Baguettes are a type of French bread that you’ve surely enjoyed sliced horizontally with your favorite cheeses or sliced vertically to house an elegant sandwich. As a crusty bread with a light and airy crumb, making fresh baguettes is optimal. But, store-bought brands have managed to mass produce and package baguettes so you can pick them up during your next grocery shop. We sampled 10 store-bought baguettes, ranking them based on flavor and texture. And the worst store-bought baguette was Trader Joe’s gluten-free baguette.
Considering three other Trader Joe’s baguettes ranked in our top 5 favorite store-bought baguettes, we had high hopes for the gluten-free counterpart. Our hopes were definitely quashed after the first bite. Trader Joe’s recommends placing the baguette in a 400-degree Fahrenheit oven to get that crispy, crusty crust that baguettes are known for. But with how thin this baguette was, it would basically become all crust and no crumb. The thin shape also limits what you can do with it; sandwiches are out of the question, for example. However, if you don’t crisp the baguette up in the oven, the crust and crumb are an indistinguishable mouthful of gummy mush. As if a gummy texture wasn’t bad enough, the flavor of this gluten-free baguette tasted like cardboard. Our taste tester described it as “a bitterness that left me not even wanting to finish a single bite.”
Trader Joe’s GF baguette reviews from Reddit
While we understand that people on gluten-free diets shouldn’t be denied a tasty slice of bread, Trader Joe’s gluten-free baguette is not the brand to buy. Trader Joe’s customers were certainly excited to see the gluten-free option on the shelves when it debuted. But, according to various Reddit threads, many were as disappointed as we were about the taste. Where we described the cardboard-like crumb as having a bitter taste, another Redditor described the taste as ” too salty for my taste; it leaves a funny metallic aftertaste that makes it hard for me to taste anything else I eat with it.” The flavor is something we just couldn’t get past, either. But there were further complaints about its dry and gritty texture. Various Redditors with celiac disease reported getting terrible stomach aches and even vomiting from eating TJ’s gluten-free baguettes, a cautionary tale for other celiac or gluten-sensitive customers.
We’ve ranked gluten-free bread brands, and our favorite brands, Young Kobras and Schar, make delicious sourdough and country-style white breads, respectively. If you’re willing to venture outside of Trader Joe’s, The Essential Baking Company is another gluten-free bread brand you can find in any grocery store. If you’ve already purchased Trader Joe’s gluten-free baguette, you can try to mask the cardboard flavor and transform the gummy texture by making crunchy, peppery crostini with it; try our technique on how to cut baguettes for perfect crostini.
