Look, the French know how to make a great baguette, right? There isn’t a lot of dispute there. No one is regularly saying, “Eh, I don’t think the French have really proven their baguette-making skills just yet.” But hold on. Can the French make a big baguette? An enormously long baguette that could feed a small town? Yes. It turns out they can do that, too, reports The New York Times.
French bakers in Suresnes, just west of Paris, made a 461-foot baguette on Sunday. The massive loaf successfully returned the title of world’s longest baguette to France, according to Guinness World Records, as it exceeded a 435-foot baguette made by (gasp) Italians in 2019.
That’s longer than a football field. Wait. Stop. We’re in France. It’s the length of nine pétanque courts!
Before you accuse the bakers of making an absurdly thin baguette to game the system, let it be known that record-setting baguettes must be about two inches thick.
A team of 18 shaped the dough, which used 200 pounds of flour, beginning at 3 a.m., and at about 5 a.m. they started slowly feeding it into an oven. It emerged bit by bit on the other side, fully baked.