A Baguette From The Wall

Parisians can now get their freshly baked daily bread from an ATM-style vending machine by christopher Pitts, He is from the USA but has lived in Paris since 2001.

Anyone who has been in Paris during the summer has likely cursed the endless shuttered bakeries and closed-up restaurants. It’s no secret that the French still prioritise leisure time over round-the clock convenience. Yet recently, Jean Louis Hecht, a Fench baker, decided that hungry citizens no longer needed to suffer in the off hours. His solution? A baguette vending machine, which has described as ‘the bakery of the future’. Pop in a euro and a partially cooked, refrigerated baguette is loaded into a 200’*C oven, baked for 15 seconds and then dropped into the machine’s dispensing tray.

Convenient? No doubt about it. Yet can a vending machine really produce this staple of Fench life? Curious, I decided to try it out at the Place du Colonel Fabien. Sure enough, just like a regular baguette. But the real test for any aspiring French bread is the overnight exam, when you wrap your half-eaten baguette in a towel, stick it in the cupboard and then remove it the next morning for breakfast. Good bread will keep its freshness sans problem. And it’s here, I have to stay, that Hecht’s baguette didn’t perform too well. My verdict: the bread was too hard. I had cereal for breakfast instead.