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Is This $10 Snack Worth It? – Le Pain Quotidien Baguette w/ Organic Butter

Bread and butter is about as basic as you can get with Western cuisine. In fact, it’s so simple one might not even consider it cuisine. However, to overlook the importance and the significance of bread and butter is to overlook how most of the world doesn’t do bread and butter. It’s a creation of the European corner of the culinary world.

Butter is a foreign material for many people. In fact, I know some folks’ fridges are devoid of butter not because of health concerns but because they honestly have no idea how to use butter. Well, the most basic way is to put a pat of butter on some good bread and enjoy the wonderfully moist yet crunchy, salty yet sweet combination.

That brings up another point about bread. Not everyone appreciates hard-crusted breads like the iconic French baguette. The hard, crumbly crust is new and not-altogether-desirable for people who have only known bread to be soft and moist throughout.

This brings me to the snack that lies here on the desk next to my computer. I have a fresh baguette from Le Pain Quotidien, and some salted organic butter bought from The Health Shoppe nearby. This little snack, as Parisian and as simple as it is, set me back $10. It ain’t cheap to eat artisanal bread with organic butter. To calculate it more reasonably, though, this is probably a $5 snack, because I sure as hell am not eating the entire half-brick of butter in one sitting!

Is it worth it?

Well.. let me take it component by component.

The bread is nice, and is made from very basic, natural ingredients. If you think the part about bread being made with basic, natural ingredients is a foregone conclusion, check out the list of ingredients on a bag of Wonderbread sometime. You’ll quickly realize that at least half of what’s available in the bakery sections of today’s supermarkets only looks like bread but is, in reality, a lab-developed concoction that is made to resemble bread. Bread made just from wheat, yeast, a bit of salt and a bit of oil only exists at the super-cheap level and the good-stuff-comes-at-a-premium level.

This bread from Le Pain Quotidien is nice, and I’m enjoying it, but it’s not wow-ing me. The last and most memorable time that a loaf of bread wow’ed me was a super-fresh ciabatta from McEwans at Shops on Don Mills. That was singularly the best bread I’ve ever had – and it helped that I bought it literally 10 minutes after it came out of the oven.

This bread that I’m eating right now was probably made this morning, and while it’s still good now in the mid-afternoon, it’s not spectacular. It is airy and moist inside, the crust is just hard enough to be interesting without being so hard as to cut into the palate when you chew or to crumble into a billion pieces when you handle it. A bad baguette may be chewy, or may be dried out, the interior may be too crumbly without enough “stretch”, the crust may be too crumbly or too hard, and at the end it just might not have any bread flavor. This baguette right now, though, exhibits none of these faults. It is, in short, a skillfully made baguette.

The butter is nice and buttery. Smooth, silky, a little salty, and psychologically I appreciate that it’s organic. However, I don’t really taste anything special about it – I wouldn’t be able to differentiate it from regular butter. On the other hand, it could just be that I have an untrained palate when it comes to butter.

Is this snack worth $10? Hell no. Is this snack worth $5? Yeah, I think so. It’s a nice, civilized snack in a world of potato chips, chocolate bars, and Tim-bits (you’ve proven yourself to be Canadian if you know what these are). However, the 2L basket of nectarines I also have on my desk only cost me $3.50 – and I think I get more gustatory enjoyment from the nectarines.

It is said that the more basic the recipe, the more important it is to have top-quality ingredients. There are few things more basic than bread and butter. Le Pain Quotidien produces a really nice baguette – but it’s not the best bread ever and faces solid competition from the likes of ACE bakery. Bio Organic butter is nice, but more for the knowledge that it’s organic than for anything that the palate can detect. Combine the two together, though, and you have a nice little treat for yourself. Just try to rationalize, as I’m doing, that it’s not really a $10 snack because you can still use most of the butter for other purposes in the future.