Anonymous wrote:I don’t eat at Subway and now want to walk into one just to see what smell you’re talking about.
I hadn't commented above, but it's a very earthy yeast smell. I worked at one like 30 years ago and they ship the breads raw, but frozen to the stores. Each morning, you took out the frozen breads and put them on the trays and put the trays into the bread ovens and there was a switch that would thaw/rise the dough, then switch to cook it. There is something about the freezing process and the yeast that they use that gives a very odd more earthy smell to their bread than regular yeast. But once they cook that, it takes hours for the smell from the breads to fade and doing it daily means that the Subways smell like that for half of every day. More if someone puts a second batch of breads in the oven (like on busy days).