We taste-tested 11 brands of frozen garlic bread you’re likely to find at your local supermarket. To find the very best one, we sampled each without knowing which was which. Our winner is 365 by Whole Foods, but we also crowned one worthy runner-up.
I will never turn down a slice of garlic bread, especially when it’s fresh out of the oven and still warm. It’s delicious served alongside a big plate of spaghetti and meatballs or a bowl of tomato soup—though most people would probably be happy to eat it on its own, too. Another bonus: Garlic bread is quick and easy to whip up. All you have to do is make a fragrant butter with minced garlic and plenty of fresh parsley, smear it on some crusty bread, then bake it until it’s nice and toasty. As simple as it is, premade garlic bread can be helpful when you want to get dinner on the table stat. That’s when the frozen stuff comes in: The bread comes sliced, buttered, and ready to bake, so you can pop it into the oven and focus on cooking your actual dinner. The question is: Which brand is worth buying?
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
To find the best frozen garlic bread, our editors taste-tested 11 widely available brands. We heated them according to package directions and sampled them in random order, without knowing which was which. We then tabulated the results and crowned an overall winner, along with a worthy runner-up.
The Criteria
Garlic bread should be rich and buttery, with a prominent, pleasant garlic flavor that isn’t overwhelming or acrid. The garlic should taste fresh and slightly mellowed out from cooking; it should not taste raw and sharp, and definitely not sour or metallic like jarred garlic. Each bite should be well-seasoned but not overly salty. The bread itself should be nicely crisp and toasty without being too tough to tear into, with a fluffy, tender interior. The bread should also not be mushy where it has soaked in the butter.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
Frozen garlic bread is sold in a couple of different forms. Some are baguette-style, in which a baguette is sliced crosswise into rounds or split lengthwise into two halves. It’s also common to see garlic bread sold as “Texas toast,” a variant of thickly sliced white sandwich bread that is buttered and toasted on both sides. And while Texas toast doesn’t have to contain garlic, all the versions of frozen Texas toast we included in this taste test were flavored with garlic butter, making them legitimate garlic-bread contenders.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
Overall Winner
365 by Whole Foods Market Garlic Texas Toast
Almost all our tasters loved this garlic bread from Whole Foods. “I have no complaints! The flavor is good, classic, not fancy,” our editorial director, Daniel, wrote. “Fluffy bread, nice golden crispy crust.” Like Daniel, I appreciated its light, crisp texture and garlicky flavor. Our associate editorial director, Megan, noted that she’d “actually buy this”—high praise coming from her!—and our visuals editor, Jessie, thought it was pleasantly “savory, salty, buttery, rich, and garlicky.” In other words, everything garlic bread should be.
Runner-Up
Furlani Texas Toast
Though this offering wasn’t quite garlicky enough for Daniel, he still enjoyed its “fluffy inside, crispy outside.” Like Daniel, our associate culinary editor, Laila, wished this bread was more garlic-forward: “It needs more butter and stronger garlic to feel like real garlic bread.” Our associate visuals director, Amanda, however, thought this garlic bread had a “nice balance” and appreciated the “good char on top.” Similarly, Megan and Jessie liked the bread’s crisp, crunchy texture.
The Contenders
- 365 by Whole Foods Market Garlic Texas Toast
- Bowl & Basket Garlic Texas Toast
- Bowl & Basket Italian-Style Garlic Bread
- Furlani Garlic Texas Toast
- Julian’s Butter & Garlic Traditional Baguette
- New York Bakery The Original Texas Toast With Real Garlic
- Pepperidge Farm Texas Toast Garlic Bread
- Pepperidge Farm Garlic Bread
- Stop & Shop Crusty Garlic Bread
- Stop & Shop Garlic Texas Toast
- Trader Joe’s Garlic Gondolas
Key Takeaways and Conclusion
Frozen garlic bread typically comes in two forms: Texas toast—which is sliced bread spread with butter and often flavorings like garlic and herbs—or a loaf or baguette spread with garlic butter. For this taste test, we sampled products from both categories.
Most garlic bread is made with white bread, butter and/or oil, salt, minced or crushed garlic, and dried herbs. Some brands may incorporate garlic powder and natural and/or artificial flavorings to enhance the bread’s flavor, along with turmeric and annato extracts for color. Ascorbic acid is frequently used as a dough conditioner, which helps strengthen gluten and improve the texture of the dough as it bakes.
Our winner, 365 by Whole Foods Market Garlic Texas Toast, is made with real butter—an ingredient that, surprisingly, appears in only four of the 11 products we tasted. Most other brands use a blend of vegetable oils (typically palm and/or soybean oil) and try to replicate butter’s natural creaminess and tang by incorporating buttermilk, whey, and/or lactic acid. Our runner-up, Furlani Texas Toast, contains no butter and is made with soybean and palm oil, and uses dried garlic instead of fresh. Though our editors thought our runner-up could have been more flavorful, they still appreciated the bread’s crispness.
Our editors generally preferred Texas toast to the loaves: The sliced bread baked more consistently in the oven, resulting in evenly melted butter slices that were crisp and golden brown on the outside and tender and fluffy within. The baguette-style loaves often suffered from a mushy interior, the result of the garlic-butter blend soaking into the crumb and steaming it to an unfortunate texture; Texas toast–style products avoided this by having the buttered surfaces always be on the exterior.
Though we prepared each garlic bread according to the package directions, we found the cooking time was insufficient for most loaves. Even after separating the bread into halves and baking for the suggested time, many were still underbaked and not hot enough. For this reason, we recommend adjusting the oven temperature and time as needed to thoroughly warm and toast the garlic bread to your liking.
Our Testing Methodology
All taste tests are conducted with brands completely hidden and without discussion. Tasters taste samples in random order. For example, taster A may taste sample one first, while taster B will taste sample six first. This is to prevent palate fatigue from unfairly giving any one sample an advantage. Tasters are asked to fill out tasting sheets, ranking the samples according to various criteria. All data is tabulated, and results are calculated with no editorial input to provide the most impartial representation of actual results possible.
