8 Breads To Buy At Costco, And 1 To Avoid

If you are like many Americans, then you've faced the deadly challenge of walking through the Costco bakery department without buying a hundred six-packs of chocolate muffins. And a challenge it is. However, since my personal bakery transit is usually focused on avoiding all the muffins, I have heretofore missed that Costco offers a wide range of other fresh-baked goods that the humble consumer might be interested in.

Although not all of Costco's bakery items are made from scratch, plenty are. For instance, you can get a made-to-order cake there, and their dinner rolls are incredible. But that's not nearly it: As the father has been telling me for years, they have baguettes worthy of a decent bakery, and freshly baked loaves with which anyone would be delighted to serve with cheese to guests. When we really dug into their Kirkland Signature bakery offerings, in fact, we found plenty we liked ... and some we didn't.

Of course, there's nothing like a true deep dive to help ensure your next dinner table offering is the best it can be. Accordingly, I rounded up the usual taste testers — the husband, small girl, small boy, mother, and father, along with myself — to determine which of the nine fresh breads we found in the bakery were worth buying, and which weren't. Here's the breakdown so you can apply it to your next shopping trip.

Although we've heard that Costco's sandwich bread is best avoided, and thus we were wary of their bakery loaves as well, our fears couldn't have been more misguided. While, as you will see, we liked the majority of what we tried, nothing topped the delicious and nutritious cranberry walnut round. It was $7.99, which is commensurate with a beautiful bakery loaf anywhere and therefore wasn't as much of a steal as we're used to at Costco, but it was so tasty that we'd do it again in a heartbeat. Indeed, next time we're at the store, we're going to load up on four or five and freeze them.

Overall, the family was mightily impressed by the flavor, texture, and moisture level, as well as the fact that you didn't need to add anything to it for it to be absolutely delicious. Because it was so moist and chewy, there was no need to add butter or jam to it — although I will say that the next morning, it was excellent toasted with peanut butter. We all agreed that it would make an excellent bread on Christmas morning or to add to a holiday dinner table. The only downside was the walnuts, which a few people in my family (*ahem* the whiny husband) don't care for. Therefore, I'm going to try to make this one myself with my sourdough starter.

There are many creative ways to use Costco bakery items, but this delicious and most buttery of butter croissants offers more room for creativity than most. Plainly put, they were very good for boxed croissants. While you can never expect them to be as super flaky as those on a rack in an authentic buy-by-the-pastry bakery, the flavor and texture were excellent. They were light, airy, eggy, and not too sweet.

Better yet, they were delicious both on their own and also the next day, cooked up in the oven with tuna salad and cheese (recipe courtesy of the mother). We can attest that they are good as sandwiches with jam and are also good when warmed slightly in the air fryer. They were also only $6.99 for a giant container, which is a steal. Per the husband, "They're as good as it gets for a store-bought croissant."

This bread was still warm when I grabbed it and put it in the cart, so it got major points from me right off the bat. It was so toasty that the checker commented on it as he rang it up; Costco's not lying when they say they make their breads fresh and in-house. I could easily have carried this home, slathered butter on it, and called lunch a done deal. (Let's not talk about how I don't eat enough vegetables, okay?)

However, we weren't doing the tasting until the next day, so I was worried it might lose its fresh-baked flavor and chew, but it didn't. I left it in its bakery bag, and it was just as tender on the inside and crackly on the outside as it had appeared the day before. Though we can't speak to the actual flavor and consistency it would have had on day one, day two was plenty satisfactory. The texture was on point; it was dense but moist, fluffy yet chewy, and all-around very nice. For $5.99, it was a great little taste of Italy.

There is one caveat, however: it tasted strongly of sourdough. After much discussion, we agreed that such a flavor probably didn't belong in a loaf billed as "Rustic Italian" — we all thought it should be more understated to pair with a range of cheeses or dips. We also assumed that Italian bread would have a neutral flavor, as called for in strata and French toast, for example. That said, if you like fluffy sourdough, you won't dislike this.

Now, I have to start by admitting that we did not enter the baguette taste test without bias, because the father loves these. He buys the set of two, cuts each into quarters, freezes them, and then pulls them out one at a time to toast, which he says makes them taste like they were baked fresh that day. (This is nearly a religious routine for him. It's important, you guys.) This not only biased us toward them (he likes them), but it also biased us against them (he won't shut up about them), so really it was a wash. (Kidding, Dad. Kind of.)

Our bias notwithstanding, we weren't unimpressed by the baguettes, especially at only $4.99 for both. The flavor was good, with a crusty exterior and a nice, soft middle. If you toast them up in the oven, they're nearly as good as bread from a corner bakery, so this is a definite "do buy" ... especially if you've got some Brie lying around.

While none of us are huge fans of ciabatta, eight rolls for only $6.99 is definitely a price I can get behind. Plus, they were delicate of flavor, airy and yeasty all at once, with a light, floury crust of which Italy would not be ashamed. As the mother put it, they'd be excellent for sopping up extra sauce if you were eating a big bowl of fettuccine Alfredo or clams in wine sauce. The father liked that while they all came from the same bakery, each of these breads tasted different and therefore had its own personality. It is to Costco's credit that the ciabatta genuinely tasted like ciabatta, in other words.

The only downside for some of us was the fact that the rolls were quite large. While they weren't too thick to become a sandwich, they were too big unless you were very, very hungry or a lumberjack. If you're serving pasta, you probably won't need an entire roll, but then, you do you.

This bread was a surprise to all of us. Given our determination to try every fresh-baked bread Costco had to offer (at least during this season), we were forced to pick this one up as well, even though it appealed to basically nobody. None of us like that tongue-singed-off feeling, especially when we're just trying to eat some dang bread, thankyouverymuch. Still, needs must, and we were all forced to eat our words along with our jalapeño cheddar bread.

How did we love it? Let me count the ways. It was deeply flavorful, with both cheese and pepper coming through nicely. The sourdough, which gave it a faint tang, was nice and light. It had good chew and moisture level, if slightly heavy — probably a result of the abundant cheese. The husband, who likes spicy things even less than the rest of us, still enjoyed it, though he'd have liked something to dip it in to cut the heat. The mother was off to use it as sandwich bread, while I'd like to try it as garlic toast.

Beware, though: The bread did contain seeds. If you get one stuck between your teeth, you will not enjoy the sensation, as the small girl can attest: "Every time I lick it, it burns like fire." Although you should probably keep some floss on hand, it's an overall win: $9.99 and worth the price. Buy it!

Everything bagels are nummy, there's nothing else to be said on the matter ... and Costco's version did not disappoint. The seasoning was generous; you could taste the individual onion flakes, poppyseeds, and sesame seeds; the bagel was chewy in the right ways; and it was edible without even toasting it. We also liked that they weren't presliced, which can start to dry out the bagel before you even get to it. If you got this bagel in New York, piled high with cream cheese and lox, you wouldn't be disappointed.

That said, we can confirm that this bagel is even better toasted, with some sort of schmear on it — but then, what bagel isn't? Unlike the plain version (discussed below, and not kindly), this one was a big hit. At $7.99 for six bagels, it's a good price, so don't hesitate to add it to your shopping cart.

We are fans of falafel and kebabs in our house, and as such, we're no strangers to pita bread. As far as pita goes, these aren't the best, but they're certainly not the worst. The husband liked how fluffy and airy they were, but then, he doesn't like regular pita that much. The father, who is from Israel and loves himself a truly flat flatbread, with a thin, chewy outside and a nice, clear pocket in the middle, wasn't such a fan. Plus, everyone thought the flavor was rather bland (though it was that very fact that endeared it to the small girl, She Of Unadventurous Taste Buds).

Although you could definitely do worse than buying these pita pockets for your next falafel dinner, especially since you get nine flatbreads for $6.99, it's important to acknowledge that they came in second-worst in our tasting. If you need them for hummus, go for it, but they're not the best on the market.

Plain bagels, though always a tasty addition to brunch, aren't the most interesting bread in the world, and so it proved to be here. They fell at the bottom of the list, both because they were boring and because they tasted decidedly not fresh-baked. Instead, they had the flavor of a grocery-store Franz bagel. The mother compared them to Trader Joe's, but same difference ... they had all the appeal of a bagel that had been in a bag for weeks. The husband, like Dame Prue Leith, felt it was "not worth the calories." His opinion: You're going to need butter or cream cheese, and a lot of it.

It feels a little dishonest even to tell you not to buy this one, especially as the small girl lobbied hard for it to come in first place. Now, to be fair, she has a deep and abiding love for all things fake-white-flour tasting, so her views were reflected neither by the rest of the group nor likely by the majority of Chowhound readers. Still, she insisted, it did its job well for a plain bagel. If you're headed to a church social or soccer game and need to bring an assortment of bagels, you could do worse than throwing this in your cart, especially for only $7.99 per half dozen.

That said, among the many Costco bakery facts it's useful to know is the fact that their 100% refund policy covers fresh-baked goods. So feel free to try this one and, if you find you really don't like it, go ahead and take it back.

Although one certainly can't describe sampling a mountain of bread as difficult, per se, the process was not without its challenges. The main thing, as the father, the purist, repeatedly declared, is that it was hard to differentiate between breads of such varying ingredients. In some cases, flavor hopping from cranberry to jalapeño to everything seasoning was trying for the taste buds, but we did our best to distinguish between them and eat little bits of plain bread in between as a palate cleanser.

As for how we tested, we distributed each bread and tried them all at once, then took notes on each. No one was allowed to eat more of anything until we'd fully tried the lot, to avoid the bias that comes with being full. After we'd tasted them all, we decided which to recommend and which to avoid, and ranked them by which we thought best (as reflected in the order of the products above).

When shopping, we bought every type of freshly baked, savory bread. We avoided products such as muffins, banana and pumpkin "breads," and anything else that was technically a bread product but was too sweet to play nicely with unsweetened goods (because the sugar ruins one's palate for anything that doesn't contain it). The nine products we found represented every baked good that fit this category on the day we visited.