread Expert Guesses Cheap vs Expensive Bread | Price Points | Epicurious

hi my name is jim lahey and i am a bread expert here so these are two white breads they look like they're made with 100% white flour but if it's cooked properly you'll see this kind of rattling on the outside of the bread that's a result of the bread shrinking after it cools down this bread here which definitely looks like a an industrially manufactured bread and instead of having cracks like this one does it has these wrinkles in it which is the result of all the additives that were put into the bread to allow it to expand this bread looks more like modern bread the future shapes this bread looks more like the past but I prefer this but because I my personal bias however I understand the utility and and the thought behind this this is the bread that has saved hundreds of millions of people from starvation because it can be manufactured industrially I'm gonna cut this one in half in the middle so when we look at a loaf of bread we can break it down into its parts there's the size the shape the color the form and we look at the interior of the loaf of bread we see what's called the crumb structure it's all those little holes or bubbles called alveoli so the reason why flour is so white is because of the milling process that takes place the grain itself has less character it's less pigment color pigments in it and then during a high speed milling process the character noids that are in it become blanched or bleached and a lot of cases with a lot of commercial wheat brands that we all know and love bromides and bleaching agents are used to make it even whiter and I'm going to taste it I kind of feel like I don't it has a very nice tea smell so let's taste it there's definitely tough and it's Pleasant salts at about two and a half percent loaf B this looks like the footlong hot dog bun to me other than half so you can see that this is a very spongy crumb and you can see the difference right here side-by-side the crust on this is thicker the crust on this is thinner the hydration on this dough is probably a lot less this is probably like 65 68 percent hydration maybe even lower you can see when I tried cutting this bread with a very sharp bread knife it just crumbled and fell apart this bread by contrast kind of held together but this is obviously there's no there's no fight but it has for me some kind of foil something very unpleasant about it based on the weight alone and also the manufacturing qualities flavor all that I would say that this is worth at least double what this is ah well look at that I may have dished on this bluff of bread but to its credit it's it's probably saved hundreds of millions of people from starvation because the mass manufacturer of bread has enabled countries societies to feed its population especially during times of great economic hardship we have bigger white smaller height this looks like it was baked in a pan I do smell natural fermentation hmm some unusual flavor profiles this looks like this was baked on a stone hearth look at this does look like someone threw some flour on top to make it look quote/unquote rustic although I don't doesn't look like that flour here was incidental to the way that the bread was made it looks like it was done for a fact I don't know what effect it has but there it is this was like very very very very dark so this bread must have some bitter flavors this has one score down the middle flour on here so I'm assuming there might be something in this dough to cause such extreme coloration but it looks really interesting I like it the salt in the dough crystallizes on the inside of your alveoli creating this lighter color so what you're seeing really is salt I call it salts going but look at that lovely even crumb I'm gonna cut up in this loaf and see what we get oh that's color huh this is a really open crumb structure this is a very tight crumb structure if I had the twos based on appearances this looks like this looks like probably the whole wheat bread when you take 100% of the grain and you mill it you end up with whole wheat flour that's the endosperm it's the bran the germ white flour goes through a series of sieves a series of screens and and and has all the all the outside of the the wheat berry that's about roughly 30% of the wheat is removed to make white flour it's taste very chewy almost rubbery texture to it definitely a lot of flecks of bread in here I would say this dough was put in a refrigerator and allowed to proof or slow proof for maybe 6 to 10 hours based on the the amount of blistering maybe more it's got a very firm crust has a somewhat even like a cakey crumb because it's kind of loose extremely tart but it has a lot going on nutty sweet sour the texture is utterly bizarre if I had to guess I hi without a question I would say this is the more expensive loaf of bread just because of all the things in it that tell me how it was made it's finished qualities or certainly higher and more difficult if I can they spend $11 for a loaf of bread I'll buy this one for 11 when you're shopping for a whole-wheat bread the number one ingredient should say whole-wheat flour so something can be sold as whole-wheat but have very little whole wheat in it I'd question whether or not this is actually whole-wheat bread although it could be a strain of white whole-wheat I'll buy no whole wheat which is has become very popular for people who are or find the color of brown breads and appealing but they're both very good loaves of bread I can guess that we have rye bread here this looks like the standard American rye bread which really isn't truly rye bread it's mostly white flour and this here looks like real whole grain rye sourdough and this is definitely this is definitely that this is a dense a very dense bread this is obviously a lighter more sandwich friendly bread if you were in Germany or northern Europe Scandinavia this is the bread of northern climes this bread is kind of like more like normal bread that you would eat in a cafeteria or a diner or a typical restaurant in America no there's some definitely some some sugar or some syrup of some sort in here maybe malt terms of the crumb structure and this is obviously very fine and very dense this is like a brick why has less gluten so typically when you see this traditional rye bread you'll see it in a in a baked in a pan so it's always going to have this square form you'll even see these little marks on the top which are equivalent of scoring the bread the dough is oftentimes pierced to keep the consistency of the of the from even the acidity of this dough allows it to have an incredibly long shelf life so there's something practical about the use of rye I'm gonna guess that this one's more expensive [Music] well this bread has a you know a lot of whole grain in it there's probably a lot more going on in terms of the fermentation and the processing of this this loaf is a little bit more sandwich ready I would even say it was probably formed by a machine just by looking at the spiral in here it's so even and so consistent this would be a real 100% rye bread this would be a marketed as a rye bread so if you're looking for a rye bread depending on your preference again look at the packaging the number one ingredients should say rye flour number one and that's definitely the case with this bed here mmm well they're very dense compact they're both very similar in that respect the crumb structure and the alveoli more or less the same in terms of the density this does feel more moist like maybe there's some additives to this bread this bread is a lot drier here let's give it a taste it's time definitely a sourdough of some sort it's just sitting smell sour at all a little acidity to it but it smells like an East leavened bread but tastes like a sourdough that's interesting the true sourdough or naturally leavened bread is a combination of yeast and bacteria that leaven and breakdown bread and in the process of leavening the bread as the dough begins to age it changes its pH and it will drop as low as four point four pH to produce that sour flavored bread the bread to my left I'm going to assume it's a bread from a supermarket but when I tasted it tastes distinctively sour so I'm going to assume that this is a bread leavened with yeast with a culture meaning a mix of raw flour or enzymes to make it taste sour and I'm going to assume that this is some small bakery using natural leavening I would say most likely this one's more expensive but we'll see yeah when you're tasting a loaf of sourdough bread compare it to a tomato an average tomato would have a pH of about four point five four point four so you're looking for that same level of acidity trust your tongue we have some type of flat breads focaccia of some sort it looks like one of those commercially available pre-made through your own at-home disc type things you find supermarkets has these weird kind of grates underneath it so maybe that was it was put on a wire rack to cool after it was partially baked it feels kind of dense it's very floppy it smells like grain has a lot of color on the bottom that means it was actually cooked on a on a hot surface or a fourth so these are for Katja for sure this bread looks like it has some cheese or something on top of it this looks like it was probably dimpled by by human hands extremely irregular let's cut these open and see what we get inside I'm assuming because this is an industrial bread that has all sorts of functioning functional food additives it looks like this bread wasn't that fermented this bread on the other hand certainly looks a lot more fermented you can see the crumb is more open that's a very very thin crust you can see the difference if you want to do a crumb paracin flat breads are usually baked under dry conditions because they don't need moisture to expand about 50% of a surface area of a flat bread is on a hearth or a sole of an oven and as a result the moisture inside the the humidity and moisture inside the bread can transpire through that that surface that the dough has contact on so obviously with flat breads you don't want to we don't want to see them too crispy or crunchy unless of course it's a cracker which technically is a flat bread I've never done this so I'm going to taste from very first time a industrially produced that is pretty foul but I can see how some people might enjoy it let's try this one here I can taste the olive oil it's it's very very good so this is definitely a focaccia sketch off the pizza Bianca I'm gonna guess that this bread costs more but I could be wrong oh yeah but not by much this bread makes more money though this is made industrially so when you're out shopping for your focaccia at your local retail baker what you want in a focaccia is that it's open the crumb is open and airy and not dense the crust should be very thin you should definitely taste the salt and the olive oil when you're out there shopping for bread ask your local baker or retailer for a taste of the bread ask how that bro has made bread after all his has been with us for over fourteen thousand years and it's something that should be available to all of us so go out there and ask for a taste

Channel: Epicurious

Views: 4,841,000

Rating: 4.7828388 out of 5

Keywords: bread, expert, flatbread, price points, wheat bread, white bread, whole wheat bread, how to make bread, bread recipe, easy bread recipe, sourdough, bread expert, making bread, focaccia, bread expert reviews bread, expert reviews, bread dough, bread making, rye bread, food, cheap vs expensive food, price, recipes, taste test, bread reviews, cheap vs expensive bread, bread recipes, cheap bread, expensive bread, expensive, cheap vs expensive, expert bread, best bread, epicurious

Id: 4g5k7H71G3k

Length: 16min 13sec (973 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 26 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/CPO_Mendez]

Crumparison... That's perfect haha.