Hey neighbor! I grew up in rural western Wisconsin, near Eau Claire.
My experience has been that the artisan bakeries are all gung-ho for their various sour-dough starters. There’s no getting a good French or Italian loaf at any of them. The other day I bought one marked “Ciabatta” that turned out to be sourdough. :smack:
:smack: I see I missed an important word…the colleague was saying that of course it’s a “pain français”; pretty much if you’re going to identify a bread as being “French”, it’s going to be a baguette. Sure, there are exceptions, but it’s generally true and it was teasing anyways 
This colleague loved to tease my mom for her Québecoise expressions. She thought that “Il pleut à boire debout” was hilarious and bizarre…until my mom caught her saying “Il pleut comme vache qui pisse”, which is even weirder!
panera’s crust is hard but the inside is fluffy. costco’s crust isn’t well-shelled but the innards are chewy. both taste just fine to my caveman palate.
You know, I’ve had reasonable versions of different types of breads here, but, I swear, it’s impossible to get it exactly right. I don’t know if it’s the water, the flour, the technique, the type of commercial yeast, or all of the above, but good French bread I’ve had here is not quite the French bread I’ve had there, and (for another example) Hungarian white bread and buns are some of my favorite in the world, but I’ve never found anything exactly like it in the US. It’s a simple, straightforward crusty white bread–it doesn’t seem like anything special–but nothing I’ve had here tastes quite right. Same with actual French baguettes. They’re close, but just a little bit off. This is not to say they’re not good in their own right, they’re just slightly different.
I agree, Whole Foods makes the best baguette I’ve had in this country. It’s even better than the baguettes at Le Pain Quotidien, which is a Belgian chain.
Get them when they’re still warm. Heaven.
Yes, this. You may have to try 2 or 3 or more, but in my tiny city there are at least two bakeries run by born-and-raised-in-France people plus several more who went to culinary school and are excellent bakers. At $2-3 a pop, who cares if you have to try several? Baking bread is tedious; I’ve never EVER tasted a home-baked one that tasted nearly as good as a bakery loaf. Unless you’ve got mad skillz (like** Athena**) do yourself a favor and just use the googles, yelp, word of mouth, etc to try and find several bakeries in your nearest city or upper-middle class or above suburb.
A trick my mom showed me is to wet your hands and rub them on the bread. Not a lot of watre, just the amount left your hands after a slight rinse under the spigot. Then toss the baguette in the oven at 350 for a few minutes. Experiment… maybe 5 to 8 to 10 minutes. It really crusts up the exterior nicely… and revives a day old baguette.
I don’t mean to be snarky, but are you actually asking for “French bread” at these shops?
For me, “French bread” is what you describe – the soft, crumbly mess that spans maybe 2% of the incredible chasm separating Wonder Bread from a truly delectable baguette.
If I went into an artisanal bakery in the US looking for a baguette, I’d ask for a baguette. Or maybe a traditional baguette. I’d never ask for “French bread.”
Having said that, it is extremely rare to encounter a truly good baguette in the US. At least, I’ve never found one. Excellent bread is much easier to find in Québec, as noted above.
Another option I’d suggest, which is what worked best for me during my years in SoCal, is just to roll your own with Jim Lahey’s “No-Knead” bread recipe as popularized by Mark Bittman. It’s not baguette shaped, but it’s really good.
To think that less than twenty meters away from my place I have a Keyser bakery that won oh-so-many prizes for its baguette, and I’m currently tasting one of their products, fresh out of the oven. I know it isnt helpful Orr, G but I felt the urge to gloat (that said I dont get it why it’s so hard to get real French bread in the US, someone would/should have figured out there’s a market for it).
They sell Ace Bakery baguettes at the local Meijer, and they stand head-and-shoulders above anything else I’ve seen passed off as French bread in grocery stores here. They’re really very good…excellent crust!
Yep :nodding: That’s one reason why it’s impossible to exactly duplicate an authentic baguette here. You can buy a reasonable facsimile from your local artisan bakery, of course. Chances are it will be very, very good with the similar crackly crusty and just-dense-enough interior, but it won’t chime the OP’s palate.
The other reason is the oven. To get that crisp, crackling crust you need an oven that can withstand a very high temperature as well as can put out the some-odd seconds of steam needed for what’s called the “oven spring”. Again, you jerry-rig something like it in your home oven (check out Julia’s recipe, for example, or, better yet, check out http://www.thefreshloaf.com to see how other serious home bakers have gotten around the issue), but again, your own baguette will never be exactly like an authentic French baguette.
The long, soft loaves that are called “French bread” in your local supermarket? They’re called “French” only because of the shape. They’re made of the same dough as the Italian, white mountain (big round loaf slashed on top and dusted with flour – it goes by other names, depending where you live), and possibly many of the store-baked rolls.
Mmmmm. Mmm mmm mmmmmm.
So, the wife just got home a little bit ago with a loaf from Patisserie 46. She had left it in the car all day, so it was rather soft, but even so I could tell right away that we had in our hands a better candidate than all of the loaves we’ve tried to date.
I heated up the oven at tossed it in for about five minutes. That did the trick pretty well, restoring the crust to a nice, crispy state.
Seconds later I had slathered my first slice in butter and took a bite. Awww Yeeaaaahh! That crunch! That crispy, crackly crunch! And the chewy bready goodness within. Mmmm.
It’s not *quite * what I remembered, to be sure. But it’s certainly close enough to be satisfying. And while the flavor was a bit darker than I remembered/would have preferred, I was completely satisfied by the texture of the crust - perfection needs no further words.
Thanks to all of you who have assisted me on my quest. I’m sure that I’ll be checking out some of the other bakeries recommended, just for the fun of it and just in case I find one I like even more, but I am quite happy with this loaf. If only all trips down memory lane could turn out so well as this.
Wait a minute…you’re still alive after this crying thing?
It’s incredible, isn’t it? The wife is truly a remarkable woman.
Indeed she is!
Tell her I said so.
Or better yet, tell her yourself. 
<hijack>Orr, G., how would you react if I said “Antwerp!”?</hijack>
With a shrug and a smile that was a mixture of puzzlement and apology.
Sorry. I thought your user name was a reference to LeGuin’s Lathe of Heaven. The protagonist’s name is George Orr, and his psychologist used “Antwerp” to bring him out of trance.
Oh cripes. That’s the second time someone’s used a LeGuin reference that I’ve missed (that I know of). I love the story, but I obviously am poor at remembering these sorts of details.
I’ll have to work on dreaming up a better capacity for catching references and remembering pertinent trivia.