ON A RECENT Tuesday, all the diners at the New York raw bar Penny, with its marble counter, cream-colored brickwork and ice boxes of escabeche mussels and fresh shrimp, had come seeking sophistication. So why was there so much white bread? Nearly every customer was eating the 39-year-old chef and owner Joshua Pinsky’s oven-warm loaf, served with butter and anchovies.
White bread — long synonymous with “bland” and “boring” — is cool again. It can seem it’s all but replaced chewy, slapped-and-folded, tangy sourdough, which for more than a decade was the de facto carbohydrate at stylish American restaurants. Only an hour into an early service at Ben Shenassafar’s Los Angeles tavern, the Benjamin Hollywood, all of the Parker House rolls had run out. When Dominique Ansel Bakery launched a limited-edition laminated Japanese-style shokupan this past Mother’s Day, the Manhattan-based company sold roughly 200 loaves in just a few days. Even in sourdough’s holy headquarters, San Francisco, the golden dinner rolls at the modern California restaurant Ernest are one of just two dishes that have never left the menu.
Brioche, shokupan, Parker House rolls and Pullman loaf might not seem like cousins, but they’re all different types of white bread, made using commercial leavener — rather than wild yeast, as with sourdough — and refined flour, which lends a mellow flavor and soft texture. From there, a baker can mix, proof and shape the dough for different results: adding butter and milk to make brioche; or milk alone to create a tangzhong (Chinese flour paste, a centuries-old technique that creates the pillowy, moist crumb of milk bread). Like so many white breads puffing up in steam convection ovens across the country, the 77 or so loaves baked daily at Penny are a hybrid, incorporating both brioche and milk bread methods. “I just wanted something squishy,” says Pinsky. He tested different loaves until he discovered a secret ingredient, inspired by a former colleague at New York’s Momofuku Ko who used to reverse-engineer processed baked goods: one drop of liquid soy lecithin imbues the bread with a pleasing buoyancy.
Breads like these also take less time to produce, says Fabián von Hauske, 34, a co-owner and chef of Bar Contra, which opened on New York’s Lower East Side in July. From his years of working at spots like Copenhagen’s Noma, von Hauske remembers the effort and slow fermentation required to produce chewy, crusty brown bread, whereas simpler varieties like his restaurant’s celeriac crumpets can usually be finished within a single workday.
Plus, he says, white bread’s inherent blandness and loose crumb — perfect for soaking up sauce — pair better with a broad range of flavors: As anyone who’s enjoyed a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich can tell you, it works in both sweet and savory dishes. At Penny, the same brioche served with anchovies returns at the end of the meal stuffed with apple butter and malted ice cream. And at the Musket Room in Manhattan’s NoLIta, the 30-year-old chef Camari Mick recently started offering milk bread-infused semifreddo, using leftovers from the plush loaves that she bakes primarily to pair with caviar.
WHITE BREAD HAS been in American homes since at least the 1800s, says Aaron Strain, 54, a food politics professor at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., and the author of “White Bread” (2012), in which he traces, among other things, “how white bread became white trash,” particularly over the last century, as diners turned against additives in favor of slow food. But bread, he says, has always been used as a metaphor about society: earthy versus refined, free-form versus structured. The smoothing of loaves into sleek rectangles in the 1920s, for example, was “a political statement about the future,” he writes in the book, like “Bauhaus office blocks or Le Corbusier chairs.”
Before the machine age, white bread implied wealth, since refining flour required manual labor. But by the 1930s, Wonder Bread had become famous for its packaged sliced bread. According to Strain, in the late 19th century, 90 percent of bread eaten in the United States was made by women at home. Just 40 years later, 90 percent of it was made by men in factories. Increasingly mothers were able to step away from the oven and into the work force as their children ate school sandwiches on Wonder Bread, its 1940s ads proclaiming that the vitamin-enriched product could build up a boy’s body, readying him for the war.
And yet the return of white bread isn’t just the latest example of nostalgia for foods both artisanal and not but a harbinger of changing tastes. Today “people just want something a little easier in their daily consumption. White bread is soft and comfortable to eat; with sourdough, you have to chew it, and it’s a very tactile feeling,” says Akira Akuto, 44, a co-owner of the now-closed Los Angeles restaurant chain Konbi, which incited a national obsession with egg salad sandwiches on milk bread after it opened in 2018.
Much of Konbi’s bread was made by Andy Kadin, 42, who now owns the Los Angeles restaurant and wholesaler Bub and Grandma’s, where he sells tuna salad and meatloaf on challah. As Kadin sees it, there’s a prevailing interest in plainness amid the gimmick-ridden, made-for-TikTok viral food landscape. “People are like, ‘Give me a sandwich the way I had it when I was a kid,’” he says. “You just need to do something honest. You’re showing people how much better that thing that warms their heart can be.”
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