If it's in that kind of bag (with little holes in it), it was definitely freshly baked that day. That kind of bag is designed to keep the bread crispy, but it can only be used on the day it was baked, or the bread will become hard as rock the next day. If a loaf is going to be kept and sold the next day, it has to be rebagged into a solid plastc bag to keep it fresh. "Lovely" is subjective. It's a grocery store baguette.
Ok, in all fairness it may very well be freashly baked, but from a factory. This bagette is made industrially. It's very clear from it's appearance (even ignoring the plastic bag). This bagette does not taste good and in only few hours time it will be dry as hell.
As a proud snail slurper, I don't trust no bagette coming in a plastic bag!
I'm from the "European country" known as UK and every single major store sells plastic wrapped baguettes. You only see them in paper in the smaller shops
It's a plastic bag with tiny holes in it. These are on the store floor, where people can grab a baguette for themselves. The plastic keeps the braguette relatively safe, and the holes allow moisture to escape, keeping the baguette crispy for the day
Oddly enough, most American supermarkets put every baguette they bake that day (if they bake it that day) in plastic bags. Although in this case, I believe they mean that they broke the baguette in the plastic bag in half so it would fit in the bag with the rest of the groceries.
The meme is also European, from Ireland. That said, I'm more interested which Spar is selling long enough baguettes that they don't fit in a bag. My local shops don't.
From the grocery store's perspective, at least in the US, it keeps the checkout lines moving way faster when some kid who is trained to bag groceries does it, rather than waiting for the customer to figure out how to pack it.
All grocery stores where I live have this device consisting of swivelling plank separating the packing area into two. If someone is slow at bagging the clerk will simply move the plank and all groceries go into the second half where the second person can bag them. It gives the first person time to bag and the next customer again has their groceries place in the first half.
Since most US people go to the market by car why do they need to pack? When I shop by car I just throw everything in the cart and then everything in the trunk, I only pack meat and some other moisty stuff
And yet somehow this isn't a problem at all in countries where we don't have people bagging our groceries. Checkouts very rarely have any downtime where we need to wait on people to finish bagging. Even with old people.
When you have a family of three and you're shopping for them by yourself and have to put them on the conveyor belt without help, it's a big time saver.
The people i see who have loaded carts, usually just pop everything back into the cart and repack either when they offload into the car or before they exit the store
Yeah, I was thinking this is a bit ridiculous. That sucker looks to be an easy 2 or so feet long. Unless you're making something that's extremely long it's getting cut up anyway.
My first thought when I saw this post was, "That's not a baguette, that's french bread." I never connected that the gigantic long bread at the store with the stale dry crust that they label as "french bread" is supposed to be a baguette, which is French. Like they are too ashamed to actually call it a baguette because it kind of sucks but that's definitely what it's supposed to be.
They call it stick bread (stokbrood) where I'm from, and I've seen it called french sticks in the UK.
I guess we all just can't accept the french having a reasonable name for something.
In the US, baguette refers to the shape, so you can get a "sourdough baguette" which is not French style bread, or "sourdough french bread" which can be either sourdough in baguette shape or a round loaf of French style sourdough or American style sourdough made with French sourdough culture and you can get "French sandwich rolls" and "Sliced French bread" which are both made with the same ingredients that French baguettes are- flour, water, yeast and salt.
It's a regional thing in the Midwest at least. It's always called French bread in the grocery and even the fancy European style bakery downtown calles it a "FRANCESE" instead of a baguette.