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Comment by jmcgough | Hacker News Reader

yesss I love Bordier, showed this to my partner recently to explain to her why I love nice imported French butters. Traveling there really made me fall in love with French food and the mentality behind a lot of it.

Part of what Europe does right is its legal certification process for traditionally made foods, "protected designation of origin" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_designation_of_origi...). At nicer import stores you can find San Marzano tomatoes with a DOP stamp, so you know it's the real deal. In America we've had a few decades of a race to the bottom, where quality slowly declined in order to generate more profits, until what we have now is unrecognizable from what it originally was.

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> At nicer import stores you can find San Marzano tomatoes with a DOP stamp

I can get these at Costco

I think in some regions they're a lot more common than others – in Connecticut they're found in almost every grocery store, but states/cities without an outsize Italian-American presence one might have to run around town.

For many products, Costco is legitimately a nice import store!

Where do you buy this imported butter in America?! I must know.

Small specialty international stores, where everything is stupidly expensive but also stupidly delicious.

while I'm a big supporter of EU PDO labels they are not perfect, they (generally) do not guarantee quality, and they have the negative effect of "crystallizing" something, which is a bit sad and paradoxical. Still, better than nothing.

PDO has minimum requirements. Some producers will do their best to barely fullfil those in order to sel PDO as cheap as possible while others will go above and beyond those requirements. The consumers still need to do some researches in order to get the best possible but the label should at least ensure you're getting something somewhat ok.

| crystallizing

can you please explain what you mean by this?

Once you get a product, like Camembert, or a wine like Burgundy, with a big AOP apparatus around it, there is little room for experimentation. In Burgundy you can't plant anything except Chardonnay for white wine that's going to be labeled Burgundy. Someone has an idea that sauvignon blanc might do well in a famous vineyard? Too bad, instead of Grand Cru Burgundy you're going to have to sell it as generic "Vin de France", which is typically box wine.

If anyone hasn't tried AOP French butter, it is really wonderful. The cows are pastured or fed forage, no grain, so it has a lot of flavor. There's a reason the French enjoy tartines and "beurre jambon" (sandwiches with preserves and ham, respectively), with good bread and butter it's a revelation. Bordier is rightly famous but any, e.g., Beurre d'Isigny is going to be worlds above 99% of butters made in the US.

If you like Isigny butter, try Isigny cream ;) It's hard to find better crème fraîche.

>Bordier is rightly famous

Oh, the smoked butter (sel fumé) from a small specialist farm in Bretagne.. stuff of dreams.

Beurre fumé or sel fumé? (Is the salted butter itself smoked, or is it butter made with smoked salt?)

I believe it's sel fumé: salted butter, using smoked salt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoked_salt

They probably mean that the certification requires very rigid processes which means any variation would not get the stamp of approval so innovation and experimentation is discouraged.

There are plenty of examples where the young renegades veered off and produced their own products in an AOC or DOC region. It just means the onus of marketing is upon themselves.

It just makes more sense to create a brand that binds hundreds of producers together by standards. Everyone on average is better off.

Yeah the food situation in the US is pretty sad. I rmb going there in an exchange and the family dad beeming with pride "look I bought you a French baguette", and suffice to say... it was neither French nor a baguette lol. It barely qualified as food for animals.

I live in a US city with a population over 2,000,000 that's seemingly incapable of producing what would be a very mediocre loaf of bread in Paris, for under $12. Actually-good bread simply cannot be had—there isn't any. One consequence of this is that it's impossible to get a decent sandwich here for anything but crazy-high prices.

And don't get me started on the croissant situation. Ugh. They're all too-big and disgustingly doughy (90% of them are in this category), or burnt.

I have no idea why this is the case, but it is. Like I know baguettes are price controlled so you can't compare those, but I mean any bread at all that's decent and somewhat affordable—simply not a thing here. You'd think someone could do it, but evidently not.

I am a fellow USian, who is haunted by the first good baguette they had. Paris, December 2012. Only half of the loaf made it to the hostel. I still vividly remember how it felt to tear that first piece off of it, the delicacy of the crust, the crumb, the warmth and aroma. I remember it better than the first time I had sex, not a joke.

Alan Bourdain writing about a bread maker he knew: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29077398

I mean, it’s the same reason you can’t find a great mission burrito in Paris. Every city has its own food culture.

I mean, I'm not complaining that our foie gras is lacking, or our sushi's not very good. Bread's pretty important across a lot of cuisines and my city's bizarrely terrible at it, for some reason. Zero places here make really good bread, and the few that achieve "OK" charge so much one hesitates to eat it, rather than preserving it in a display case to impress guests.

What do you expect from a country that came up with the saying "best thing since sliced bread", when sliced bread is the worst :)

You can also get decent sliced bread (it's a regular loaf sliced at the time of purchase rather coming pre-sliced).

So you're suggesting that a main feature of US food culture is shit bread?

> So you’re suggesting that a main feature of US food culture is shit bread?

I don’t know if GP was suggesting it, but it absolutely unironically is. At least from the perspective of anyone who thinks of bread as a standalone element; bread as a neutral canvas for other elements is fairly central to, at least, many of the distinct American food cultures.

Sure, but then you can take exactly the same ingredients but swap out the bad bread for an artisanal bread and the result will taste much better.

> Sure, but then you can take exactly the same ingredients but swap out the bad bread for an artisanal bread and the result will taste much better.

“Better” is subjective and shaped by experience and cultutal expectations, among other factors; for a set of food preferences that are fairly common in the USA, no, it won’t, which is why it is hard to find “good” bread (which is not particularly more expensive to make) on the market in the USA, and why what little their is commands a high price; people to whom it makes a positive difference are rare, and disproportiinately price insensitive.

I have been to the USA only twice, to San Francisco and to New York, and the absence of flavour and substance in the food is what really stuck with me. Everything was so bland and generic and non filling. The two only exceptions were a cheesecake at the Cheesecake Factory, and a chowder in some small fish shop. And the latter only because I never had it before.

I can really imagine all portions being over sized and saturated with fat and sugar in an attempt to (over) compensate with all its consequences.

And yes, proper fresh French baguette is worth a meal on its own.

> San Francisco and to New York, and the absence of flavour and substance in the food is what really stuck with me

What? Where did you eat?

> The two only exceptions were a cheesecake at the Cheesecake Factory

I guess we have different definitions of substance and flavour. I can't imagine anything being more boring than Cheesecake Factory.

> What? Where did you eat?

My experience is that no fuss food can be fantastic (I have really fond memories of things like hot dogs, pastrami sandwiches, breakfast burritos, and cheesesteak sandwiches) but fancy restaurants were mostly disappointments. Following tourist trails in an American city I definitely can see how someone could not come anywhere near anything tasty.

> I guess we have different definitions of substance and flavour. I can't imagine anything being more boring than Cheesecake Factory.

It’s the exotic factor. If you’ve never really had a real cheesecake, it is a novel experience. Once was enough, but I enjoyed it.

It’s something that I and almost every immigrant I know struggles with. I moved to the US when I was a small child but even I’ve got tons of memories of what tomatoes and blueberries are supposed to taste like. Every household in my extended family grows a lot of their own food and I’m in the process of building out a green house around my existing hydroponics setup to extend the growing season to all year. For next year we’re debating buying a whole cow from a local rancher to split amongst the family so we can have some semblance of control over how the meat is grown.

I feel especially bad for those who immigrate from tropical countries like Costa Rica. The quality and variety of fruit there is completely insane compared to the bland trash we have in the US.

> And yes, proper fresh French baguette is worth a meal on its own.

Almost. Just add wine and cheese :)

And saucisson!

and foie gras!

Indeed.

Unfortunately even in France quite often a French baguette isn't so 'proper', but when it is mmmmh.

I think I'll never forget the croissant I ate around San Francisco, I had never seen such a big croissant! When you think about the amount of butter there is already in a normal croissant.. This one had probably enough calories for half a day.

If it helps, it’s more or less the same in London: I haven’t found a decent baguette in years (though they have some decent croissants, only quite expensive). They have a not-quite baguettes which are serviceable in sandwiches, and some kind of larger loaves that looks like actual bread except that it tends not to have any crust, only the external appearance of it.

But nothing close to an actual baguette, which is something stupidly easy and cheap to make. And stupidly delicious, it goes wonderfully with marmelade and good butter, which is quite easy to find in the UK. Better than crackers with a lot of cheeses, as well.

> You'd think someone could do it, but evidently not.

I think the main things with baguettes is that they are not as sweet as common English “bread”, and for some reason some people seem to hate crust or any kind of texture. Also, you cannot keep them fresh for more than a day. Keeping a supply requires going to a bakery every other day, which in turns requires the presence of a bakery within a couple of minutes walk from home. This is just not a thing in the UK, or the US from my more limited experience.

I live in Montreal (a city with a large French influence) and am regularly in France, and there is no comparison between the bread or butter we get in Montreal vs what is available everywhere in France. If you look you can find decent bread - Montreal has the best overall bakery scene I'm aware of outside France. I haven't found good butter yet.

Butter in produced in north america seems to be mostly pretty bad. I think it has a lot to do with how milk is marketed, low price is everything. So the dairies are dominated by volume-over-quality, a ton of holstiens and whatever cheapest feed can be found. Starting from there doesn't lead anywhere good, for butter or cheese.

A friend who lived there (Montreal, or maybe it was when they were in Ottawa?) told me the import duty on European butter was 300%. So you can get some good imports, but super expensive. And the local "artisinal" stuff is mostly not as good as even KerryGold but also stupid expensive, because they only compete with those imports.

It's been 35 years since the price of baguette is no more regulated in France.

Perhaps my French-born French professor had outdated information :-) I did find the prices to be notably low and identical everywhere when I visited, but maybe that's more a kind of cultural habit or expectation, than law, these days.

How do you not get depressed being surrounded by all these unsophisticated rabble?

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