White sliced bread or sliced wrapped loaf

To each his or her own taste. What one person’s taste buds delight in, another rejects. The world of bread does not escape this reality. For instance, take what we call “crusty bread”, so well known in the world of French bread making. In the English-speaking world, you won’t find many zealots of this way of cooking bread, which depends on major, suitable organoleptic characteristics between a crispy crust and a crumb with fine pockets of air. Crusty breads certainly have fans in the English-speaking world, but not so many, and it hasn’t been possible for the French to reverse the tendency that makes soft-crumb bread the reference in these countries.

In order to form a crust on a dough roll going into the oven, it is imperative that it be cooked in a bread pan, either open or closed. This is, quite naturally, the major characteristic of bread baking on the other side of the Channel, a method which attenuates the Maillard reaction: the color, like the smell and taste, of a food containing protein (gluten) and sugar (starch) are changed in a more or less intense manner, depending on the degree of cooking and the composition of the food.

Behind this obsession to prevent the formation of a crust is, in reality, hidden in the desire to make white sandwich bread; the same holds for other products in the English-speaking world of bread baking: sweet breads such as crumpets, muffins, buns, etc. In this sense, we are closer to what the French refer to as Viennoiserie. To state it differently, this consists of a bread-baking sector that incorporates products containing milk, fat, and sometimes even sugar. Bakers’ intentions have therefore moved away from making this white bread using the original leaven -- the famous barmy -- a foam that forms on the surface of a barrel of beer which gives soft-crumb bead an acidity less sought-after today.

Today, white sliced bread is consumed in the form of toast for breakfast or used for sandwiches.