Le Pain de Pierre: a village bakery near Paris…

We “happened” upon this little bakery (actually my friend found it thanks to a wonderful touring app on his French smartphone) in the sleepy village of Lardy, Essonne, south of Paris, during a day outing. We didn’t “visit” it or even got to talk to the baker (who was probably sleeping off his busy shift) but we bought bread and the salesperson kindly allowed me to take pictures. I later checked out the bakery’s website which is all in French but features a lovely gallery of pictures: although the bakery changed hands last fall, the new owner has picked up where the previous one left off and continues to bake all organic bread, using levain spontané (wild yeast) and a wood-fired oven.
The bread is on the expensive side, which means the village is not your run-of-the-mill French country village but probably a village-dortoir (a dormitory village) or a village of résidences secondaires (weekend homes) where the residents can afford to pay a premium for organic and hand-stenciled bread. As much as I might like it to be the case, most country bakeries in France do not look like this one… Still I enjoyed seeing it and I thought you might too.
The whimsical turtle below is one of the loaves the baker had made from leftover dough with kids in mind.
Update: Since I posted the above, my niece Flo Makanai has written to say she knew the bakery well when it still belonged to Pierre and that judging from the pictures, the breads sadly do not look as good today as they did then. They were already on the expensive side, which can be explained by the fact that the bakery uses Demeter flours, obtained through biodynamic agriculture (that, at least, hasn’t changed). She also recalls that Pierre didn’t necessarily bake everyday as his baking was influenced by the activity of the moon…