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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

One thing I've heard said about French food generally in the past is that there's an entire supply chain in France around French food in particular so you really tend not to get bad French staples at very many places--even if it's a random touristy place.

You can rinse and repeat in many places for various items. For example, when I was last in Germany, you'd get good sandwiches with good bread at any random train station in a system of any size. Try that in the US.

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> so you really tend not to get bad French staples at very many places--even if it's a random touristy place.

French here! I'm usually not that picky with croissants, but much more with other patisseries, such as eclairs. It's a bit harder to find good patisseries, and the quality doesn't always correlate with the price. Even in what looks like legit "patisseries artisanales", you can find eclairs which are basically frozen industrial stuff and sell for 3.50+ euros, which I think is a scam.

That being said, yes, I think you can normally find decent bread, croissants and patisseries (and cheese) pretty much everywhere in France.

On a side note, I lived in London and I noticed that Sainsbury made good bread and croissants, for much cheaper than the fancy "French" bakeries.

Maybe I'm wrong but I had the impression that in France pastry shops had legit pastry chefs who had to go through apprenticeships whereas in America for example, pastry shops give a baker a recipe to follow and that's pretty much it (for the ones that bake in-house I mean)

It varies. Your neighborhood bakery/pastry shop may have a baker that learned from their parent(s). Or it could be a higher-end shop with a trained patisserie chef. Or it could be a 'front' bakery that receives their daily shipment from a regional factory that makes them by hand or by machine.

For simpler items like croissants, IMO the recipe and following directions is all that matters. I've made a decent amount of semi complex desserts from recipe authors I trust and they turned out great. Sure, there are some minor physical skills you learn and knowledge you gain, but for baking I find that as long as you follow good recipes precisely you can get great results. This does fall apart when you start talking about decorating desserts as that is definitely more art/skill than science.

> France pastry shops had legit pastry chefs who had to go through apprenticeships

It depends. Nowadays it's not always the case. To reduce costs, apparently quite a lot of shops sell industrial pastries. For bread, there's a label apparent on the shop that certifies whether the bread is made in house ("artisan boulanger"), but it's not true for pastries. It's hard to say exactly what is made in-house without asking.

In the 80s some bright spark realised that the smell of baking bread makes people hungry and buy more food, so now most large-enough UK supermarkets bake in-store.

I believe nowadays they have automatic sprays for bakery smells, I saw a documentary about it like 10 years ago

Freshly baked bread is also a lot more delicious, especially when it's still warm.

In the NYC metro area we actually have a great supply chain for bread, it's New Jersey.

Last time I was in Germany, they had a lot of food just sitting out in the open with flies regularly hanging out on it

It looked tasty except for the flies, but I don't think I'm ever going to trust something in Europe that wasn't covered up before it was handed to me

That's what your immune system is for. Unless you're unusual, you'll be fine.

Haha, man, I hope you don't have a food handling permit

Not to mention they have typically been making the regional food for centuries, if not millennia. The selection can be more limited in the EU, but the quality is incredible, and at a very low price point compared to US.

You can get cheese and wine made in the US ~ as good as French, but it’s 5x as expensive.

I don’t know about the cheese but I disagree with you about the wine. For example Californian wine is excellent, and you get a much higher quality for the money than with French wine for anything below $150. French wine is in much higher demand so all the lowest quality is sold too, instead of being made vinegar or discarded, becoming the entry level. French wine is subjected to strict rules that don’t allow them correct them like the Californian do, like adding a bit of water here or there… etc. In places where you have to import both the quality difference for the money is evident, within the us is abysmal

California wine can be excellent but is overpriced, and I am a native Californian raised on California wine. French wine has impressively consistent quality at low price points. You can’t easily buy good cheap French wine in California I’ve discovered, but you can in other parts of the country. There are certain types of wine that California does better, but France does much better for the price generally. This was not the case a few decades ago, but global competition crushed the price of French wine and opened the global wine trade. France has so many regions that produce excellent wine without the brand premium of Bordeaux, Burgundy, et al.

Because I no longer live in California, there is excellent distribution of French wine where I live. Now I can buy myriad discerning $15 bottles of French wine that frankly are much better than what you can typically buy from California for the same price point in the US. California wines are overpriced for the quality. I’d prefer that were not the case but that’s the reality in my experience.

At any price point, French wine is lower risk than California wine. Their reputation for wine is deserved.

You need to sample the price/quality in France, not on goods exported elsewhere - that’s the key point of this observation. French products are often expensive abroad, but dirt-cheap locally.

The top-quartile 5-10 EUR bottle of wine at the hypermarche is way better than anything in the <$20 price range made in the US. A $15 lump of cheese would be a few EUR in France at quality-parity.

In a place like New York, it's hard to find a good restaurant that doesn't have a relatively severe price premium

Argentina and steaks too. (Sorry, cows)

Oh yes! Extend that to fish and you get Tokyo where you have to work your ass off to get mediocre sushi.

Coffee in Italy.

Fish & sushi in Portugal;

Coffee in Portugal;

Wine in Portugal;

Traditional food in Portugal;

Artisanal pastries in Portugal;

(no “supremacist” views, just pointing out - love good food & epicurism in any country/place I can find it. cheers!)

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