Best bread for making a sandwich - Germany

I was on a business trip to France the other day with my (German) colleague, Birgit.

At lunchtime, the client served us the sort of sandwiches which are impossible to eat without dribbling bits of it down yourself. You know - French baguette with tiny bits of mushrooms, tomato, lettuce, tunafish, sweetcorn... in fact pretty much anything you can think of was falling out of that unwieldy sandwich.

Anyway, that started a conversation about the best type of bread for making a sarnie. Which is obviously (obvious to me at least) British bread. Large - square - holds it all in.

"Urgh!" says Birgit. "British bread's full of air. And it's soggy. If you make a sandwich using it, it's a bit like eating a napkin that's wrapped round your ham."

"Well German bread doesn't hold the filling in your sandwich either. It's too heavy and unyielding. It's like putting your tunafish between two planks of timber."

And so it went on. All the way back to the airport. Who would have thought bread could be the source of an international incident. Huh?

I'm agreeing with british bread plus you can hold monster amounts of filling inside british bread but it has to be hovis and it has to have German butter on it not english!

I'm all in favour of a nice big crusty bloomer.

Sorry remind me what a bloomer is again... eek sorry I've only been awake about 30mins!

Depends on which German bread you mean. There's so many kinds.

I reckon she means the multi-pupose sort. You know the stuff you can either eat, use as a beer mat, or as a weapon in a close combat fight!

I love the bread here. So much better, healthier and tastier. We live near a bakery and the make fabulous bread. My favourite for a sandwich is the Kürbiskernölbrot, those pumpkin seeds on top are devine! But there is so much choice and variety.

Would never dream of eating a sliced pan here with all the lovely bread that has a real bite in it here. Two planks of timber does not do justice to the fabulous bread to be had here.

Kürbiskernöl (Pumpkin seed oil) is a great and very healthy Styrian delicacy

You see, this is why I always get a strange look in the bakery when I ask for my favourite bread! It's Kürbiskernsomething or other but it tastes grrrrrrreaat!

Perfect sandwich bread has a well-defined yet pliable crust to prevent solid ingredients such as corn, pickles or red pepper slices from escaping, enough air pockets to capture the more liquid ingredients of your favorite condiments such as mustard, mayonnaise, butter, tzatziki, relish but enough firmness to resist the scrape of butter across its surface and - most important - enough flavor of its own to complement your ham, salami, fish, wurst, cheese or meat. Pumpernickel is no good but amazing as an open-faced sandwich with hot mustard and roast beef or middle-aged Gouda. Holzofenbrot is too crusty for a sandwich but marvelous when thickly cut and spread with sweet butter then topped, and I mean wall-to-wall carpeted, with chopped chives or thinly sliced white or red radish. The best bread I have found is a real bakery bread as supplied by the Aumüller bakery here in Munich, called Buttermilchbrot, a wheat/rye mixed bread made with buttermilk that gives it a wonderfully light texture to go along with the nutty flavor of rye.

Pitta bread. You can cut a slit in one side and fill it up like a bag...

Anything other than American Storebought Whitebread! Down here in Florida, that's basically what you've got. Even the rye bread is soft and mushy! What I wouldn't do for some timber bread! LOL

Bullshit. Do yourself a favor and go here.

Have been there. Unfortunately it's a 55 mile drive for me. That's a long drive just for a loaf of $5 bread. I actually applied for a job there awhile back, while I was still living in the city.
I'm talking about where I live, here out in the outer fringes.

Oh did I mention, that besides the five dollar loaf of bread, that still doesen't come close to the German wood plank stuff. I cannot afford to shop there. I live on a $60- a week budget for food.

The best sandwich bread by a mile is in fact US standard white or whole grain sandwich bread of which there are many varieties. The best being: Sunbeam, Kerns, Wonder, Merita and Nature's Own. The closest thing to those in Germany is a brand called Lieken and I would favorably compare that to Nature's Own, but not the others for which there is no substitute.


We call that French bread in the south. They were yellow, sold in a bag and called "something rolls". I ate the shit out of them for a while and they were great balled up as bait for Blue Gill. I will think of the name of them here in a minute.

Please, please tell me you are kidding. Wonder bread? White air? OMG. Unless, of course, you want to emphasize the sandwich filling by using bread that is tasteless. I guess you would be correct, then.

Tasteless my ass. Bread is supposed to be bread. If you wanted a cracker, then buy a damn cracker. I, for one, want to make a sandwich with bread, not a cracker. I want to experience the wonderful goodness of biting into a cloud filled with ham and cheese and lettuce and Mr Mustard. I don't want to bite into a cracker only to find that what used to be there has now fallen unto my plate or worse yet my lap. You want to eat cardboard? I got some mighty tasty boxes lying around here.

Ah wonderbread, you can make perfect little balls with that, they are great for flicking/throwing at people, didn't know anyone actually ate/chewed the stuff though, well except for the military anyway.

Nononononono! This is Bread with a capital B! Not a roll, this is a loaf of bread all in one piece weighing in at app. 1kg. Not hard, not dense, not über-crusty, great texture, excellent flavor.

Ingredients: Weizenmehl, Roggenmehl, Natursauerteig, Buttermilch, Hefe, Salz
(wheat flour, rye flour, natural sourdough, buttermilk, yeast, salt)
No additives, no preservatives. It can't go bad because it gets eaten up before its due date. Absolutely wasted on fish!
For more bread, go to your nearest Aumüller bakery.

this reminds me of an arguement at a going away barbeque i had back home in oz. the scandinavians and my german boyfriend were going on and on about how much our bread suck (wonderbread etc). the debate ended in one norweigan guy grabbing a whole loaf of bread and squishing it down so it was just a couple of centimetres. i wasn't happy!! haha.

there's nothing better than a piece of fresh white bread with butter and vegemite. mmmm...
although i really like german bread too, especially the sunflower seed kind

White bread is probably the best for making sandwiches as it doesn't have an overpowering flavour, but most of the mass-produced stuff is unfortunately virtually entirely devoid of any vitamins or protein. This needn't be the case, but of course it's cheaper to produce bad bread, so that's what is mostly sold (see CBP).

I think German bread is fantastic, but it is generally too heavy and flavourful for closed sandwiches. I usually eat open sandwiches (at home), or buy a specific white bread from the market that still has a decent flavour.

I have. I especially love the part where I have to peel it off the roof of my mouth.

Yeah, peanut butter, banana and honey sandwiches just aren't the same on German bread.

The Hofpfisterei, despite having a stupid name, do some excellent sandwich bread in their mini-kerndl, mini-mild and other mini sandwich loaf sized breads. They're the right square size to fit in your hand, with the right structural strength to hold together even when generously stuffed and eaten with one hand, but not too heavy or dry so you can't swallow them.

I'm with Eurovol on this thread. I've also more or less stopped eating bread here.

I find that quite staggering, I have to say.

I like German bread. But I prefer the American-style white sandwich bread for toast and toasted sandwiches per se.

Eggs? Only with toast mentioned above.

Prosciutto with gurken and tomatoes? Only on a dark-bread like the kind you get at Aran's near Odeonspatz. They make excellent sandwiches and have an assortment of fresh juices.

Horses for courses.

I like eating the bread here too, open-faced with various toppings, but when I want a real sandwich then it has to be soft white or wheat bread. Nothing else comes close.

oh, if you want to know where the rock is, they call it bread here.

Rock bread huh? I was always under the impression it was lead bread. Sorry, but the rock has nothing to do with bread...still looking for a good radio station's all...

Yuck, exactly my I hate the stuff..I also like white bread for sandwiches, so I buy a fresh loaf from the bakery & have them slice it so I don't end up with doorstoppers & then I freeze it & defrost as needed, as you all know fresh German bread won't last overnight, I also like ciabatta, makes great toast...reminds me how do you pronounce it?? I always thought it was chibatta, but I get strange looks when I say it that way

Tchiah-bah-tah
In Italian a c before e or i is pronounced tch. If there is an h between the c and the vowel it is pronouned k. So when I hear someone saying kibattah or radditchio I want to spray paint panda bears green.

Ah ok, thanks Sb, seems I am missing the a, but I have heard Italians say chib rather than chiab or maybe it's just the fact that i'm deaf and didn't hear them properly ...er you don't actually pronounce the T do you? A friend of mine always says T chibo...

We have taken to making our own now.Get bread mixes from the Aldi.Mehrkorn and white bread comes out of the machine really well.Both great for butties

German bread can be fantastic, especially from small independent bakeries. But as this discussion is about the best bread for sandwiches, then English bread must be the best.
The (larger) supermarkets in England now tend to have their own in-sore bakeries and produce some excellent sandwich bread.

Personally, when back in the UK, I prefer to buy the in-store loaves un-sliced, so that I can slice them nice and thick for real butties.

Am I the only one that finds this funny? Comparing German bread to tasteless cardboard and extolling the flavorful virtues of Wonder Bread? The only thing bread-like about Wonder Bread is in the name. At least you got the cloud bit right.

I promise to teach you the correct prononciation of ciabatta and radicchio when I make it to Heidelberg later this year.

Cool, I can teach you some Norfulk (the original one) speak too . Let me know when you are headed this way.

If you know how to pronounce "ciao" properly then you know how to pronounce "ciabatta" as well. I wouldn't transcribe the initial sound in "ciabatta" as "tch" without specifying that it's not supposed to sound like "church" or "chair" in English, it's softer than that - it's more like running "don't ya" together. Incidentally, the two vowels ('i' and 'a') are not voiced separately, you only really hear the 'a', just like in "ciao".

I despise most German bread, it's too dry and rough-textured and I especially don't like having birdseed falling all over the place as I try to eat a sandwich. Best sandwich bread in my opinion is a nice baguette or panini. Pitas can be nice too except that they only seem to come in one tiny, useless drink-coaster size here.