Why are they different shapes?

You cut a baguette down the middle to make a sandwich

Like this

Because the dough was a different shape before baking.

You can beat a baguette with a golf club, a truncheon, or even another baguette.

The sandwich bread is mass produced, baked in racks of loaf pans, designed to give very consistent and convenient slices for making sandwiches.

The second pic is the way many people prefer to bake a more rustic loaf. The dough is just placed on a flat sheet, so there's much more crust, and it can just rise however it does. It's less convenient for sandwiches.

No baguettes aren't used for sandwiches, they're used to serve bread with the meal. If you're eating dinner, you don't really want a slice of sandwich bread, you want something more convenient to hold in your hand, dip in you pasta sauce, or whatever. Plus it has a higher ratio of crust to insides, which can be nice.

Edit: I replied to someone who corrected me, but apparently baguettes are very much used for sandwiches, I've just never seen it. Apparently I'm an ignorant American.

ELI5: dough can take any shape you give it.

You can load the dough into a metallic shape and close it with a lid, and you'll get picture 1.

Or you can make a ball out of it and leave it be on a flat surface, and it will naturally expand to look like picture 2.

Side question: narrow shape makes baguette have a more crispy texture, which many people like. It's also usually produced using a special kind of sourdough, which makes it have unique and rich taste. People eat it as is (just biting it from one end to another) or make small open sandwiches by cutting it in slices and putting all sorts of toppings on top of them.

Depends if they are baked in a container or not.

The rectangular loaf became popular due to packing efficiency. You can fit more of them in less space.

One's cooked in a pan, the other not.

You can use baguettes in multiple ways like other breads, imagination is the limit.

-Cut it on the bias (at an angle), toast and use to dip in soup or mop up sauce. I do this with onion soup to top it, buttered and sprinkled with a good melting cheese, place on top of soup in bowl and broil in oven until melted and browning.

-Slice in half long ways, butter with a good garlic butter recipe, bake in oven until browned serve with spaghetti.

-Once it's old, stale and hard, cube it up (can do it fresh too) use as croutons for salads or grind it up for bread crumbs to cook with.

In Brazil we have a small baguette called "French bread"! It's very convenient and absolutely everywhere. And it tastes good, white bread in comparison tastes like nothing and has a shitty texture

IMHO, I don’t know why people buy those sliced white bread loafs. That bread is weak sauce.

One word: Bánh mì

Regarding your main question: you don't fit a square in a round hole.

Baguettes are delicious, use a knife if you want to do a sandwich, what's the difficulty?

industry vs. artisan goods?

Why do people buy baguettes?

They taste amazing

Do they make sandwiches with them? How do you even make a sandwich from them?

Cut the baguette along the length. Cut in half. You now have 2 sandwiches

Not pictured: baguette

How are you meant to beat a baguette????

Just punch it dude, it's bread.

Well, there's a number of reasons for the shape of the various bread types. The dough type - from the kind of flour used, through the resting time, fermentation time, raising agent (let it be any of a variety of yeast products, wild yeast aka sourdough starter, baking powder or baking soda, there's tons of options), how hydrated it is, and so on. The oven type and baking approach. The purpose of the bread.

Your first picture is of a standard toast or sandwich bread. It's supposed to be a fairly loose, soft bread with a soft crust and an engineered shape for easier baking - with conduction baking on all sides except the top (here conduction baking refers to the fact the sides and bottom of the bread is held in place by a heated metal tray, transferring heat directly without letting air or steam escape, resulting in the soft crust). A more industrial yeast type is used (usually dry or instant yeast), which result in relatively small gas bubbles, giving it a dense but fluffy interior. The flour is usually a light wheat flour, and both resting and fermentation times are low - that's why it's a more industrial bread, you mix the ingredients, let the mixture sit for 30-60 minutes then bake it, easily automated.

The second picture is of a sourdough loaf. This usually uses wholemeal wheat flour, often mixed with rye or other grains for better texture, and is a fairly tedious bread to make with multiple stretch and fold sequences and long resting periods, allowing lots of gluten to form, which means every stretch and fold sequence doesn't mix the dough but rather layers and shapes it. The yeast comes from a sourdough starter, and is allowed to ferment longer, which is why you get an intense flavour. It bakes quick in a Dutch oven first covered then uncovered, allowing it to fluff up but then shape a hard crust. You get much larger bubbles and an internal structure of long strands of gluten forming swirls and such.

Then the baguette, it uses a different approach to sourdough but with a similar effect. Unlike sandwich bread, the dough for baguettes - as well as what I'd call "European medium bread" (medium here meaning the hardness and bakedness of the crust) - a crispy crust that isn't as well baked as a sourdough, but also isn't soft, with a well developed gluten structure, using more predictable yeasts (again usually instant quick yeast or dry yeast, or in some areas, live yeast cubes). Mind you the baguette you're showing is more of a hypermarket style baguette that is intentionally baked to a lesser darkness, and traditional baguettes are more on the golden brown part of the scale.

Overall, the kind of flour determines the flavour, but also the raising and resting times. Some flours (especially wholemeal or grain mix flours) need more time as the more complex proteins and sugars take more time to be broken down by the yeast thus they rise slower. Hydration determines how tough the dough is to shape (e.g. pasta is only hydrated by the eggs, making it a hard, dense dough, pizza needs to be flexible so it's high hydration, and it gets extra raise in the oven as the water quickly evaporates). Yeast determines the flavour, the raising time, and in the final product, the texture and airiness. The baking method can fuck a lot with the texture. A regular convection oven can dry the crust out making it tough and thick, forming quickly and stopping the bread from rising, but adding some ice in a pan at the bottom can generate enough steam to let the bread rise properly by delaying the crust hardening. Same idea for sourdough using a Dutch oven, you create a high moisture environment, a steam box, to keep the crust soft while the bread rises, then remove it at the end so the crust can cripsen and brown. The sandwich bread is medium hydration thus it keeps the sides moist while they bake, giving it that brown but soft crust. If you were to plop the same dough just into the oven, without the baking shape, due to there being little to no gluten development, it would just fall apart and harden into the world's shittiest giant cookie.

But also you can bake bread in a Dutch oven over an open fire, giving a more rustic style bread with thick, chewy, but also cripsy crust. Toss the same dough with lower hydration into a circle and onto an upside down pan in the same fire and you got some awesome flatbread with a nice center air pocket you can open up and stuff with meat.

Then, you can decide to just fuck it and add as much high fructose corn syrup as possible without fucking up the bread, and you get American style bread.

US , EU and FR variants.

Side question: Why do people buy baguettes? Do they make sandwiches with them?

Sometimes, sometimes just eat with butter. They make good toasts too.

How do you even make a sandwich from them?

Just cut it open and put the ham and cheese inside it, not much to it really. Either cut the slice in half if I'm feeling poor or fold it in two if I'm feeling rich.

Unbaked Bread is a yeast fungus building a house out of glutens, all of which very slowly expands to fit it's container. You can shape it a lot of ways. You can also apply a variety of different fluids to create different crust thickness and textures, such as egg wash, sugar glaze, olive oil, etc.

Homemade bread is very good, would you like a recipe?

For dipping in Soup, you fool

Look for baguette sandwich in DDG

You just slice it horizontally for that.

Think of a baguette as a 3 feet long sub-sandwich. Now it starts to make sense doesn't it ?

All depends on the shape of the pan it's baked in.

Baguettes make good home-made garlic bread if sliced the right way.

personally i eat the whole baguette.

This is literally called nostupidquestions and people are saying it's a stupid question...??? some people just didn't experience the same things. https://xkcd.com/1053/

A big reason is different texture, with the semisphere shape the middle can be fluffy while the outside is crunchy, for baguettes it's basically a sandwich that the whole thing fits in your mouth in one orientation, so it's a different way to eat it.

I took a trip to Tahiti a couple years back, which is a French territory. Baguettes everywhere. Fellows sold sandwiches with baguettes as the bun. French toast was day old baguettes and phenomenal. Sometimes you just ate baguettes and saw people riding their mopeds with a bag of baguettes. It's versatile and great.

Why are they different shapes?

Sliced bread is made in loaf pans

Sourdough is made on a flat tray in the shape of a ball so it spreads out a bit.

Baguettes are made by a long strand of dough.

Bonus answer: the reason why sourdough and the baguette have the textured crust is due to the dough being sliced with a knife prior to baking.

Is this a trick question?

It starts with people making different sizes of bread many years ago, and continues with traditions and people having different preferences.
Having one type of bread would be boring, same way having different kind of pizza's.

You're not supposed to beat a baguette, you're supposed to beat people with a baguette!

Garlic Bread.

Cut it on the side, you can effectively have a nice sandwich. Cut it in tiny slices and you can make nice tiny toast. You're more hungry ? Cut a big portion, slice one side, and you got a tiny sandwich. Slice both sides, and now you have two big toasts, that are a bit elongated so you can dip them into your coffee/chocolate if you'd like ! It fits so many cases !

https://uppercrust.co.uk/menu/

Love a well-packed baguette.

Cheese fondue.

Depends on what it was baked in/how it was shaped.

The white bread is baked in a rectangular pan, the middle is baked in a dutch oven (but not always), and the last is just shaped that way as you portion out the dough as far as I know

For some soups, a great way to serve them is to toast a thick slice of one of the uncut loaves (so you can cut it thick), then place it in the middle of a wide bowl and serve the soup on top of that. Sometimes, you put another sauce that harmonizes well with the souo on the bread, first.

Then you eat it as the soup absorbs into the bread, experiencing a combination of soggy and dry bread textures along with the flavour of the broth (and sauce, if present).

It wouldn't work with a standard loaf of bread, as both the slices and the bread itself aren't thick enough to keep it from quickly going fully soggy. Breaking crackers or dipping toast into soup are pale imitations (ok, dipping toast isn't that far off, but I still prefer a good thick piece of toast).

Also, if you take a baguette and cut it into thinner slices then toast/bake those slices, you end up with a much cheaper version of those artisan crackers that are just dried pieces of baguette.

Also, look up beef wellington for one of the more extreme uses of non-standard bread.