Side question: Why do people buy baguettes? Do they make sandwiches with them? How do you even make a sandwich from them? How are you meant to beat a baguette???
Not pictured: baguette
How are you meant to beat a baguette???
Just punch it dude, it’s bread.
The question is how to beat with a baguette
This will truly be a dual fates.
Really a pane in the ass.
Why are they different shapes?
Sliced bread is made in loaf pans
Sourdough is made on a flat tray in the shape of a ball so it spreads out a bit.
Baguettes are made by a long strand of dough.
Bonus answer: the reason why sourdough and the baguette have the textured crust is due to the dough being sliced with a knife prior to baking.
This is literally called nostupidquestions and people are saying it’s a stupid question…??? some people just didn’t experience the same things. https://xkcd.com/1053/
A big reason is different texture, with the semisphere shape the middle can be fluffy while the outside is crunchy, for baguettes it’s basically a sandwich that the whole thing fits in your mouth in one orientation, so it’s a different way to eat it.
Cheese fondue.
The rectangular loaf became popular due to packing efficiency. You can fit more of them in less space.
Okay, why not hexagon shaped bread?
Ease of manufacturing the bread tin. Ease of extracting the baked bread from the tin. Hexagons do not pack better than squares.
Because you can stack rectangles into bigger rectangles, can’t really do that with hexagons.
How high are you stacking your bread
Depends on how high I get first.
For some soups, a great way to serve them is to toast a thick slice of one of the uncut loaves (so you can cut it thick), then place it in the middle of a wide bowl and serve the soup on top of that. Sometimes, you put another sauce that harmonizes well with the souo on the bread, first.
Then you eat it as the soup absorbs into the bread, experiencing a combination of soggy and dry bread textures along with the flavour of the broth (and sauce, if present).
It wouldn’t work with a standard loaf of bread, as both the slices and the bread itself aren’t thick enough to keep it from quickly going fully soggy. Breaking crackers or dipping toast into soup are pale imitations (ok, dipping toast isn’t that far off, but I still prefer a good thick piece of toast).
Also, if you take a baguette and cut it into thinner slices then toast/bake those slices, you end up with a much cheaper version of those artisan crackers that are just dried pieces of baguette.
Also, look up beef wellington for one of the more extreme uses of non-standard bread.
Because the dough was a different shape before baking.
You can beat a baguette with a golf club, a truncheon, or even another baguette.
IMHO, I don’t know why people buy those sliced white bread loafs. That bread is weak sauce.
Whole grain is infinitely better.
The average american is conditioned from birth to prefer mediocre, bland, mass-produced food options with highly refined ingredients and/or highly processed foods with way too much sugar and artificial flavoring.
White bread is the lamest thing. Even “artisanal” bread in america is really just white bread in disguise, unless you know what to look for. I’ve even seen breads labeled as “with whole grains” that are actually just white bread with a few whole grains added in, just enough that they can put it on the label. I fucking hate the food industry here.
Oh, and fun fact: in Europe they call sliced bread “toast” because the only use they have for it is to toast it. Literally any other purpose and they choose a better bread.
Because it freezes well and is better for toasting. Nice bread tends to be a flatter oval shape which doesn’t fit in a toaster as well.
Those are small problems I will gladly endure in order to have food with flavor.
That bread looks meh, but there are plenty of great white slice bread options, particularly if you’re a toast fan.
Brioche is definitely for toast/french toast/samdwhiches.
I’ve only seen big loves like that for restaurants though.
loved brioche as a kid, its way too sweet for me now though. i usually sub for a potato roll or japanese milk bun.
I thought I was the only one…. 🥲
Totally agree. Sliced bread is great. But that white bread sandwich which stuff. Bleh.
How can sliced bread not be great? It’s been the ruler by which all greatness is measured since it was created!
Sliced white bread = boo
Sliced sour = now we’re talking
White bread / Wonder bread is also universally used as an analogy for something bland and boring.
Which country? The ingredients of a sliced white loaf vary significantly across the planet. Here in Britain it’s (re)fortified with a lot of the things the bleaching process might otherwise take out, but those are pretty much the only additives. No sugar or preservatives. Keep a loaf in a warm cupboard for a week and it will visibly moulder.
But, one thing that generally doesn’t vary is the price.
It’s often the cheapest loaf by weight sold by any supermarket or bakery, so it’s a staple for a lot of people, weak sauce or not.
Garbage tier bread.
Well of course, it’s bread, not sauce.
Garlic Bread.
Well, there’s a number of reasons for the shape of the various bread types. The dough type - from the kind of flour used, through the resting time, fermentation time, raising agent (let it be any of a variety of yeast products, wild yeast aka sourdough starter, baking powder or baking soda, there’s tons of options), how hydrated it is, and so on. The oven type and baking approach. The purpose of the bread.
Your first picture is of a standard toast or sandwich bread. It’s supposed to be a fairly loose, soft bread with a soft crust and an engineered shape for easier baking - with conduction baking on all sides except the top (here conduction baking refers to the fact the sides and bottom of the bread is held in place by a heated metal tray, transferring heat directly without letting air or steam escape, resulting in the soft crust). A more industrial yeast type is used (usually dry or instant yeast), which result in relatively small gas bubbles, giving it a dense but fluffy interior. The flour is usually a light wheat flour, and both resting and fermentation times are low - that’s why it’s a more industrial bread, you mix the ingredients, let the mixture sit for 30-60 minutes then bake it, easily automated.
The second picture is of a sourdough loaf. This usually uses wholemeal wheat flour, often mixed with rye or other grains for better texture, and is a fairly tedious bread to make with multiple stretch and fold sequences and long resting periods, allowing lots of gluten to form, which means every stretch and fold sequence doesn’t mix the dough but rather layers and shapes it. The yeast comes from a sourdough starter, and is allowed to ferment longer, which is why you get an intense flavour. It bakes quick in a Dutch oven first covered then uncovered, allowing it to fluff up but then shape a hard crust. You get much larger bubbles and an internal structure of long strands of gluten forming swirls and such.
Then the baguette, it uses a different approach to sourdough but with a similar effect. Unlike sandwich bread, the dough for baguettes - as well as what I’d call “European medium bread” (medium here meaning the hardness and bakedness of the crust) - a crispy crust that isn’t as well baked as a sourdough, but also isn’t soft, with a well developed gluten structure, using more predictable yeasts (again usually instant quick yeast or dry yeast, or in some areas, live yeast cubes). Mind you the baguette you’re showing is more of a hypermarket style baguette that is intentionally baked to a lesser darkness, and traditional baguettes are more on the golden brown part of the scale.
Overall, the kind of flour determines the flavour, but also the raising and resting times. Some flours (especially wholemeal or grain mix flours) need more time as the more complex proteins and sugars take more time to be broken down by the yeast thus they rise slower. Hydration determines how tough the dough is to shape (e.g. pasta is only hydrated by the eggs, making it a hard, dense dough, pizza needs to be flexible so it’s high hydration, and it gets extra raise in the oven as the water quickly evaporates). Yeast determines the flavour, the raising time, and in the final product, the texture and airiness. The baking method can fuck a lot with the texture. A regular convection oven can dry the crust out making it tough and thick, forming quickly and stopping the bread from rising, but adding some ice in a pan at the bottom can generate enough steam to let the bread rise properly by delaying the crust hardening. Same idea for sourdough using a Dutch oven, you create a high moisture environment, a steam box, to keep the crust soft while the bread rises, then remove it at the end so the crust can cripsen and brown. The sandwich bread is medium hydration thus it keeps the sides moist while they bake, giving it that brown but soft crust. If you were to plop the same dough just into the oven, without the baking shape, due to there being little to no gluten development, it would just fall apart and harden into the world’s shittiest giant cookie.
But also you can bake bread in a Dutch oven over an open fire, giving a more rustic style bread with thick, chewy, but also cripsy crust. Toss the same dough with lower hydration into a circle and onto an upside down pan in the same fire and you got some awesome flatbread with a nice center air pocket you can open up and stuff with meat.
Then, you can decide to just fuck it and add as much high fructose corn syrup as possible without fucking up the bread, and you get American style bread.
Ah, a fellow bread bro
I’m not even a bread bro, I just happen to have ADHD and got a few hyperfocus sessions into sourdough 😭
Uh,Sir?
ADHD and got a few hyperfocus sessions into sourdough
Is the nearly the verbatim senior qualification for certification from the charter. Section 2-14, p.12.
Your certificate, membership card and lapel pin should be in the mail, but we haven’t fully caught-up from the Pandemic breadocalypse.
Either way, welcome your High Breadbroness.
Beautiful answer!
A small point from someone working alongside bread industry - small bubbles in toast/sandwich bread are not due to the type of yeast used, but due to intentionally low time for second stage mixing and, as you mentioned, low time for resting and leavening. You can absolutely create huge bubbles using the very same yeast, though, if that’s your goal.
In Brazil we have a small baguette called “French bread”! It’s very convenient and absolutely everywhere. And it tastes good, white bread in comparison tastes like nothing and has a shitty texture
I believe those are called Petit Pain. And strongly agree, much better than standard white bread by a mile.
At first I was impressed it exists if France, but it’s kinda obvious. Now I’ve learnt that, for 20 years of my life, I believed a bullshit story about how hundreds of years ago people in Brazil couldn’t make baguette so they sold “French Bread”
Btw, cute name for a pastry
So here in the UK they sell these fresh in Lidl: a cheap supermarket but it has an amazing bakery where they make these and other items.
I often go to Lidl at lunchtime to buy two of these and something simple to fill them with into sandwiches, usually cheese and ham, (insert bland UK food joke here).
My question for you, in the spirit of international culinary collaboration, what Brazilian fillings would you stuff one of these with to make a great sandwich?
We put cheese, ham, salami, mortadella and other stuff. However just mortadella on bread is really famous, because it’s quite cheap and a very famous TV show called Chaves had the main character loving it.
Recently I’ve started trying to make more meal-like sandwiches, like chicken, tomato and lettuce (really tasty) or egg, cheese and peperoni (all heated up together) and it’s considerably better
Also, you’re talked about petit pain, do you know they have that name in France or they are sold with that name in the UK?
Those all sound delicious, I’ll have to give them a try 😋
Yeah I do and they are sold under that name here in the UK because English will just adopt words from other language or slang terms if they’re used enough. Also in English words for farm animals are Germanic in origin and words for the meat of those same animals are Norman (northern France) in origin because after the Norman Conquest in 1066, the nobility were all Norman French and were the ones to refer to cuts of meat whereas the peasantry didn’t eat the meat of the farm animals.
Cow, Pig × Filet mignon makes much more sense now!
Also, that’s called loan word
Ah, bolillos!
tortas!
industry vs. artisan goods?
One word: Bánh mì
Regarding your main question: you don’t fit a square in a round hole.
I love ordering a bánh mì with pho and dipping it.
If you have a Viet restaurant that serves things other than phó and noodles, check out a dish called “Bánh mì bò kho” - it’s a spicy beef curry dish, chunks of meat, onions, potatoes and broth that comes with the bánh mì baguette to dip.
https://www.hungryhuy.com/bo-kho-recipe-vietnamese-beef-stew/
That sounds fantastic. I checked our usual suspects but none have that on the menu. Not surprised, because if I had seen it I definitely would have ordered it by now.
I got in trouble once for pronouncing it correctly and people thought I was just being lewd 😭
That’s two words.
Well lookee here fellas, it looks like we got a fancy pants that can count to 2!
Mama always said, “If you can’t count to two, you’ll never do.”
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Look for baguette sandwich in DDG
You just slice it horizontally for that.
Baguettes are delicious, use a knife if you want to do a sandwich, what’s the difficulty?
