The human being delivering that bread, however, will alter hands as judges awarded this year’s prize for one particular of the most intense food items competitions in the French cash.

Xavier Netry, who runs Boulangerie Utopie, has been topped the winner of the 31st edition of the Baguette Grand Prix Paris.

The bakery, located in Paris’s 11th arrondissement, beat out 172 opponents to get this year’s coveted prize.

For 37-yr-previous Netry, it’s recognition for a career he claims to have been undertaking since his early teenage a long time.

“I have been a baker for 25 decades. And I was saying to myself it would be nice to have a recognition and right now it has happened so I’m very happy about it,” Netry explained to AP Information.

Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo and her deputy Emmanuel Grégoire took to social media to praise this year’s winner. Hidalgo will current Netry with the prize on Might 7, the day of Paris’s Bread Pageant.

TikTokers have already started off to flood the bakery, suggesting Netry will need to have to up his provides by far more than those wanted for the 30 further baguettes that will feed Macron and his workers just about every working day.

Very best baguette

Awarded by a panel of judges who blind flavor test a pile of baguettes from the city’s best bakeries, the contest evokes fierce competitors, innovation, and experimentation.

The eight judges, designed up of six random Parisians, two professionals, and an assistant, ascertain the very best baguette primarily based on 5 conditions: cooking, taste, crumb, mobile framework, and appearance.

Bakers are likely to use sourdough starter fairly than yeast to make their dough increase. The pure fermentation ingredient—a mix of bread and water—makes bread harder to excellent than when applying dried yeast, but is ordinarily significantly tastier.  

Sourdough typically offers its bakers the chance to make additional various bread, a little something that has allowed rivals at the Baguette Grand Prix to thrust the boundaries in get to stand out. 

“Every baker has his have key, irrespective of whether in the choice of flour or in the fermentation procedure. Even sourdough can have unforeseen ingredients, this sort of as orange or grape juice, to enrich the taste,” Adeline Chazelle, from the Syndicat des Boulangers du Grand Paris, explained to Sortir a Paris.

Bread fit for a President

Netry will have to get made use of to a new program soon after declaring this year’s major prize. 

His reward is the opportunity to produce fresh new baguettes just about every early morning to French President Emmanual Macron’s formal home, the Élysée Palace. He has also scooped a €4,000 ($4,290) payday. 

Final year’s winner, Tharshan Selvarajah of Levain des Pyrénées, sent 30 baguettes at 6:30am each individual morning to Macron’s residence. 

“God gave us all distinctive palms,” Selvarajah, who immigrated to France from Sri Lanka when he was 21, instructed the New York Situations.

“My mother’s chicken curry and my wife’s hen curry could use the identical chicken but they do not taste the very same,” he mentioned. “God gave me the arms to make the very best baguette in France! I am under no circumstances angry with the flour as I knead the dough.”

However, as the initial non-French winner of the prize, Selvarajah felt he experienced been persistently slighted by his friends since of his position as an immigrant. 

“It’s not pleasant, but I really do not giver a damn,” he told the Occasions.