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A Quebec Story

“The economic system of New France was inspired by the feudal model, and it continued for many years after the English conquest. The land-owning seigneurs had several obligations. They had to apportion lots so that the land would be farmed. They had to build a grist mill for their tenant farmers, who were called censitaires, or habitants. For their part, the censitaires were obliged to grind their wheat at the seigneur’s mill and give him one fourteenth of their flour as a toll.” (extract from booklet The Moulin de la Rémy)
The region of Baie-Saint-Paul and Saint-Urbain had been entrusted in 1662 to the Seminary of Quebec which had been parceling it out to settlers ever since. The population was growing fast and in 1806 the Seminary had a wooden mill built on the Rémy to serve its pressing needs. By 1825 however, the wooden mill had fallen in serious disrepair and the Seminary contracted Jacob Fortin to replace it by a much larger stone mill which would include lodgings for the miller and his family. This new mill began operating in 1826-27.

Roger Bouchard

Its first miller was Roger Bouchard from nearby Petite-Rivière-Saint-François, a rather dubious character according to Les Moulins à eau du Québec: du temps des seigneurs au temps d’aujourd’hui by Francine Adam. He appears to have had marital and anger management issues which drove him to an ugly legal dispute with the local priest. I won’t get into details but, to put it mildly, his poor wife seems to have had few reasons to be happy in her new home. He operated the mill for 8 years during which it almost burned down (as the story goes, the mill was spared because God agreed to turn the wind around after the priests at the Seminary notified Him of its imminent destruction) and otherwise deteriorated. However, maybe because he fell seriously behind in what he owed the Seminary, when the miller left the region in 1850 to build and operate a sawmill further north, he was considered a wealthy man.

The millers who succeeded him were not as colorful and although their names survived (I was gratified to spot a woman among them, Marie Fortin Simard, a widow who operated the mill from 1880 to 1884 before entrusting it to her sons), not much else is known. From 1902 to 1991, the mill remained in the hands of the Fortin family: Cléophase Fortin was the miller from 1902 to 1909, Robert Fortin from 1909 to 1951 and finally Félix Fortin from 1951 to 1991.
Félix Fortin
(photo from booklet The Moulin de la Rémy)
By all accounts, Félix was deeply attached to his mill and cared for it in the best way he could but he didn’t have money to make the necessary repairs: the north wall had crumbled, sending stones tumbling down as far as the river. The great waterwheel was gone. The façade had cracked following a series of earthquakes. No longer able to produce flour, Félix kept producing dry animal feed until he retired. The going was tough however as he had to compete with the new industrial mills.


At the time of his retirement in 1991, he had few reasons to believe his mill would ever be back to what it was in its prime, let alone be operated again. But Heritage Charlevoix bought it in 1992 and the rest is history… (see

)

As can be seen from the following picture though…
…while the old mill was surrounded by various outbuildings (the barn and the root cellar have been restored already and the outdoors bread oven will soon be reinstalled), there was nothing near it resembling a bakery. Since Frank Cabot’s dream was to restore bread to Charlevoix County (see

), a building had to be either found or built. Bent on preserving the county’s heritage, Frank opted for the second solution. Heritage Charlevoix purchased an abandoned farm building in nearby Sainte-Irénée, had it sliced in half, and carried to the site on trucks.

Once the bottom part of the house safely set on its new foundations, the ovens were trucked in. Built 27 miles (45 km) away in Jean-Claude Bernier’s workshop, these replicas of eighteenth-century French wood-fire ovens each weighed more than 40 tons. I would have loved to show you a picture of the ovens lifted with a crane and set in their assigned spots and, even better, a photo of the old roof flying through the sky to be reunited with the bottom part of the farm house but none is available that I know of and we’ll have to be content with a picture of the bakery today.

For all practical info regarding the mill and/or the bakery, please refer to the Moulin de la Rémy’s website.

Frank Cabot: A Man with a Passion

Photo by Richard W. Brown

Reproduced by courtesy of Frank Cabot

A man with a cause (see

) is generally a man with a passion. Frank Cabot is no exception. Bringing good bread back to Charlevoix County was a worthwhile cause and he made sure he achieved his goal, spurred on by his wife’s unfailing enthusiasm and support. But he isn’t a bread warrior. For him, the bread issue is part of a larger rescue operation: preserving the legacy of the past in the county. His true passion lies in creating gardens.

A self-proclaimed romantic when it comes to landscape and food, Frank became a gardener when he married Anne Perkins, herself fascinated with plants. Their garden at Les Quatre Vents in La Malbaie, Quebec, has been acclaimed as one of the most beautiful gardens in North America. It wouldn’t belong on this baker’s blog however except for the link between Frank, Anne and

.

I first met Frank through the book he wrote about his garden’s history, The Greater Perfection: The Story of the Gardens at Les Quatre Vents, a fair portion of which can be read online courtesy of Google Books. (For the passionate gardeners among you who simply must have the book despite its cost, please note that Hortus Press sells it for less money than amazon.com).

The Greater Perfection – which Frank calls the garden’s own autobiography – makes for lovely reading (a friend lent it to me and I couldn’t tear myself away) and when I met Frank and had a chance to hear him talk about the mill and the bakery, I was struck by the similarity between his approach to bread as part of the larger culture and his conception of the garden as part of the larger natural landscape. He clearly knows where Man stands in Nature. He is also very aware of the fact that for a society to keep its identity overtime, the Past must leaven the Present. The same holds true for a person or for a garden.

Les Quatre-Vents was 75 years in the making and while very much bearing the signature of its current owners, it clearly remembers the previous generations: the horizontal lines that anchor the house to the landscape, the tree-lined drive up to the house, the carpet of plain green lawn, the framed vista of the distant hills, all were dreamed up by previous stewards of the land.

I like to imagine Frank looking at it as one looks at a photo album, recalling loved ones, distant countries, reluctant plants, forgotten memories but wondering at the blank pages waiting to be filled. What will they hold? Who will browse through them?
Anxious that the garden should continue to exist and not “deteriorate once the shadow of its patron no longer hovers, until it becomes what French writer Colette referred to as “le débris d’un rêve” (the remnants of a dream)”, Frank and Anne have put in place a legal mechanism, the Charlevoix Trust, that will carry it into the final quarter of this century. To their deep satisfaction, their son Colin has agreed to take responsibility for Les Quatre-Vents when his turn comes. Again this doesn’t have much to do with bread and yet in my mind, there is a link.

When I feed my levain, morning and night, inhaling the complex and rustic fragrance of the freshly milled grains, I feel my hands come alive with the gestures of countless generations of women who have been baking bread in my family over the centuries. When our grand-children help with the scaling and mixing or simply when they tear eagerly into the loaves I make for them, I know that, on another continent and in a different language, they are acquiring the taste of bread and, beyond bread, being handed a thread of their past to weave into their present and their future. It feels right. I imagine that, on a much larger scale, Frank and Anne have the same feeling when they look back at what they have achieved.

For all practical info regarding the mill and/or the bakery, please refer to the Moulin de la Rémy’s website.

Potato Flatbread with Zucchini and Mint

It’s been almost two months since I last posted. Sorry it took me so long to come back online but life kind of intervened… Anyway here we are in our summer river retreat enjoying family, friends and retirement. Hard to believe we finally have time on our hands. What a treat!

I have been baking up a storm, mostly Gérard’s rustic batards which have become a staple in our house since it is such a tasty bread and such a reliable recipe and if I make a double batch, there is enough for us, for the freezer and for the neighbors too, which is always nice. Although the other day, I overlooked the fact that it was searingly hot out and I let the dough overproof. That’s how I discovered that, when overproofed, Gérard’s dough makes deliciously flavorful and crusty flatbreads (not pretty to look at though).

However this zucchini flatbread was made with a different dough. I found the recipe for it in The Bread Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum, an excellent book which I have certainly underused since I bought it last October. It calls for mashed potatoes but I didn’t have any on hand while we had some leftover steamed potatoes. I just peeled the skin off one and mashed it with a fork and voilà, it worked. I also had one zucchini, mint from the garden, some red pepper I had roasted the week before and kept in olive oil, fresh goat cheese and, in the freezer, a bag full of za’atar, a flavorful Middle Eastern seasoning which is also delicious on salads and veggies but goes equally well with grilled meats and yogurt cheese, among other dishes. For best flavor, the dough is made 24 hours ahead of time.
We had friends over and I totally forgot to take a picture of the baked flatbread. The pictures you see show it before it went into the oven. Size-wise, it would have made a meal for the two of us with a salad on the side. There were four of us and we had it as an appetizer.
Ingredients (for one 10-inch flatbread):
100 g unbleached all-purpose flour
0.8 g instant yeast
2 g sugar (Beranbaum uses 8 g)
2.5 g salt
38 g mashed potatoes (or peeled and fork-smashed steamed potatoes)
7 g olive oil (Beranbaum uses butter) + 4.5 g for the bowl
44 g water (preferably potato water) at room temperature
8 g lightly beaten egg
Toppings to taste: here I used an unpeeled zucchini, sliced very thin, steamed for 1 minute in the microwave and squeezed dry, ribbons of grilled red pepper, crumbled goat cheese, mint, za’atar, pepper and salt but you can use whatever you have on hand that goes well together and looks pretty.
Method:
  1. In a small bowl, whisk together the flour, yeast and sugar. Then whisk in the salt, add the mashed potato and olive oil and mix with a wooden spoon or rubber scraper until just incorporated in clumpy bits
  2. Add the water and egg and stir in until blended
  3. Using an oiled spatula or dough scraper, scrape the dough onto a counter and knead it lightly for about 15 seconds, just to form a smooth dough with a little elasticity
  4. Pour 4.5 g of oil into a bowl and place the dough in the bowl. Turn it over to coat all sides. Cover tightly and allow to sit at room temperature for 30 minutes or until slightly puffy
  5. Set the dough, still in the container, in the refrigerator for up to 24 hours (if planning to use it right away, double the fermentation time to one hour and skip the fridge part)
  6. When ready to bake, lift the dough out of the bowl and place it on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper (Beranbaum uses an oiled pizza pan)
  7. Press down on the dough to deflate it gently and shape it into a smooth round by tucking under the edges. Allow it to sit for 15 minutes, covered
  8. Place a baking stone on an oven shelf at the lowest level and preheat the oven to 475º F/246º C one hour before baking
  9. Using your fingertips, press the ball of dough out into a 10-inch circle, sprinkle with some olive oil from the bowl, cover with plastic wrap and allow to sit for 30 to 40 minutes, until the dough becomes light and slightly puffy with air
  10. Garnish with the desired toppings and set directly on the hot stone
  11. Bake for 10 minutes, check for color (turn 180º if your oven has heat spots as mine does) and bake for another 5 to 10 minutes until nicely colored
  12. Eat while still warm.

This flatbread goes to Susan, from Wild Yeast for Yeastpotting.

Pain de l’Abbaye Saint-Wandrille (Abbey Bread)

The recipe for this bread was devised by William Alexander during his stay at Saint-Wandrille Abbey in Normandy. As related in his book, 52 loaves, the monks had been baking their own bread for ages but their baker had left two years earlier and since none of the remaining monks possessed the necessary skills, they were happy to have a baker come and make “un peu de pain pour la communauté” (some bread for the community). They wrote that they would also be grateful if their helpful guest could show one of them how to make bread.
Not feeling qualified enough, Alexander almost wrote back to say he couldn’t possibly live up to the monks’ expectations but then he reflected: “I wasn’t just being asked to train a monk or to bake some bread; I was being asked to repair a broken thirteen-hundred-year old chain, to return fresh bread to this abbey, to reignite a tradition what had tragically been extinguished. It was an opportunity to repay a debt, to do for this abbey what the abbeys of Europe once did for the rest of us – keep knowledge alive during dark times….” You’ve got to love a man who thinks like that!
Once at the Abbey, he discovered the monks were reluctant to commit to the rigorous feeding schedule of a levain (although I wonder why… What did the monks use in the old days but levain?). They agreed however to feed the one he had brought them on the nights preceding baking days. Alexander didn’t argue, he adapted his recipe for fresh yeast (with a bit of levain thrown it for flavor) and, two years later, at the writing of the book, the monks were still baking his bread three days a week and hadn’t gone back to the local baker. They even asked for brioche and croissant recipes!
If their village baker made bread that was anything like the one we sampled last year in France near Bourg-en-Bresse, I fully understand why the monks were calling for help. We had stopped for breakfast in a tiny village on our way to visit an old mill. The owner of the café told us that she didn’t have any bread but that we could cross the street and buy some from the bakery and that she would happily provide us with butter and jam.
So I went to the bakery where I observed with amazement voluminous loaves which looked like oval balloons: the label said they weighed 1-kg but they were gigantic. Logically they should have weighed much more. I bought a half-baguette which I brought back to the café. We tried it. It was very white and bland and its texture recalled that of cotton candy. Apparently the village baker had mastered the dubious art of producing the worst possible kind of French bread by using no preferment and mixing the dough at high speed.
The café owner saw our faces and she said: “Well, now you understand why I don’t have any bread to offer you. Not only is the bread pretty bad but it goes stale so fast that if I buy it before 9 AM, I have to go back to the bakery before lunch hour begins and still my customers complain! Unfortunately we are stuck with it as he is the only baker in the village.”
Well, the monks were lucky enough to have all necessary (albeit rather old-fashioned) baking equipment on the premises and their determination to go back to “real” bread paid off. The “pain de l’Abbaye” is of the quiet variety (just like them) but it delivers. It has lovely rustic undertones, thanks to the addition of whole wheat and whole rye, and the combination of poolish and levain gives it a satisfying complexity. It rises beautifully in the oven and bakes to a ruddy burnish.
I baked a big batch as I needed bread to give away, to bring to a party and to freeze and I had fun with the shaping and the stenciling.
Alexander reports that the monks insisted on a blunt-end cylinder shape with no points “so that everyone gets the same-size piece”. I guess the monks are nothing but egalitarian! I didn’t have the same concern (some of us – meaning myself – love the pointy ends while some others – meaning my significant other – don’t – how lucky is that!), so the blunt shape wasn’t a requirement. I tried however to make my ends as rounded as possible. I had to make my loaves shorter than the monks’ as my oven is rather small and they ended up stubbier.
As it is, I settled on 7 680-g loaves (raw weight): 4 short and fat bâtards and 3 boules (one of the boules weighed a tad more, 710 g, I think). Only six loaves can be seen on the photos as one was given away while still warm from the oven. The last loaf was rather overproofed even though I had tried to delay things by putting the dough to ferment in the cool basement. The day was pretty hot and incipient summer weather does make a huge difference in fermentation time.

Generally speaking the loaves all ended up proofing a bit too fast. Maybe for that reason, I didn’t get all the holes I was hoping for in the crumb. It could also be because I used more whole grain than indicated, both in the poolish and in the levain. Anyway like the Olympic torch, the burning desire for the perfect Abbey loaf has now passed on to me and this summer I plan to forge ahead in my own quest for the holey crumb. I also plan to tweak the recipe a bit by adding no commercial yeast at all in the final dough.

William Alexander has kindly allowed me to post the original recipe (which is in the book but not on his website). The recipe you’ll find below is my adaptation. I used all organic flours and grains.

Ingredients: (for 7 loaves)
Poolish

400 g all-purpose flour (I used King Arthur’s)

267 g high-extraction flour (I used La Milanaise‘s sifted flour)
111 g freshly milled whole wheat flour (red hard winter)
56 g freshly milled rye flour
834 g water
15 g fresh yeast
Final dough
1,433 g all-purpose flour
223 g freshly milled whole wheat flour
112 g freshly milled rye flour
154 g high-extraction flour
1,012 g water
334 g mature levain (100% hydration) (originally a 42% whole-grain firm levain based on a mixture of wheat, spelt and rye, changed into a liquid levain and fed once with high-extraction flour the night before the bake)
all of the poolish
31 g fresh yeast
54 g sea salt
Method:
  • I pretty much followed the indications given by Alexander in the original recipe, except that I did the autolyse before adding the salt (salt tightens the gluten networks, slowing down their development, which is the opposite of what the autolyse is supposed to achieve. See Hamelman’s Bread, page 9). Alexander may have the monks add it earlier so that they don’t forget it later (as happened to him once).
  • I also did one fold after one hour and another one 30 minutes later. I also baked at 475 F instead of 500 as my oven gets really hot and at 500 F, the bread turns dark before it is fully baked.
Le pain de l’Abbaye Saint-Wandrille goes to Susan, from Wild Yeast for Yeastpotting.

52 loaves – One Man’s Relentless Pursuit of Truth, Meaning and a Perfect Crust

First book in a long time to make me me laugh out loud! William Alexander makes the quest for the perfect crust (crumb, actually, since he spends the better part of one year trying to get holes in his bread) sound both like the single-minded obsession of a slightly demented home baker (when he isn’t baking, Alexander is director of technology at a research institute) and a somewhat comical endeavor which ends up involving the whole family one way or another.

Having heard that the secret to authentic French bread is authentic French spring water, he goes out and buys a bottle of Evian, “delivered straight from the French Alps,” fully expecting that his bread, “once liberated from its chlorinated, acidic manacles, would rise in the oven like a soufflé, tasting of the Alps, evoking the character of Jean-Paul Belmondo and the eroticism of Brigitte Bardot.” But even if it had done so (and it hadn’t), it wouldn’t have satisfied him. Carbon footprint aside, “I wanted my bread to have that terrroir, the taste of the land, and when the Hudson Valley wheat growing in my garden matured, I wanted to bake it with Hudson Valley water.”

Yes, growing in his garden, you read that correctly. Not satisfied with flour that could be bought at the supermarket, Alexander had decided to grow his own wheat (from scratch, literally) and, with the help of his wife, Anne, a medical doctor, planted four beds of winter wheat.
Discovering how he and his family dealt with the harvesting (“after a few useless swings with my old, rusty scythe – essentially a sickle on a long pole – I went into the basement and emerged with my not-quite-as-rusty hedge shears,”) the threshing (first with an old broom, then with a shovel, then with a mallet), the winnowing (first relying on the wind to separate the wheat from the chaff, then resorting to more technologically advanced solutions) and the milling (using an Indian artifact grindstone), not to mention the efforts which went into building a brick-oven, makes for fun and instructive reading.
Along the way, the author reviews the history of bread, learns about the various types of flour, reflects on the link between bread and religion, researches the origin of pellagra, a mystery disease that has disappeared in our part of the world thanks to the systematic addition of niacin to white flour, muses about modern milling, deals a swift blow to bread machines (they seem “to have been designed to reproduce not artisan bread but commercial bread, the cellophane-wrapped kind”) and has with levain an encounter that changes his life. He actually becomes so attached to his that he takes it with him to France: his description of how he gets it through security at JFK is most entertaining. My only reservation about the book has to do with the frequent asides about the author’s libido which, I suspect, were put in to make the book more appealing to a general public perceived as having voyeuristic tendencies (although I don’t know that voyeurs would rush to purchase a book entitled 52 loaves).
When the book begins, Alexander’s loaves are so dense his kids refuse to slice them themselves, “it was so difficult – not to mention hazardous,” but they eat them anyway and say they are pretty good, unwittingly irritating their Dad who deems them “lousy” (the loaves, not his kids!). Deeply unsatisfied with his bread, he resolves to take a scientific approach, to read books and to talk to bakers.
He thus discovers preferments, learns the merits of gently folding the dough instead of punching it down à la Julia Child, visits yeast factories, goes to baking school in Paris (at the Ritz, no less), flies from Paris to Morocco to bake his bread in a communal oven (Alexander’s description of his stay in Asilah is both hilarious and moving) and, last but not least, spends a few days at Saint-Wandrille Abbey in Normandy where he has been asked to teach the monks the forgotten art of bread-baking.
I love the author’s description of all things French, from the quirky way general strikes operate (they start the evening before the declared date) to the invariably cheerful tone used by hotel clerks to deny a tourist’s legitimate requests. Of course, being French, I don’t get the cheerful tone when in France, just the un-helpfulness, so, unbeknownst to him, he actually has it better than the natives! (Just kidding, readers!)
Alexander fares better with the monks than with hotel clerks. Not being particularly religious himself (“Would you call yourself an atheist, Dad?” asks his teenage daughter. “Not as long as Grandma’s alive”, replies the author as he kneads), he expected his experience at the Abbey to be one of an outsider looking in but it turns out quite different.
After the first bake, he goes for a long walk: “I had been out for two hours, and not once had I encountered another living soul. The thoughts occurred to me that I was more likely to encounter God. Not that I really expected to, but it did, for the first and only time in my life, seem possible in this ancient , otherwordly place to realize some kind of divine experience: a vision, a voice, an epiphany. I stayed on my toes, alert to His presence, but all I could see were the timeless ruins, the sparkling stream, flowers and herbs, fruit trees heavy with ripe apples and pears, birds chirping in the trees, church bells ringing in the distance, all of it drenched in that incredible Norman sunshine, and, above all, perfect, transcendental solitude.”
He devises for the monks a bread that can be made without compromising their attendance at the seven daily offices, the performance of their tasks and their participation in study groups, the “pain de l’Abbaye Saint-Wandrille“.
You will find recipes, a photo tour of the Abbaye (including a video clip of the ancient mixer at work) and other delectable tidbits on William Alexander‘s website.