What is it with American kids and bread crusts? How do they communicate to each other that crusts are to be disliked?
I grew up in a culture where everybody knew that the crust is the best part of bread, and here I am, endlessly sawing off crusts for my very American kid.
The crappy spongy bread sold in plastic bags has crust that’s frankly not worth eating. This isn’t European bread.
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Yep. I love the crust in homemade bread. I studiously avoid the bun end of Wonder bread (I never went so far as having the crusts cut off though)
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I bake our bread (the good kind is too expensive, and I can’t in good conscience feed regular sandwich bread to my kids). Nobody’s ever told my kids that crusts are bad. They fight over who gets the heel, when we slice a new loaf.
The end piece in your average wonderbread though… they are kind of gross.
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“the crust is the best part of bread”
(mumble mumble) years ago during a trip to Krakow I had the most delicious bread ever in my life…. and the most delicious part was the bottom crust. The rest was great but the bottom crust was sheer heaven…. I have no idea why… I’d already grokked onto the idea that even mediocre bread in this part of the world is lightyears ahead of what they have in the US but this was a different order of deliciousness above anything I’d had in other Polish cities….
I went back to the place that sold it every day and it was their most generic type (although that soon after communism there wasn’t a lot of variety).
With most US white bread the crust just seems like an outline and not part that was meant to be eaten by humans….
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It’s because American bread has no crust. There’s nothing there to appreciate.
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Regular US bread is terrible and the crust is worse and likely does not have enough of the sandwich contents to make it edible. Eastern European bread has amazing crust.
Back when my little didn’t like crusts I would save them and turn them into French toast, and the little bits of PB&J were a yummy part of that.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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