Paris---baguette question???
 

Actually all of France.

What do they do with the leftover baguettes from the morning? We've seen bakers take them out of the window/rack and replace with freshly baked baguettes in the late afternoon/evening.

Good question, I'll sign on to hear the answer.

I don't know what they do with them in the States, either. Our local supermarket bakes them daily, but they do not appear outside the bakery section until about 11:30 in the morning. (Silly, as that is much too late for breakfast.) Still, they make for a nice sandwich for lunch. If they don't sell out, those same stale baguettes are still there when the store closes.

It is my understanding that a Frenchman won't eat one that is more than a few hours old, which makes perfect sense to me.

Lots of French men eat them the next morning , cut in half and toasted , buttered often dipped in their coffee .

My dad is french and he hated it , but it is very common for those trying to be economical .

Yes Justine but that for sold baguettes. What do the bakers do with ps baguettes indeed ?
Maybe they give them to tramps - I know a lot do actually.

By the way that is the contrary with men : after 50 men get the baker's syndrome :
La brioche s'arrondit et la baguette ramollit.
Ok
I won't say it anymore.

Some use them for sandwiches the next day.
Some are more enterprising and make croutons, breadcrumbs or "pouding" - bread pudding.
There are some who sell stale bread at a discount and many now are giving donations of bread and pastries to food banks and people who are hungry.

I know one very decent baker which unfortunately does sell day old baguettes as fresh, the next morning. I think this is reprehensible.

Ok, customers reheat them for later meals. Bakeries tend to compost/use for pig feed. Selling day-old would work exactly once as customers would not put up with it and I suspect it infringes some 1910ish law.

Given that the things were basically brought about to ensure a basic loaf at a fixed price for the French peasant at the start of last centuary, they have done well. I just wish they were better, in my experience French bread is some of the worst in Europe (beaten only by some Italian, though even that is beginning to turn the corner) but, the croissant is a fine product. It is almost like northern European bread is wonderful and the further south you go it just gets worse and worse.

At home, I grind hard bread into bread crumbs.

I agree that much French and Italian bread is mediocre.

Ah.. but a good baguette is heaven.. and I love that.. never buy a baguette from a grocery store.

I think this is the same question as for any kind of food--what do stores or vendors do with it when it is old or bruised or damaged? Usually, they dump it.

You might want to view the Anges Varda film Les Glaneurs which was excellent and covers a lot of this situation, people gleaning food and other items from discarded items. I remember there was one young man who was a teacher in a homeless shelter who gleaned from the open-air markets after they closed down (apparently a lot of them leave some excess stuff behind, although I seem to recall it was mainly vegetables/fruits it showed).

And I know last year or so, they passed a law in France that stores had to turn over goods to food banks or something, instead of dumping stuff in the trash. But I'm not sure that included fresh food or not.

I imagine most bakeries try to make sure they don't bake a lot of excess baguettes, they should have some idea of about how many they sell each day, and you often can find them out at the end of the day of certain products.

But some sell them to discount stores, I think. HEre is a story about one such day-old bread store in Nimes
http://www.leparisien.fr/espace-prem...12-2397329.php

A true baguette sold at 8 am is not fresh enough to eat at 12

The term dump suggests an infinite container, the planet is only so big and products have to be converted into something

Compost converted into soil..

I was told that they make pudding out of them - bread pudding made into pie like slices- cheap.

At home my French friends make Trompez au lait (sp?) - bread and milk soup the next days.

No one I know throws out day-old baguettes.

Trompez au lait - never heard of it - but I'm not French.
Yet it doesn't sound right.

In Italy, they use hard bread to make various kinds of soups.

I make bread pudding, both a sweet one with sugar and raisins, and a salted one, with cheese.That's an American habit I brought here. But I also use the old bread to make bread crumbs, which are used a lot in Italian cooking.

Croissants, pains au chocolat etc are often sold the next day at half price. Stale bread is sold in big sacks to people who raise horses, hens, duck etc....
At home we make bread crumbs, pudding as PalenQ writes, stuffing for meat pies or petits farcis, and no, you don't throws out bread at least in the older generation. It is considered almost a sin !

Pvoy - Trompez au lait - this is what my French ex-wife called the old pain she put into bowls of hot milk and ate either in morning or at the 4pm snack time.

Ever heard of it -I may be butchering the spelling.

anyone heard of trompez au lait?

Merci

tromper = deceive, cheat
tremper = dunk, dip, drench

In English it's called Milquetoast.

tremper = dunk, dip, drench

OK voila- Tremper au lait

You can make "Pain Perdu" = Lost Bread = French Toast

When I was growing up my mother would make us bread and milk. Had to be stale bread ripped up into chunks boiled on the stove then sugar added. We nine children loved it. Filling as well. Then Mum started making it for her grandchildren and most of them loved it too. Not sure if it was because Granny made it. My husband thinks it is revolting. Mum also made bread and butter pudding.
I always thought of these types of food as 'poor people's food' and that it was passed on to us Aussies from the Brits. If only Mum was here so I could tell her that French people ate bread and milk. She would be impressed.

Bread salad is very good - any kind of stale bread, covered with tomatoes, olives, maybe some tuna, beans, vinaigrette...

P she may have been punning with Trompe-l'œil which sounds very similar

You can only use a certain number of bread crumbs or eat bread pudding or French toast until you can't stand to look at it anymore. But this was not meant to be a discussion of what we do with our leftover bread at home.

Most unsold bread is 1) given away, generally to charities, 2) sold at a discount, 3) recycled with organic waste.

One should hope that the artisans keep close track of almost exactly what they will need every day and have very little left over. As for the non artisan bakers, they have even less of a problem since all they have to do is get more dough sticks out of the freezer when they are running low. It only takes about 15 minutes to bake new baguettes. And even though most non artisan bread is not all that great (but fans of industrial places like Paul or Eric Kayser might disagree), it does have the upside of having have fresh warm baguettes more regularly throughout the day.

As for this statement:

<i>In my experience French bread is some of the worst in Europe (beaten only by some Italian, though even that is beginning to turn the corner). It is almost like northern European bread is wonderful and the further south you go it just gets worse and worse.</i>

... that is just a matter of personal taste. The bread of northern countries is full of sugar, whereas the bread of southern countries has more salt. If you prefer the sugary soft product, it is not easy to like the salty crusty product.

There are two kinds of baguettes:

Regular - sometimes called "Parisiennes" - made of bleached white flour, water, sugar, salt, sometimes oil and industrial fast-rising yeast.

"Une Tradition" - made of unbleached flour, water, salt and levain (sourdough starter).

Une Tradition usually costs a few centimes more, but is worth it.

K, don't worry I am a salt man much as my doctor wishes I was not :-) of course it is matter of personal taste (though I bake myself 6 times a week), I just don't happen to like white flour, and when I find brown/whole meal flour loaves in France I can get by.

Apart from using white flour the B has virtually no fat in it which makes it attractive to those dieting.

The steam oven makes up for a lot though

"Regular - sometimes called "Parisiennes" - made of bleached white flour, water, sugar, salt, sometimes oil and industrial fast-rising yeast."
There is no sugar in baguettee whether regular or traditional.

The baguette "tradition" is just a name and has nothing to do with tradition. In fact, it was just invented in 1993.

I continue to prefer normal baguettes because I don't like the dusting of loose flour on the others.

What Northern European bread has sugar in it? I make traditional Irish brown soda bread at home, and have never put sugar in it.

Bread with sugar is not european, I agree.
Neither is ham with honey and such.

Sometimes the sugar is disguised - especially in industrial breads.
Many boulangeries use industrial products.

Yeast already has sugar in it, and the amount of sugar in yeast can be quite variable.

And just for fun, since I believe that a number of Americans use this site as well, here is the composition of a popular brand of American whole wheat bread:

<i>Ingredients: Whole wheat flour, water, enriched flour (wheat flour, malted barley flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), wheat gluten, <b>brown sugar, honey</b>, sunflower seed kernels, yeast, rolled oats, contains 2% or less of each of the following: salt, soybean oil, cultured wheat flour, vinegar, dough conditioners (may contain one or more of the following: sodium stearoyl lactylate, calcium stearoyl-2-lactylate, mono- and diglycerides, calcium peroxide, calcium iodate, DATEM, ethoxylated mono- and diglycerides, azodicarbonamide), wheat bran, rye flakes, barley flakes, soy flour, buckwheat flour, bulgur wheat, cracked wheat, triticale, yellow corn grits, millet, soy grits, ground flaxseed, brown rice flour, calcium sulfate, soy lecithin, wheat starch, enzymes.</i>

When my my son's French mama was here she remarked that the bread at Panera Bread tasted better to her than the baguettes she gets from the local Carrefour (who bakes them on site like any boulangerie).

I like the Pain sans Sel too.

I love the French butter more than the bread. Bread and butter pudding with the leftovers.

<i> <b> What Northern European bread has sugar in it? </b></i>
...
<i> Yeast already has sugar in it, </i>

Oh, so southern European bread has no yeast?

Kerouac meant 'no ADDED' sugar. But it was difficult to understand, I guess.

There is a reason we are not (yet) all overweight in Europe.

Yes, bvlenci accidentally deleted the second part of my sentence.

I am confused , I am not a huge baker , but I distinctly recall one would add a little bit of sugar ( like 1/2 tsp) TO yeast to help it bloom , before adding yeast to flour .

My wife doesn't add sugar when we bake our own bread.

Because yeast already contains sugar.