Farine

Crazy for Bread

No-Knead Chocolate-Chocolate Chip Bread

Remember Emmanuel Hadjiandreou’s lovely chocolate currant bread in How to Make Bread? Maybe because of the cold snap that hit most of the country, including our state, and maybe because there are few things more comforting than the aroma and taste of chocolate when the outside world freezes up, I had a sudden craving for that bread when we came back from our Thanksgiving family visits. However I knew there was no way I could make it until I got my levain (starter) going again and since said levain had been quartered in the fridge for a couple of weeks, I also knew it was going to require some tender loving care over the course of a few days before it got back to its usual ebullient and efficient self…
Meanwhile, what could I do? Mix a poolish, let it ferment overnight and use that instead of levain? Sure, and I would have done just that if, on the plane ride home, I hadn’t read the Kindle version of Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François’ appealing new book, The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, and bookmarked a double chocolate bread which seemed rather similar to Hadjiandreou’s (minus the currants) but required neither levain nor poolish. It did require a long cold fermentation though. Impatience and curiosity had a go at each other within my head for a few seconds and curiosity won. I decided to give the Artisan-in-Five recipe a try.
The result is spectacularly tasty, even if a bit less complex than the levain version. The crumb is both soft and ever so slightly crunchy and the dark chocolate flavor is to die for. I attribute the almost imperceptible crunch to the sugar I used: with the drop in temperature, the hummingbirds had been feeding like crazy and most of our regular sugar had gone into making nectar for them. I didn’t feel like driving to the store just for sugar, so I settled for evaporated cane juice sugar which we had in stock. It doesn’t seem to melt in quite the same way but I actually love the crunch.
Despite the fact that I only used half the amount of sugar indicated in the original recipe, the bread eats like chocolate cake (with less fat) and is so easy to make that even a beginner should have good results.
One thing to keep in mind if you decide to try your hand at it though: do not treat time indications as gospel truths. I am sure that all the recipes in the book have been thoroughly tested and re-tested but they haven’t been tested in my kitchen in the winter, using the flour available to me. If I had followed the recipe to a tee, I doubt I would be as satisfied as I am with the result. So instead of going by the book, trust your eyes and hands. To give you an example, the dough sat on the counter for close to twenty-four hours after mixing before it had risen enough to be put in the fridge (instead of the two hours indicated in the recipe) and, on Baking Day, the shaped loaves proofed for two hours (instead of forty minutes) before they were ready to bake. Depending on where you live and a myriad of other factors, you may have a different experience. If you have the patience to jot down flour brand, dates, times and temperatures and if you make the recipe over and over (which you may well do if you get hooked), you will learn more about the interplay of these factors. In the words of Adam Gopnik (in Bread and Women, a piece he wrote recently for The New Yorker and which, sadly, isn’t available online in its full-text version), “Bread dough isn’t like dinner food, which usually rests inert under the knife and waits for you to do something to it: bread dough sits there, respiring and rising, thinking things over.” In my experience, the more a baker knows about the way dough thinks, the easier it becomes for her to humor it and get good results.
Jeff and Zoë kindly gave me permission to blog the recipe providing I used my own words. Please note that I adapted both the ingredients (using less sugar and a different salt) and the method. For the original recipe, I refer you to the book and, for more info regarding the “Artisan in Five” method, to the Breadin5 website and corresponding YouTube videos, including this one.



Ingredients: (for three 300g-loaves)

(The formulas were created using BreadStorm)

By weights

By percentages

Method:

(The dough is made a few days ahead of the actual baking day)

  1. On Day 1, I mixed the liquid ingredients in a large bowl (using water at 100°F), then added yeast and sugar
  2. I added in the remaining dry ingredients (flour, salt and cocoa) and mixed well, using a dough whisk.  Even though the whisk helped a lot, at the end I had to use my hands and since my wrist is not strong enough yet to hold the bowl firmly for long, the cocoa powder wasn’t perfectly blended in, which really doesn’t matter. A case can actually be made for the white swirls, don’t you think? Next time, I might just stop blending in the cocoa a bit sooner…
  3. I covered the bowl loosely (the dough needs some oxygen at this stage) and let rest at room temperature (which was 65°F on that day). According to the book, the dough will rise and collapse within about two hours but I suppose it depends on the season and how warm your house is. In my case, after two hours it was going nowhere fast. In fact, it took almost 24 hours to rise
  4. Once it had more than doubled and looked like it could do no more, I put it in the fridge, tightly covered this time
  5. The authors suggest using the dough within a five-day period: accordingly I used two-thirds of  it on Day 3 and will use the rest by Day 5. Following their instructions, I dusted the surface of the dough with flour. Then I scooped out 600 g of dough which I divided in two. I loosely shaped two boules which I let rest at room temperature on a floured countertop, covered with a plastic sheet
  6. After thirty minutes I shaped one piece of dough as a bâtard and the other one as a boule and I sent them to rise on a board covered with flour-dusted parchment paper. I placed the board inside a large sealed plastic bag, put a space heater in the little laundry room (which doubles as my bakery) so that the room temp rose to about 73°F and I waited. The loaves took over two hours to proof (rise). (You know they are ready to bake when they jiggle as you gently shake the board.) At a lower room temperature, the process might have been even longer
  7. Meanwhile I had preheated the oven (equipped with a baking stone) at 350°F. Before sliding the loaves onto the baking stone, I brushed them with a bit of melted butter and sprinkled them with pearl sugar
  8. I baked the loaves for 50 minutes (a good way to know when they are baked through is to take them out, hold them upside down and knock on the bottom with your knuckles. If they give a hollow sound, they are done. If not, bake a while longer)
  9. I let them cool overnight on a rack before slicing one of them open.

For those of you who are using BreadStorm (including the free version), please click on this link to import the formula so that you can scale it up or down as desired.

Meet the Baker: Guillaume Viard

Guillaume Viard is a baker with a mission and it is not in the least surprising that his bakery, Le Pain par nature, should gleam like a beacon on Rue Cavallotti, an otherwise rather gray street in Paris’ eighteenth arrondissement.

Customer education begins in the window:


(All our ingredients are fresh and seasonal and all our products are “home-made”). 

“People need to learn to live within the Earth’s finite resources, they need to pay attention to the weather, to the climate. Once a crop is all in, that’s it for the year. In the fall, we use apples and pears in our tarts and cakes, in the winter, lemon, chocolate, caramel and apples (they keep well); in March, we work with dried fruit. Then spring arrives, bringing back first strawberries, then apricots. When someone asks for a fraisier (a fresh strawberry cake) in December, we explain why it can’t be done. Our sandwiches and other snack food follow the seasons as well. We offer thick vegetable pies in the fall when varietal diversity is at its peak. As soon as tomato season is over in France, grated raw root vegetables (carrots, beets) or céleri rémoulade (grated celeriac in a mustardy mayo dressing) replace tomato slices in our sandwiches. New customers are baffled. We explain. That’s when consumer education happens. Some will never learn, they go elsewhere. Most stay. We have lots of students, many families, old people who are the pillars of our community. Some come three or four times a day: for croissants in the morning, for a salad or a quiche at lunch, for bread at any time.” Listening to Guillaume (who, while talking to me non-stop in the bakery’s kitchen, is also hand-mixing mayonnaise and chopping and grating vegetables for salads and sandwiches), I feel a sudden longing for a life where I too might be able to stop four times a day by my neighborhood bakery…
The bakery gets its flour from Moulin Trottin, a mill whose owner largely shares Guillaume’s outlook on territoriality and the environment: the flours Guillaume buys from him are all French and all organic. He shuns such exotic grains as kamut and quinoa: “They come from too far away. Using these flours makes no sense economically-, biologically- or environmentally-speaking. So we do without. Besides wheat, the flour we use the most is petit-épeautre, also called engrain (emmer). Grown in central France (the one from Provence is too expensive) and rich in minerals, it is redolent of our terroir français.  Since it is low in gluten and absorbs a lot of water, we have developed a special formula and technique to make the best possible use of its characteristics and to showcase its unique flavor. It is quite popular with our customers.”

“We use no grand-épeautre (spelt) at all. It is too close to wheat, especially in gluten-content, to be of much nutritional interest.” Guillaume stops chopping for a minute. “Gluten intolerance is a modern ailment, a direct result of wheat selection which has consistently favored high-gluten varieties: today wheat can contain up to forty-three percent gluten. Twenty years ago, the percentage was twenty-five percent. There is naturally much less gluten in ancient wheat varieties, such as the ones that are currently being reintroduced in some parts of southern France.” His face takes on a slightly mournful expression: “I guess gluten-free baking has a future in this country, sort of.” Chopping resumes at a faster rythm.

The loudspeakers are going full blast in the shop and kitchen; Guillaume and Suat, his sale associate, are moving briskly. It is mid-morning. Their shift has started early but not as early as Luc’s, who is nevertheless still busy downstairs in the bread lab. The phone rings, the greengrocer is on the line. Guillaume, who is dexterously filling mini-tubs with the salad he just made, wedges the phone between cheek and shoulder and places an order from a list seemingly embedded whole in his memory: “Flat parsley, Reine de Reinettes and Golden apples, leaf celery, eggs, etc.” He goes on and on. The seller is a cooperative of producers and everything is organic.
I ask about dried fruit and nuts. “We buy organic French walnuts. I’d love to buy French hazelnuts as well but we just don’t produce enough. The best hazelnuts come from Italy. Unfortunately ninety percent of Italian hazelnuts are gobbled up by a huge industrial confectioner. ” He shakes his head: “And that’s how the best hazelnuts in the world end up in the worst candy in the world. ” He looks dejected for a minute but he soon brightens up: “Right now I am looking for a producer of AOC chestnut flour in Corsica but this year’s crop isn’t completely in yet. I have to wait. Meanwhile I use the Markal brand. My rule is to go as close to home as possible to buy the best I can find: almonds from Spain, hazelnuts, figs and apricots from Turkey.”

One thing is for sure: no truck ever lumbers up to Le Pain par nature to delivers frozen pastries and viennoiseries; no order is ever placed for strawberries from Spain, Africa or South America or from anywhere but France, for that matter; mangoes, pineapples, sesame seeds and pistachios never darken the door. Ninety-two percent of the fruit and vegetables used at the bakery is grown in France and organic. Milk and eggs are organic too. But, Guillaume explains, “Organic is becoming a business, and nowadays the only organic butter available in France comes from Holland. It makes no sense to use Dutch butter when we ourselves make the best possible butter for our croissants!” So he buys Montaigu, a conventional AOC butter from Charentes-Poitou.

Suat Adiyaman, Luc Poggio and Guillaume Viard

Among the breads, the best-seller is the Tradi-bio (a naturally leavened baguette with a crunchy crust, a fine crumb and a good shelf-life) closely followed by the Bioguette (a yeasted baguette with a shorter fermentation time).  Bio (short for biologique), means “organic.”





Among the special breads on offer on this particular morning, I spy the Cambrousse, a country bread…

…the Pain des champs…

… and a few glorious miches…

I also spy also viennoiseries such as the airy chausson aux pommes below (filled with homemade applesauce)…

…the friand maison (a house pâté made with ground meat -veal, beef and chicken- and fresh herbs)…

…or crumbly pains au chocolat aux amandes (twice-baked chocolate almond croissants)…

Despite using all organic ingredients (save for butter, oil and vinegar), Guillaume and Luc keep their prices reasonably competitive. The Bioguette goes for one euro (a non-organic baguette costs an average of € 0.85 in Paris,  € 0.95 in the neighborhood) and the Tradi-Bio for € 1.20 (against an average of € 1.10 for a conventional baguette tradition in Paris, € 1.15 in the neighborhood). Sandwiches and salads are a bit more pricey than elsewhere, reflecting the added cost of the ingredients but they still fly off the shelves. “People come for the taste. They may grumble about the price but they come back.” Guillaume hands a stack of covered salad containers to Suat who takes them into the shop. Noon is fast approaching, the lunch crowd will soon arrive, re-stocking is in-order.

Full trays of just baked snacks are waiting to be displayed…



Roullos made with rolled out tradibio dough smothered with organic ham and cheese
sometimes made instead with julienned veggies or shredded chicken and cheese

“Our customers understand that everything we sell is made in-house. But it took a while for that to sink in. Take the croissants! After years of eating frozen industrial croissants (the bakery’s previous owners didn’t make their own), they were a bit put out by the fact that the shape of ours varied slightly from one batch to the next. We had to explain that our croissants were hand-made by Luc, an artisan, not by a machine! Now they know and they no longer notice.”
Guillaume met Luc at La Boulangerie par Véronique Mauclerc, an organic bakery which I remember visiting it a few years ago, awed by the diversity and flavor of the offerings. (For a picture of Guillaume in front of Mauclerc’s woodfire oven, one of only three still in existence in Paris, click here). There is pride in his voice when he adds: “I trained him myself. Now he runs our bread lab.”
As for Guillaume, he started as an apprentice in a bakery in Central France (where he is from). Sadly the boss never allowed him to touch anything but a broom and a mop and he spent his days cleaning the floor. So he joined Les Compagnons du Devoir, became a baker, did the customary Tour de France, and after trying his hand at pastry, cooking, and other trades went back to bread when hired by Veronique Mauclerc. “Not only did I learn a lot from her about organic baking but she also taught me self-reliance. At one point though we found ourselves disagreeing about some fundamental choices and we parted ways. I went down South to get my driver’s license and started thinking about the bakery I was dreaming of opening one day. I worked a bit for Eric Kayser, a fellow Compagnon and my then-idol (I learned a great deal from his three textbooks). Then Luc and I decided to become partners. It took us more than two years to put the project together: a year and a half to write the business plan, six months to find financing then a year to locate the bakery we wanted.  We found our current premises (where a bakery has been continuously in operation since 1904) through word-of-mouth. There were many other interested buyers but the owners liked us from the get-go. So they sold to us. We opened on November 5, 2012 and did well right away: sales volume increased by 50 to 60% the first year compared to the sellers’ turnover of the year before (to be fair, they weren’t getting any younger and didn’t have their heart in it anymore). Most of their customers stayed with us. Le Pain par nature is a neighborhood bakery and we love it that way.”

Guillaume is very proud of the fact that he won tenth place earlier this year for his tarte aux pommes (apple tart) in a Paris-wide competition. “I was raised in rural France and we grew most of our food. All organic of course. We knew no other way. I still do everything the way we used to. For instance, I make my crème pâtissière (pastry cream) from a recipe given to me by a great-aunt. I don’t change a thing.” When he was a child, he baked cakes every Sunday, so when he joined the Compagnons, he was hoping to become a boulanger-pâtissier (bread baker/pastry chef) but admission was based on competitive exams and “I could only apply to one. I picked ‘boulanger‘ because the trades were listed in alphabetical order and it was the first to come up. I have no regrets: pastry is a very rigorous and technical craft. That’s not who I am. I work on instinct, on feeling. But I still like pastry. Although maybe I like cooking even more.”
Le Pain par nature is a different kind of business: “We chose to make it a cooperative, which means that the focus is on the business itself, not on the capital. We are required by law to keep it growing as opposed to getting the most money out of it and, again by law, we cannot be anything but salaried employees. Right now the bakery officially has two employees, Luc and myself. Suat – who is a landscape artist by trade – came on board at a later stage, when the company he worked for went out of business. He is expected to soon become a partner.”
“We all share the same ideas. Luc was born in Paris but he is keenly aware that organic is the way of the future. Our dream is actually to one day open an école de boulange (a baking school), maybe in my childhood home if we can swing it as it is fairly large and comes with a fruit and vegetable garden. We would just need to build a classroom. We would adopt a holistic approach and teach all aspects of the trade: working with organic ingredients only, we would make sure the apprentices know where everything comes from. They would grow the produce they would use. We would build a mill to help them understand flour. They need to see by themselves that wheat requires time, technique and terroir to grow, that the land has its own nature, origin and history, that life has meaning and that bread is alive. We’d seek accreditation but we couldn’t get it, we could remain a private trade school: our graduates would just have to sit for the public exam to obtain their official diplomas. Whether or not we ever open our dream school one day, we already live and work by our principles and I like to think that our bakery is twenty years ahead of our times.”
I close my notebook and Guillaume selects a well-baked Tradi-bio among those which have just come out of the oven. He hands it to me. It makes a lovely crackling sound: “Taste it later when it has cooled down a bit”. I already know that it will taste just the way it looks, as an honest to goodness baguette, ready to play second fiddle to whatever tasty food will be put on the table but whose crust and crumb make it ideal for that most cherished goûter (afternoon snack) of my childhood: bread with a bar of chocolate inside. The torch is passing to a new generation and it is a lovely feeling.

BreadStorm: a quick update on the free version

When I first wrote about BreadStorm (see my post here), the free version only allowed the user to scale formulas downloaded from the BreadStorm formula page or received as a .bun file (BreadStorm format) from another baker. With the new free version, you can experiment creating a formula. That should make it easier to decide whether or not the software is right for you.
To find out more, you might want to check BreadStorm’s FAQ page.

Meet the Apprentice: Loïc Pinel

When I saw Loïc for the first time,  he was only a blur walking up and down the opposite aisle from where we sat in an Air France wide-bodied jet traveling from Paris to Seattle. Since he was one of two flight attendants in charge of the side of the cabin across from ours and I slept or read most of the way, I don’t recall even really noticing him. But as luck would have it, our friends Larry Lowary and Gerry Betz from Tree-Top Baking were seated on that side (the four of us were on the same flight home from Europain 2012). They struck up a conversation with Loïc and his colleague Xavier. One thing led to another and they ended up inviting them to come and visit them the next day at their Whidbey Island home and bakery. Loïc fell under the spell of what he could glimpse of their baking life and declared himself eager to discover more.
Larry and Gerry invited him to come back and spend a week with them at the bakery. For various reasons, that didn’t happen until early December when Christmas baking was in full swing. Gerry was making kringles and I went over to observe him and to meet their guest. Cheerful and easy going, I liked him instantly and we soon found ourselves chatting away like a pair of old friends.
When he went back to France to resume flying around the world, we remained in touch via Facebook, which is how I found out, a few months later, that he was contemplating a career switch: he had applied to the baking program at Ferrandi, possibly France’s most prestigious trade school, and had been accepted (one of ten successful candidates out of a hundred). My head spinning from this turn of events (I knew he loved his job as a flight attendant), I asked Loïc what had brought it about. He replied immediately: “My chance encounter with the Whidbey bakers on that flight from Paris” (a flight which, incidentally, was the last direct Air France flight on that route). As to the timing of his decision, he attributes it to two tragedies that struck too close for comfort: the crash of Air France flight 447 out of Rio in June 2009 (which killed passengers and crew) and the Newtown shooting of last December in which we lost our six-year old grandson. Loïc had only met me one week earlier. The message was clear: life was too unpredictable to postpone one’s dreams.
When I arrived in Paris last month, Loïc was nearing the mid-point of a sixteen-week training program at the end of which he would obtain his CAP boulanger (certificate of professional competence as a bread baker). To say that he is happy with his training would be a serious understatement. He loves the fact that the group is small (ten apprentices), that he is constantly learning new doughs and techniques and that the instructor, Christophe Moussu, is the kindest and most patient of teachers (“la gentillesse et la patience incarnées”), always ready with a helping hand. With twenty-five years of experience in bread and pastry, Mr. Moussu is both a master baker and a pastry chef. He’s passionate about teaching: “I want the apprentices to develop a real feel for the dough,” but he knows that right now they are just playing at being bakers. No amount of schooling will replace work in an actual bakery where they will have to contend with a rigorous production schedule and where nobody will be holding their hands.

On a cloudy Parisian morning, Mr. Moussu fitted me with a white jacket and snuck me inside his lab for a quick peek at what the trainees were doing.


Under this particular program, the apprentices study at the school from September to December (their training is mostly hands-on but also include a full day of theory per week plus weekly classes in hygiene, security, risk prevention and business law), complete a fourteen-to-sixteen-week internship in a bakery from January to April, come back to the school in May for two weeks of review and take the final exam in June. Having opted for an additional three-week of pastry training, Loïc should be done with school by the end of July 2014.
There is no risk and no cost involved for him in this exploration of a possible new career path: Air France is picking up the tab of his training under FONGECIF (a fund to which companies are required to contribute to finance time-off for training purposes) and he is still being paid his salary. When done with school, he will go back to Air France where his job is being kept open for him. He won’t have to leave the company unless he wants to.
When we met for lunch after school, I asked Loïc: “Why bread?” He replied: “Initially, it wasn’t so much bread per se. What drove me was the keen desire to feed others. But my faith is important to me and I am aware of strong religious connotations (Christ broke a bread open and handed pieces of it to his disciples and said: “This is my body”). Also, bread is part and parcel of the French cultural identity and I feel deeply French.” He added: “Passion isn’t in my nature, so I can’t say I am passionate about bread. It’d be more accurate to say that I am fascinated. When I watched Larry and Gerry at work in their bakery, I had no idea why they were doing what they were doing. But I liked what they had me do. I remember their printing formulas for me. I had no clue how to use them. Now it is all coming together. That’s a great feeling.”
Loïc thought some more and amended what he had just said: “In fact I do have a passion and that’s for learning through experience. I loved my job at Air France. But I have done it now for fifteen years and time has come to discover something new. What I truly appreciate about the bakers I have met so far is that they care deeply about sharing their knowledge and expertise. They are bonnes pâtes.” (A bonne pâte, literally a “good dough”, is an affectionate expression designating a good person.) “They have instilled in me love and respect for le travail du pain (dough handling) and I have found out at school that I greatly enjoy shaping and creating beautiful breads. Also, when I helped Larry and Gerry sell at the market, I witnessed the strength of the bonds they have forged with the community over the years. I want that. I want to settle down somewhere, feed people and get to know them. Some bakers say that you need to be passionate about bread to work the required long hours and exhausting shifts. I don’t see it that way. I am a people person. My hard work will go towards building the customer base that will be my reward. To answer your initial question, bread may be what will carry the day for me but if it turns out to be something else entirely, so be it.”


(Above photos reproduced with Loïc’s kind permission)

After I left, as I was walking towards the métro, I got a call from Loïc on my cell phone asking me to come back to the fournil (the lab). He sounded mysterious, I headed back and he came out into the courtyard to meet me, holding a gigantic bag of croissant-dough bats (Halloween was coming up) that he had forgotten to give me. He had made them himself.

He warned me not to eat them all by myself. So, in the spirit of sharing and because I was headed next to meet a friend who works for the Paris Opéra ballet company, I re-gifted most of the bats to dancers and ballerinas. When I later told Loïc, he said it was a great idea because ballet dancers were in a perfect position to work these buttery bats off. I did save one for each of us. They were sinful and since I am not a ballerina, I am indeed glad I ate only one. But they were delicious. Merci, Loïc !

Early fall in Western Washington State

We had a friend from France staying with us last month and since she had never set foot in the Northwest, we took her sightseeing. Her visit coincided with some medical events for me though, so that all we could take were short day trips. She nevertheless fell in love with what she saw and said she wished more people in France and across the world knew that there was more to the United States than soaring glass towers, plastic-wrapped food, urban blight and gun violence.
On this day which marks the ten-month anniversary of one of my adopted country’s darkest moments, a horrific event which claimed the lives of twenty first-graders, including our grandson, and of six of the grown-ups working at their school, I want to share some of the light of this other America. I don’t remember whether or not our little grandson liked beets (probably not although he was rather adventurous taste-wise), but he loved bread (with no butter on it), garlic, pumpkins and butterflies, and he loved color.  He also greatly enjoyed walking the drift logs when he visited the beach in West Seattle. These images are for him.