Trader Joe’s Organic French Demi Baguettes Review

Bread! How can we live without bread? I know I eat way too much of the stuff. Trader Joe’s has always had a few decent loaves of bread in their stores. Sometimes they are good and sometimes they aren’t. But I think we can all agree that most of the time they are pretty good.

Just in time for the holidays, Trader Joe’s has released a new frozen bread option. Trader Joe’s Organic French Demi Baguettes are “par baked” waiting for you to stick them in an oven. 

Who doesn’t love freshly baked bread? Especially a baguette? 

As I mentioned in my review of the Mini frozen baguettes I had lived in Europe for a while and have traveled to France several times and I was always blown away by how good the bread is even in the most remote parts of France. Most Europeans take their bread seriously. 

What we have is two “Demi” (which just means half-sized) baguettes that just happen to be organic and par baked. Bar baked just means they have been baked but not finished and it’s up to you to finish the baking process.

The baguettes come in a nicely attractive plastic bag and as long as you don’t open it or put only one back in a partially opened bag, you should be all right for several weeks or months before you need to bake them.

Making them couldn’t be easier. Just warm up your oven to 400F put the baguettes on a baking sheet and finish the baking process for about six minutes, although I let mine go another minute or two just because I thought it needed to brown up a bit more.

Take them out of the oven and let them cool for a while.

Once the baguettes had cooled off for a while and were cool enough to pick up, I sliced one of them up and slabbered on some butter.

The baguettes are supposed to be made with a sourdough culture and I am sure they are but I wasn’t picking up much sourdough tang.

The crust is nice and crispy and brown. They smelled great, that fresh baked at-home bread smell permeated the house. But the crust was not that crackly crispy that you get on real French baguettes, if you want to be picky (which is my job here!).

The crumb structure was spot on. Nice holes that aren’t too big or too small and fairly uniform.

I did think the bread was a bit gummy without a good chew as they say in the bread baking world.

Looking at the bag and the shape of the baguettes, they reminded me exactly of the bread I can buy at Safeway called La Brea. I swear to go they are from the same company!

But there is one overriding thing that I appreciate is the fact that you have warm, fresh bread. The flavor is OK, nothing to write home about. The texture is also just OK but like I keep saying warm bread right out of the oven makes up for a lot of sins and I wouldn’t be ashamed to make these and slice them up and put them on the Thanksgiving table. 

In light of all that I am going to give them 7 out of 10 Bells!
 

Ingredients