Our family always eats wheat bread so I’m pretty clueless when it comes to a healthy white bread. By my way of thinking, white bread isn’t healthy because it lacks the fiber that our bodies need. However, companies like Wonder Bread often make up for this lack of fiber by enriching their breads with other good stuff. When shopping for my aging mother recently, it was the Wonder Bread Texas Toast that caught my eye in the grocery store as a reasonably nutritious white bread that she and Dad could enjoy. How did this bread measure up?
Appearance
Like the old joke of how “Everything’s big in Texas,” Wonder Bread Texas Toast is probably the thickest sandwich bread you may have ever seen. The slices are extra thick, measuring a whopping 3/4 of an inch, compared to other breads which measure around 3/8 to 1/2 inch in thickness.
The slices are extremely uniform and somewhat square in shape, which makes them ideally suited for placing in a toaster. Their uniform shape means that the bread toasts quite evenly, a real plus for those who enjoy eating toast for breakfast or as a side dish.
Wonder Bread Texas Toast has 100 calories per slice, about the same as most wheat breads. The rest of the nutrition label reads as follows:
1 gram total fat; 0 mg cholesterol; 200 mg sodium; total carbs 19 grams with less than 1 gram of dietary fiber; and 3 grams of protein.
While Wonder Bread Texas Toast doesn’t have quite the grams of protein and fiber of wheat breads, it is packed full of vitamins and minerals. These include 15% of our daily requirements of Calcium; 10% of Thiamin; 8% Niacin; 6% of Iron; 6% of Riboflavin; and 10% of our recommended daily requirements of Folic Acid. Since I’m concerned about my aging parents calcium intake, the extra calcium found in Wonder Bread Texas Toast was a real plus. Just two slices of Wonder Bread contain the same amount of calcium as a glass of milk.
Taste
I made up a batch of toasted Wonder Bread Texas Toast for my family one morning, and everyone agreed that the bread had a slightly sweet yet delicious bread flavor. And unlike those wimpy sandwich loaves, the Wonder Bread Texas Toast had real substance to it. A couple of pieces of Texas Toast with a side dish of scrambled eggs kept my family satisfied until lunch time.
Price
The Wonder Bread Texas Toast was priced a bit higher than I expected from a white bread. At my local Albertsons, the Wonder Bread Texas Toast ran $3.79 a loaf, which is steep for a family on a budget. However, if you are fortunate enough to have a Wonder Bread bakery thrift in your community, this same product can be purchased for $1.48 a loaf which is certainly more reasonable.
Summary
What distinguishes the Wonder Bread Texas Toast from other breads is the extra thick slices. While these thicker slices are great for eating toast plain or buttered, as a side dish with a steak or spaghetti dinner, or even for making French toast, they aren’t very practical for making sandwiches. By the time you load up a Texas Toast sandwich with lettuce and meat, the entire sandwich is about 2 inches thick, which is much too large for kids (and most adults) to eat for lunch.
As a sandwich bread, the Wonder Bread Texas Toast won’t work. But, for families who want a delicious yet nutritious white bread that toasts to perfection, Wonder Bread Texas Toast definitely fits the bill.
