We get excellent baguettes in the US at Vietnamese restaurants who make their banh mi with them. Not all places, hit or miss until we find the best ones.Left from their French Colonial days.

Gusto Bread does an interesting one which incorporates corn masa into the dough

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The best baguette I have ever eaten in the US was just OK. Even in France, not all baguettes are fabulous. My local boulangerie won the Best Baguette in Paris a few years back and their baguettes are truly amazing. I think that the tradition is made with T-65, a flour that is somewhat courser than a normal baguette which I believe is T-55. The tradition is what you want to ask for in Paris. It typically costs .10€ more than a regular baguette, but it will be the best 10 cents you ever spent.

A tradition has edged up in price during the confinement and is now typically 1.30€.

I actually buy very little bread because for some reason I have developed some sort of aversion to just about all products involving it in one way or another -- I don't like hamburgers, pizza or even sandwiches even though I used to love all of these things -- or viennoiseries and other pastries, cakes, tarts... Must be something about wheat? But about once every three months I want a baguette and buy an ordinary one for 0.90€, which is perfect for me, even though generally about half of it is left (yes, of course I know that I could buy a demi-baguette). I save the stale dried sticks until I have at least 4 of them and then I grind them in my food processor to make crumbs, for which I manage to find uses when mixing ground pork or beef or other things. If I have too many leftover baguettes, they end up at the duck pond at the Buttes Chaumont or Bercy, or (my very favorite place for that) the nature reserve at the Aire de la Baie de Somme on the A16 which has a huge network of little canals for the fish, ducks and geese to battle it out. I often spend more than an hour there, which is incredible for a rest stop on the autoroute.

I do not at all like "tradition" baguettes which are dusted with flour and make a mess. In any case, they were only invented in 1990 and there is nothing traditional about them. They were just created by the bakery lobby due to a major drop in baguette sales in the 1980s (probably due to the arrival of burger buns and sliced American style bread which became hugely popular). The popularity of the "baguette tradition" is attributed mostly to the fast food chain Paul which gave the convincing illusion of tradtiional French bakeries even though the Paul locations cannot be called bakeries since their bread is produced industrially.

A real traditional baguette is the ordinary cheaper one, not the more expensive incorrectly named product. However, I will not deny that bread lovers can prefer the new version since anything that costs more is supposed to be better.

While we are "in bread" can anyone tell me what a "brioche style bun" is, as advertised by MacDos?

Brioche contains eggs and butter as opposed to bread.

Hi kerouac, thanks I understand what brioche is, I was more concerned that MacDos use the term "brioche style", normally when an industrial manufacturer uses words like "style" it means it is and it isn't such and such a product. Does anyone know what their ingredients are? Powdered egg, milk whey?

Ingrédients
Pour 5 pains à burger brioché
250 g de farine spéciale pain blanc (le top : la marque Francine)
8 g de levure instantanée (le top : toujours Francine)
5 g de sel
12 g de sucre
100 mL d’eau
38 mL de lait
30 g d’oeuf battu
15 g de beurre

I find that Aldi has excellent brioche burger buns.

Ingredients:
Wheat Flour, Water, Eggs, Sugar, Canola Oil, Invert Sugar Syrup, Wheat Gluten, Yeast, Butter, Nonfat dry milk, Salt, Natural Flavoring, Milk Proteins, Deactivated Yeast, Malted Rye Flour, Color (beta Carotene).

mon Dieu! Sometimes I wish I'd never asked. Is that food? Thanks J62, you live and learn.

The squirrels would say yes. The birds haven't yet decided....