Since 1998, one bakery has had a grip on a very particular market category in Missoula: the baguette. Le Petit Outre’s French-style baguettes, baked fresh each day and delivered to local grocery stores and restaurants, offer a delicious, golden, crusty exterior and tender, airy interior. Missoula—and Montana—does not lack for bakeries producing excellent baked goods of many varieties, but it’s still pretty rare to find fresh baguettes baked in the classic European tradition.
So it’s big news to we bread aficionados that two more Missoula bakeries have recently entered the wholesale baguette business, causing somewhat of a shakeup, you might say, inside those humble paper bags.
Newest is Florabella’s sourdough baguette, which the restaurant started distributing wholesale in December, along with other, larger loaves and focaccia. The baguette is meant to serve as an ambassador for the restaurant itself, which serves up a fine-dining experience of handmade pastas, pizzas and wine.
“We’re hoping to get the Florabella name out there, and bring more people into the restaurant and see what else we have to offer,” says head baker Molly Walsh.
Florabella is baking at relatively small volumes right now—just 16 baguettes per day are stocked at Good Food Store, for example—and Walsh says the baguettes are frequently selling out. Her team starts mixing flour at 6 a.m. each day while the previous day’s proofed loaves begin baking. A trained pastry chef and cake decorator, it’s Walsh’s first time running a strictly bread operation. She aims for a more salty, sour loaf using a sourdough starter that’s been alive since 2020.
“We give it some steam, bake it at a high temperature—450 degrees—and a nice scoring to give it the ‘ears,’” she says. “So we really like to have a nice kinda angled ear to give it that crispiness.”
Another new, notable baguette comes from Grist Milling and Bakery, where the owners—much like grizzled detectives who meant to enjoy a quiet retirement—had intended to escape the baguette life.
“We swore we would never make baguettes at this bakery, because working at Le Petit we made thousands a day,” says Dan Venturella.
He and Grist co-owner Selden Daume each worked at Le Petit for several years.
“We sort of burned out on baguettes,” Venturella says. “But when Brasserie Porte Rouge opened up, they came to us and said, ‘Would you make a baguette for us?’ Since we were making a baguette for them, we started making it for other people.”
Grist’s baguette uses a poolish and sourdough mix to get the dough started, and once proofed, each loaf is scored just once down the middle and then baked to a tawny brown. The flour mix boasts the high protein content of Kamut, the trademarked ancient grain propagated by legendary Montana farmer Bob Quinn.
“It definitely doesn’t get the big, large open crumb that a lot of people are familiar with,” Venturella says. “It has a really nice buttery flavor to it, and it carries a really nice yellow color to it, so it looks really cool when you open it.”
Venturella says they’ve temporarily pulled the Grist baguette from grocery store shelves because it was outselling their other (more expensive) loaves, and they’re focused on meeting their wholesale orders at restaurants, which range from fine dining establishments to Whiz Kid, the late-night cheesesteak joint in the Badlander complex. (You can also get your hands on a Grist baguette at Tosca Olive Oils on Friday afternoons and occasionally at Worden’s Deli.)
Competition-wise, these bakers don’t seem concerned about saturation in the local European-style baguette biz.
“Every baguette’s going to be a little bit different,” Walsh says. “Grist is a really whole, hearty bread, and Le Petit is your classic French kind of bakery, so I think it’s nice that everybody kind of has a different niche they specialize in.”
Walsh notes that Florabella’s ovens are at maximum capacity since forging a new deal to distribute to Yoke’s grocery stores. Grist, meanwhile, is expanding to a new facility this summer since they’ve outgrown the back of Black Coffee Roasting Company’s original location on Spruce Street. And Le Petit is moving its retail coffee shop from the longtime Fourth Street location (that building’s been sold) to a new spot right on the Hip Strip (the old Iza Restaurant space at 529 S. Higgins).
On a recent rainy afternoon, at Le Petit Outre’s warehouse on Third Street west of Reserve, where 25 bakers work nearly around the clock to produce pastries and breads supplying retailers in Missoula and surrounding areas, staff seem unruffled by the new bakeries on the scene.
Operations manager Jen Greuter says they’re still making artisan-style bread, and their scale means they can keep prices affordable.
“That’s what I’ve seen with some new bakeries is their price point has gotten a lot higher,” she says. “But because of our size we’re able to keep that price a little bit lower and still provide that feel. It feels fancy to go get a crusty loaf of bread to have with dinner.”
Greuter, who started at Le Petit 18 years ago as a night baker, says the community’s appetite for fresh, delicious bread only grows as Missoula’s population and tourism expand.
“Even last year, I kept saying, ‘Oh, we’re going to slow down soon,’ and we never seem to really slow down that much,” she says. “It gets mellow after the holidays for a minute and then we go straight back into it. With the tourism, the restaurants are busier, and there’s a lot of newer restaurants opening up, and I think with their volume we end up doing more.”
What to do with all that bread
Quality baguettes are typically baked fresh and meant to be eaten the same day. If your baguette consumption rate is not quite that high, what to do with the leftover bread?
We asked the bakers.
At Florabella, Walsh says she really likes slathering it in Florabella’s house confit garlic and a little pizza sauce.
“And the cafe just started doing sandwiches recently. They do some really good salami sandwiches,” she says. “[The baguettes] stay pretty shelf-stable for at least a week, I would say, if you keep it contained properly—a nice towel over it or wrapped in plastic wrap. If it’s after a couple of days, at home I’ll just make an egg sandwich or something like that. But definitely, if it’s fresh, I like to do a classic butter action.”
She says not a bit of unsold bread goes to waste, as Florabella and sister establishments Bar Plata and Tres Bonne can use up extras for croutons, breadcrumbs, crostini and bread pudding.
At Grist, Venturella says he refreshes a next-day baguette first by simply cutting it up and drizzling some olive oil on it. And he makes sandwiches.
“Slice it crosswise and load it with stuff,” he says. “It’s also a good snack. Just tear it and eat it. I mean, it’s great with cheese and olives, things like that. I also like that Italian method of when you still have red sauce in your bowl, just sop it up.” (Many restaurants in Italy serve bread purely as a vehicle for cleaning up the sauce on your plate, not as an appetizer or snack.)
For cooks seeking inspiration, he suggests “Bread and How to Eat It: A Cookbook,” with recipes from the famous Bread and Salt bakery in New Jersey. The book celebrates the many applications of leftover bread, such as bread meatballs and pasta with bread crumbs and cauliflower.
At Le Petit Outre, an inquiry from The Pulp led to a lively staff debate on how to use up day-old bread.
“We brought up French toast and someone said, ‘Oh, there’s no way we could use a day-old baguette, it’s too hard,’” Greuter says. “We made French toast last week just to prove him wrong. So French toast is great.”
Greuter recommends recipes from the “Tartine” cookbook, such as panade, a sort of savory bread pudding with layers of thickly sliced bread and squash and fontina cheese. For garlic lovers, check out sopa de ajo, a Castilian bread soup with an entire head of garlic. Bon appetit!
