It's not that the Subway smell is bad; it's just that there are a lot more Subways than there are little French bakeries, and all of them carry that same distinct and yet nearly indescribable aroma.
It's what one Vice reporter called "that sweet, herby, bready scent" that will leave you "feeling disgusted or hungry. Whatever "that" is. And therein lies the rub. Just "follow the smell of our baking bread," Subway's website teases in big, bold-faced letters. But is bread really what we're smelling? Because we've baked our share of bread, starting with sourdough bread and moving on to three-ingredient banana bread before making our way to cloud bread.
And Subway's signature scent, which they claim they don't intentionally vent onto the sidewalk , does not smell like any bread we've ever baked. All told it would be 48 hours of Subway cookery. My Italian herbs and cheese got a bit burned but the wholemeal looked pretty similar to the Subway original.
This fragrance intensified as I placed the loaf into the oven. It was close but… somehow still not quite right. My Subway bouquet still needed a tinge of sweetness. I ate my mediocre buns in defeat. The next day I was semi-ready to make the same breads again, along with five different types of cookies to see if the smell was a composite. As my oven began blasting the combined scent of basil and macadamia cookies I knew I'd done it.
That might not seem like a huge shock, but it is also an incomplete answer. To my absolute delight, they said yes. According to this snazzy YouTube video , they help companies make safer, fresher, and healthier foods.
They also have the tech to identify the specific compounds wafting from Subway's doors. This man is a flavour chemist by the name of Dr Tanoj Singh and he agreed to help me out. You can see this pen-like device in the above photo. It has a variety of odour-absorbing chemicals coating its point and when the tool is exposed to the air, the aroma compounds bind to the tip.
And it looked like a total success. In the above photo Dr Singh is holding a decent looking sammie from Werribee Subway. The baking compounds that it identified were 2-methylbutanal, 3-methylbutanal, and benzaldehyde.
Maybe they knew I was coming. The bread smell was still inside the store, allegedly escaping from the oven when Lema opened the door—likely story.
I looked at my Subway map and went off again. The next person I talked to was named Yalo. I know what you are up to. Lucien Formichella I continued trekking to the next restaurant and confronted Isuru—a devilishly handsome and charismatic man—about his baking practices. It creates a very good impression. I could feel it. Isuru had almost cracked.
The next worker I talked to claimed he had never even heard of the theory, but that he would do some research on it.
Strangely, all the others had pleaded ignorance too. I decided to give it one more go and walked into the Subway by my house, asking my hard hitting questions to the worker on his cigarette break out front. The guy standing next to him, a friend who claimed his name was Kamran, cut in and answered instead. Are you smelling anything?
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