Farine

Crazy for Bread

About love

Love is when an eight-year old French girl decides to make a Pithiviers (an almond cake) for her family. She has baked Pithiviers before and is confident it will come out well. So confident that she forgets to use flour. Butter goes in and ground almonds and sugar and who can remember what else but what comes out of the oven is a flat disk. At the end of dinner that night, the so-called Pithiviers is solemnly brought out and sliced. But the smell and taste are off-putting (mushroomy in fact, probably because of the baking powder) and nobody is actually able to eat more than one bite of his or her share except the little girl’s dad who pronounces the sorry cake the best flourless Pithiviers he has ever had.
Love is when you bake a brioche for your Valentine and you make it a hundred percent whole wheat to compensate for all the butter you used that he shouldn’t be eating and you bungle the shaping because really you never learned how to make a brioche à tête like the ones you see all over Paris and because of the poor shaping, it doesn’t rise as well as it should but you bake it anyway and when you slice it open to reveal a somewhat under-baked center, your Valentine says there is nothing wrong with your brioche that a little browning in the toaster won’t fix.
Love is a lot like gluten in bread dough: it binds us together, yet leaves enough breathing space around each of us that we can grow and change and still be part of a whole. In the face of the relentless waves of violence, ugliness, intolerance, and plain old stupidity that are threatening to sweep us under, the humble metaphor is reason enough to keep on baking.
Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!

Red gold on rocky hills: harvesting saffron in Provence

I was out walking the pups (in addition to our own, we were taking care of our youngest son’s dog) around nine one morning last week. Having just barked their heads off at a plumber getting out of his truck, they were strutting down the street (all eighteen pounds of chihuaha-terrier mix, combined), one with his ears perked up, the other one with her ears flapping down, both tails up in the air, clearly very pleased with themselves, when I experienced one of these minutes when Time seems to coalesce and hang in the air like an all-encompassing drop of luminous peace. The sky was a deep blue, the sun bright, far away the highway rumbled, birds were tweeting somewhere, the cool air smelled of pine and eucalyptus, I felt that if I reached out, I might actually touch life itself and it would be almost gel-like because there was no flux, only the present. A perfect minute. I stopped walking, awed. Then the dogs started sniffing and panting, pulling towards a red squirrel on a low limb, the world resumed its spinning. Still I had had that moment and I filed it away in my box of wonder. Albeit a very different, experience, our visit to a saffron farm back in the fall when we were in Marseille also felt suspended in time. Maybe it was the setting…

Or the twenty-minute walk up the fragrant hills from Lascours, the sleepy village where we had parked the car…








Maybe it was the beloved friends we were with and the good-natured group of locals we had joined for the occasion…

Maybe it was Delphine Douet, the owner of the saffron farm, a knowledgeable and enthusiastic guide. Maybe it was the weather, maybe the colors, maybe the aromas… Maybe a combination of all this. In any case, a morning so perfect that it could only foster hope and healing.

I didn’t know much about saffron before visiting the farm. I knew I loved its smell and taste, I knew it was the most expensive spice in the world and I knew it came from a specific variety of crocus. Beyond that, not a clue. I suspect such is the case with most visitors because the first thing Delphine did was sit us down at a long table on a restanque (narrow terrace where the crocuses are cultivated) and tell us everything we could possibly want to know about the precious or rouge (red gold) as saffron is sometimes called.
Although I enjoyed hearing about the role of saffron in history, its place in religious rituals, its medicinal benefits, its cosmetic uses, its dyeing properties, its culinary assets, etc. I am not going to overload you with this info because you can easily find it on the web. If you read French, a good place to start would be 13’Or Rouge, Delphine’s own website or this report she referred me to. For English-speakers, there is Wikipedia and other resources including this page of gardening tips in case you decide you grow your own (which I’d like to try).
What mostly got my attention was the fact that while the world produces about two hundred tons a year, four hundred tons are actually traded, meaning that not all that is labeled saffron is the real thing. As explained in this article (in French), some producers may substitute marigold, safflower, arnica, corn silk, seaweed, etc. or use dyes. They may make saffron threads heavier by coating them with sugar, oil, honey and mineral powders.
Others may include some non-aromatic parts of the plant itself. The stigma is the red thread which, once dehydrated, becomes the spice. The style is its yellow “foot.” Cheaper brands often contains both stigmas and styles. Delphine explained that she always has her harvest helpers (us on that particular day) gather the stigmas in red bowls so that she can see at a glance whether or not they mistakenly included any of the yellow styles. Bowls containing yellow specks do not pass muster. To make her point, she passed around two little bottles, the first one containing dehydrated stigmas, the second one containing dehydrated styles, and invited us to uncork them and smell. The red stigmas smelled divine. The yellow styles smelled like old hay. In other words when you buy saffron that’s both red and yellow, you are not getting one hundred percent pure saffron.
I normally get my saffron from Trader Joe’s. When I got back home from France, I checked the bottle I had in my spice drawer.

Here is what TJ’s saffron looks like on a red plate.

To be compared with the saffron in one of our bowls (prior to Delphine’s inspection)…

Knowing what I know now, I understand why TJ’s saffron is more affordable than others. I checked out saffron at Costco too. At first glance, it looks pretty much the same as TJ’s and I assume it smells and tastes about the same as well. Less fragrant and aromatic that the one in Provence but a reasonable alternative although you will have to use it in bigger amounts to achieve comparable results.
One trick to find out whether the saffron you bought has been dyed is to rub some threads (or powder) between two wet fingers. Your fingers should turn yellow. If they turn red, dye has been used. Delphine advises against buying saffron powder because it is often adulterated.
The saffron-producing crocus is crocus sativus. The bulbs are buried in the summer for a fall harvest. They multiply underground during winter and spring then go dormant. Early summer is a good time to deter them, so that the cycle can resume. Dependent on man’s help for reproduction, the crocus has been grown that way for five thousand years. To harvest the saffron, one pinches the flower at its base and snips it off (pulling would damage the bulb). When all the flowers have been harvested, the stigmas are pulled out. There are three stigmas per flower.



Delphine demonstrating where to cut off the style

We were directed to a pile of little straw baskets…

…and off we went, the two youngest (age nine and fifteen) racing ahead and filling their baskets in record time. When the whole restanque had been plucked over and all the stigmas pulled out, Delphine weighed the contents of our combined harvest: twelve grams.

Well, it was twelve grams when she first weighed it but by the time I took the picture (like two or three minutes later), desiccation had set in and the weight was already down by one centigram. Just so you know, one hundred grams of fresh stigmas yield 20 g of dry saffron. For one kilogram of saffron, you need the stigmas of about one hundred and sixty thousand flowers.
Once enough stigmas have been collected, they are dehydrated for twenty minutes at 140-158°F/60-70°C, then stored in tightly closed containers away from any light source.
To maximize aroma and flavor, saffron must be rehydrated before use, preferably for twenty-four to forty-eight hours. A baker might want to soak it in the water to be mixed with the flour.
Delphine took out various saffron-infused products (jams, marmalades, honey, tea) to taste with bread from Dame Farine, the lovely Marseille bakery we had just visited. A match made in heaven!


Spent crocus flowers…

If you ever are in the Marseille area in early fall and would like to visit the farm, you may want to contact Delphine at +33 6 86 22 16 88 and put your name on the list for a group tour. She speaks English. Outside harvest season, she also organizes saffron-themed breakfasts at regular intervals.

Happy Holidays!

We are in the throes of kitchen renovation, which means we haven’t had a sink or a stove since the first week of November. I have learned to make dinner on an induction cooktop in the garage (glum!), to scrub veggies and do the dishes in the bathroom sink (cramped!) and to eat out of paper plates (sorry, trees!). We were hoping everything would be finished by early December but it wasn’t. Now I am hoping the kitchen will be mostly functional sometime next week. Meanwhile my hopes of baking something in time for a Christmas blogpost have been dashed. Unless I go for microwave baking like this guy? Just kidding…

Anyway I was sorting through old photos on an external hard drive when I happened upon this picture dating back to September 2008. I was in California (already!) visiting our youngest son and his family. We had brought back plums from the farmers market and I had made a tart. While I remember neither how it turned out (there are no post-baking pictures) nor how it tasted, I love the way it looks pre-oven.

To me it suggests an old mosaic gently swept with an archeologist’s brush. Perhaps a tile found in the ruins of an ancient Roman kitchen. Buried in dust and ruble and unattended for centuries.

Suddenly brought to light and glowing from within, it speaks of the ages. It set me thinking of Christmases past, of the faces once gathered around the holiday table. I have always found it a sad comment on the human condition that the persons we love the most as grown-ups so rarely get to meet the ones that meant the most to us as children. There is little comfort in the image of Time as an endless chain of which each of us can only see so many links because it begins and ends in darkness. If a family could exist outside of Time, I like to think it would form a mosaic. The patterns might vary from one family member to the next and each of us might interpret the story differently but we would still all get the whole picture and be the richer -and maybe the wiser- for it.

Time being unescapable, we are left with the chain. Which will never make a mosaic no matter how many times we try to coil it upon itself.

Still some of the light is carried over from one generation to the next. Not so much in the stories we tell about a long departed great-grandparent -although the kids clearly love hearing them- but in the way we tell them or even in the simple fact we tell them at all. When my dad retired, he spent a couple of years writing the history of our family. What started as a simple memoir turned into three volumes plus a fourth one, a year later, in which he collected his and my mom’s favorite recipes (always a passionate eater, he had turned into a passionate cook in his old age). He had the pages typed (he wrote in longhand), added scores of old photos and documents, had it all photocopied and collated and gave a copy to each of his children and grandchildren. It makes for very interesting reading and it illuminates a part of the chain that would now be in complete darkness were it not for his efforts.

I love it that he -and my mom who helped out- cared enough to do it.

There are no stories of Christmas in these memoirs. We did celebrate when we were kids. It just wasn’t as major an event as today. It wasn’t as commercial either. At least not in France. Not then.

Christmas acquired a different aura when I met my mother-in-law who was Danish and for whom December 24 was the most important day of the year. The Danes know a thing or two about light and she knew a thing or two about family. She had had a very interesting life (she was born in St. Petersburg to a Russian mom who died giving birth when she was three, was raised by a stepmom she loved, fled Russia at the time of the Revolution, spoke several languages, was so beautiful than men vied for her hand in marriage, married a foreigner, visited pre-Castro Cuba, moved to Switzerland, then after the war, to Paris, etc. ).  But although she shared a few details, she was the quiet type and not a born storyteller. Hers is a different kind of legacy. One I cherish very much.

The holiday season has become painful since our grandson was killed. But the kids love it. So we make it a happy time for them. Some are still young enough to believe in Santa, others like to hold on to childhood a while longer by pretending they still do. Either way they clearly feel the magic and that’s as should be.

As for me, having learned over the years that nothing is more important, I am content with spending time with family, friends, and pets, and grateful for our connected world which makes it possible to video-visit the ones who live far away.

And if the kitchen works out, I’ll bake something. Not a plum tart (this is December after all) but maybe one of my mother-in-law’s favorite holiday dish, a salmon koulibiac. My way to conjure her presence at the table. Plus our son’s own mother-in-law loves koulibiac as well. As do we. Maybe one of our common grandkids will remember that one day and make it part of his or her Christmas lore.

See how the chain gets forged…

Happy holidays to all!

Marseille: Boulangerie Dame Farine

I was planning to do a Meet the Baker post on my friend Marie-Christine Aractingi who recently opened a bakery in Marseille, France, but circumstances went against us. The Toussaint holiday weekend was around the corner and Marie had a hectic week. Both the lab and the shop were unusually busy and we couldn’t do a proper interview. But the Man and I were in the city visiting friends who have two sons, age fifteen and nine. These kids have the proverbial growing boy appetite which means we brought home a lot of bread every time we stopped by…

…and bread is very eloquent at Dame Farine.

In fact it can’t stop talking and it says a lot about the baker. So if you ever find yourself in Marseille, a city of mind-blowing contrasts which I personally find both hard to fall for and impossible to dismiss, make a beeline for 77 avenue de la Corse, not far from the Vieux Port and Palais du Pharo. and get a loaf or two. Your tastebuds will thank you. Plus you may meet la boulangère! If you do, please say hi! to her for me.

In the hands of a skilled baker, bread not only talks, it sings. Take Marie’s petit-épeautre intégral (whole-grain einkorn) for instance. Buy a loaf and cut yourself a slice (or rip off a chunk if you can’t wait), close your eyes, bring it to your mouth and bite.

Chances are you will find yourself transported to the hills of Haute-Provence, the very ones you roamed in your imagination if you ever read Marcel Pagnol’s souvenirs or watched Jean de Florette or Manon des sources. I have had einkorn before but nothing that ever approached the flavor of this one, grown in a hardscrabble land where the sun is fierce and water elusive. The bread reminds me of pain d’épices (even though it contains no spices or sweetener)  but mostly, it brings back the drives south in the summers of my childhood when the first clue that the grandes vacances (summer vacation) had indeed arrived was the scent of the maquis (the pervasive Mediterranean scrubland) drifting in through the open car windows. However you don’t need blasts from the past to love Marie’s petit-épeautre, the aforementioned boys couldn’t get enough of it. I was impressed. Especially because the bread is whole-grain and they are raised mostly on baguettes. Of course it helps that, despite their tender age, they are both erstwhile gourmets with a devouring interest (pun intended!) in experiencing new tastes.

Also strongly evocative of terroir is Marie’s fougasse aux olives. While petit-épeautre takes you to Provence’s fragrant and stony hills, the fougasse brings to mind cobblestoned streets lined with colorful market stalls and lazy lunches under the vine arbor. The olives are plump and plentiful (I love it when a baker is generous with ingredients) and the crumb-crust ratio is spot-on perfect, so that buying a couple of loaves (or more) is the only way to make sure there’ll be some left at mealtime.



Baguettes au levain: one white, one wholegrain

At Dame Farine, all flours and most ingredients are organic and locally sourced. The bread is hand-crafted in small batches. The levains are mild, the mixer is gentle, fermentation is long. Even though the bakery is located on a busy avenue, it feels like an old-fashioned village boulangerie: locals come in, greet the baker, leave with bread and brioche; kids examine the display of sweet rolls and carefully select their after-school snacks.

There is laughter and gossip. People linger and ask questions. The city isn’t familiar yet with the flours Marie likes to use: kamut, spelt, rye, buckwheat, chestnut. Some customers are more daring than others but all look and wonder and you can see in the timid ones’ eyes that they are sorely tempted and that, one day, they too might take a wild leap into the unknown.

It doesn’t hurt that the baker is a poet and that her breads carry inspired names. The whole-grain kamut is miche Cléopâtre, the big rustic white loaf Petit-Poucet (Little Tom Thumb) and, in a stroke of genius, the whole-wheat is called Soleil Levain (soleil levant means “rising sun.”) When I saw that, I couldn’t resist brightening up our day by taking home a chunk.

On our last visit we left with half-a-dozen castagnous (Marie comes up with a different seasonal roll every week). Made from chestnut flour and whole chestnuts, they taste like an old-fashioned French Christmas. Guess who made short work of those!



Castagnous (chestnut rolls)

There is a wonderful feeling of community around the new bakery. The neighborhood tradespeople threw a block party when it opened. The mayor gave a toast. Friends came from Aix. There were flowers and smiles. Tears of emotion too. Word of mouth is doing the rest with help from the media. Locals have started saying “tu” to Marie, to kiss her on both cheeks, to ask how she is doing. She is getting to know them, to remember who likes his or her baguette bien cuite (dark) and who deplores the crisp crust but still comes back for more. On Saturdays, some customers arrive in late afternoon and leave with armfuls of loaves, a sure sign they live in other boroughs or maybe in the suburbs and are stocking up for the week before heading home. She loves interacting with them all.

Delphine, one of Marie’s new neighbors, runs a safranière (a saffron farm) in nearby Aubagne. We visited her on a gorgeous Saturday morning (more about that in an upcoming post) and were delighted to see that the bread used in the tasting came from Dame Farine. Bread made with local grains, spread with locally-grown-saffron-infused jams: we were eating the landscape. It tasted marvelous.