Farine

Meet the Baker: Gérard Rubaud

Having met with several artisan bakers over the past year and a half (since I retired from my other life), I am ready to vouch that they are a breed apart. They exhibit none of the greyness, sameness, run-of-the-mill-ness which seems to fall like a cloak over many of us as we grow up. They come out as real characters, intense, focused and passionate.Now are they bakers because they are passionate? Or passionate because they are bakers? Or both?
To borrow a phrase from George Stapledon as quoted by Andrew Whitney in Bread Matters: The State of Modern Bread and a Definitive Guide to Baking Your Own, bread which, at its most elementary, comes from the soil, has the “ability to enliven”. It is alive (or it was before it went into the oven) and it needs to be coaxed into being. To my mind here lies the challenge and with it, the kindle that fires the baker’s soul.

But all bakers are not created alike. Some are always on the lookout for new techniques, others wax poetic on the music of the cooling loaves, others yet talk about their wild yeast starter or levain as if it were their favorite child or their most valuable asset. French baker Gérard Rubaud, from Gérard’s Breads of Tradition in Westford, Vermont, is and does all of that and more.
More than an artisan (although he is that too, definitely), he is an artist who plays his levain with the same dexterity and virtuosity as Yehudi Menuhin played the violin. With minute changes in temperature, fermentation times and hydration rates, he gets a wide array of subtle flavors, giving his bread a complexity that most bakers can only dream of. He is the prince of aromas.
No wonder the ten stores he supplies locally – among them City Market in downtown Burlington, Healthy Living in South Burlington and Richmond Cornermarket in Richmond as well as CSA Intervale – can never stock enough of his fragrant loaves.

Gérard sees the baker as a poet, not a movie star. Calm and solitude are the two ingredients that feed his creativity. As he works, he alternates between silence, music and Radio-Canada’s ad-free nightly broadcast of programs from France and other French-speaking countries. A fervent believer in simplicity as the road to excellence, he makes only one dough but strives for perfection. He wants each of his loaves to carry the bouquet which is his signature. The aromas which waft up from his mixers when he mixes either the firm levain or the final dough are heavenly. I could get totally hooked on them. I wish there were a way I could reproduce them for this blog!

Apprenticed as a baker at the age of 13, Gérard got his baking & pastry diploma (CAP or “certificat d’études professionnelles en boulangerie-pâtisserie”) early on.

(In this videoclip, Gérard explains that the exam was a competitive one and that, as indicated on his diploma, he won first place. When he was young, it was more important for him to win first place than to get the diploma itself. As he added a few minutes later off-camera, in each district the youngster who won first place was awarded a trip to Paris financed by a major margarine manufacturer!)
However, when he was a youngster, the mountains held more appeal for him than bread (although he vividly remembers the fragrance of the huge loaves baked each week at the mountain farm where he was sheltered during World War II). He skied in the winter and mountaineered in the summer, while working as a baker to finance these two hobbies, a way of life he reproduced later on when he was a member of the French national ski team in the winter and took tourists on tours of the Mont-Blanc in the summer. He soon became a ski racing coach as well but then he got married and his life changed.
He started working for Rossignol, the French ski manufacturer, and from then on devoted his enthusiasm and energy to making sure the racers had the best possible skis to help them win. He sees a lot of similarities between the job he did then and the one he does now. Then as now, he strove for excellence. Working closely with the racers, he also developed invaluable communication skills which serve him well today in his relationship with his students.
For Gérard isn’t satisfied with producing the best possible bread. He also wants to make sure his knowledge of the levain is passed on to the next generation. To that effect, he takes on students (usually bakery owners or instructors in baking schools and culinary institutes from the world over) whom he coaches on the intricacies of what is commonly called “sourdough baking”, a misnomer in Gérard’s case as his bread is anything but sour.
His classes run 5 or 6 days and the price ($2350) includes room and board as well as some small tools he sees not only as necessary but as most valuable for the baker (a manual grinder for the grain fed to the levain, a small thermometer and a small scale). He only takes about 2 students a month, unless they come in a pair. Then he might take four (there is a discount for pairs). He likes teaching partners because, working in shifts, they may find a way to keep their bakery open 7/7, something he sees as a social duty for a village baker. He did it himself for a while but there was only one of him and the relentless pace almost killed him. Since the stroke he suffered in March 2004 (which left him paralyzed for 5 months and unable to work for more than a year), he limits himself to making bread 5 days a week.

Manual grinder used by Gérard to mill flour for his levain
(Can be found online at Lehman’s Hardware – reference number: 30347120)

What brought Gérard from the steep slopes of his native Savoie to the gentle hills of Vermont? It is a long story. Suffice it to say that he went quickly up the corporate ladder at Rossignol and ended up as president of the company’s North-American division. The job took him to Vermont when the ski giant built a factory in the state. He and his family thrived there for a dozen years or so but at age 47, he decided that time had come to do something else with his life. After a brief stint as the owner of a restaurant and vacuum-cooking facility, he went back to his first profession and opened up a bakery on a large tract of land he had purchased near Burlington.

He set it up on the model of an 18th century French bakery, working from old engravings to have a local carpenter and a woodworking buff he knew from his restaurant days reproduce the equipment commonly found at the time, save for the mixers which, while old, obviously do not predate electricity! By opting for old-fashioned equipment, he wasn’t trying to be quaint or to make a statement. He just chose what he deemed best for bread and in his opinion, wood is best because it allows the dough to breathe without perspiring.

Bakery illustration from Diderot’s mid-eighteenth century encyclopedia
(found here on the Web)

Gérard has built two wood-fire ovens with the help of a local bricklayer but although the smaller one (designed for week-end use before he went back to baking full-time) is in good working order, it cannot handle the number of loaves he needs to produce daily (around 170). The large one weighs 50 tons and if shut off, needs ten and a half day to come back to the point where it is hot enough to bake bread.
Gérard uses the wood from his woods (mostly maple) which a forester selects and a lumberman cuts down for him, paying close attention to environmental and aesthetic issues. Since landscaping is another of his passions (and he did a great job around the bakery and the main house), he is not likely to overlook these two considerations.

When I arrived at Gérard’s bakery, night was falling and he was feeding the levain, using a blend of all-purpose flour (which he says doesn’t count, flavor-wise, but acts as a filler) and one third each of whole grain wheat, rye and spelt which he had ground less than thirty minutes before, using a manual grinder, and then sifted. In his experience, using freshly milled flour is not only the best but also the only way to capture most of the wild yeasts packed in the kernel. He has also found that using an electrical grinder produces a coarser flour which is less propitious to yeast growth in the levain.
Gérard mixed the levain with the freshly milled flour blend, some all-purpose flour and water in the old Hobart which he uses only for this purpose (it wouldn’t be gentle enough for the dough).

Here is the levain after the first feeding:

and seven hours later:

Before mixing the final dough, Gérard grinds a larger quantity of whole wheat, spelt and rye berries (using an electric grinder this time) to add additional layers of flavor to his bread. He does it right before mixing a new batch to make sure most of the wild yeasts will still be present.

When the levain is ripe, Gérard mixes these just-milled flours, all-purpose flour and water in the big mixer, then lets the whole thing rest for 30 to 40 minutes (autolyse). The process helps develop the gluten, making it possible to reduce mixing time later (thus preserving the flavors). Then he adds the levain and the salt.

The mixer is a sixty-year old German machine on which Gérard has disabled the second speed setting (to make sure his students will not be tempted to use it). It continuously folds the dough, reproducing the baker’s age-old gesture. There is something serene about the way it works and watching the dough slowly come together is a real pleasure. In the above videoclip, Gérard is cutting up some of the ripe levain for the first batch of dough and adding it to the “autolysed” (fully hydrated) flour while the Hobart is mixing the remainder for the next one. (A portion of the levain is always reserved from one feeding to the next).

After the mixing, the dough goes into the big wooden box for the first fermentation (which can last up to 4 hours). It is poured from the box onto the bench and folded when the box is required for the next batch:

After another resting period comes the weighing…

…and the pre-shaping:

Then Gérard gives the bread its final shape:

…and lets it proof (ferment) for up to three hours depending on the temperature inside the bakery and the quality of the levain. He uses 35% levain for 100% flour (except when it is cold out, then he uses more levain) but he says he would have a slightly different approach if he worked with a partner. Right now he does whatever is needed to give him enough time to mix and bake two or three successive batches by himself without running the risk of overproofing the dough.

When the time comes to put the bread in the oven, he scores it delicately, holding the blade sideways so as not to get deep “ears” which he says distract from the taste.

Gérard adds steam then the loaves bake for 30 to 40 minutes at around 450 F/230C (the oven is hotter though for the first batch).

The goal of the first fermentation is to develop the flavors while the second one (the proofing) creates the gas. A good hydration rate (Gérard goes for 78-79% but tries to get as close to 80% as the flour will allow) combined with a good quality levain helps produce the airy crumb which characterizes a country bread.

A good levain has a delicate and complex flavor, it must taste like a ripe pear or peach. The only way for the baker to get these aromas is to control the production of acids. Gérard feeds his levain every five hours, which means that he never sleeps more than five hours at a stretch or leaves the bakery for longer than that. When he needs to go away for a few days, he dries it up. Exceptionally he may put it in the fridge for 12 hours at a time (but then he makes sure the temperature never goes below 46 degrees F/8 Celsius) to avoid losing some tasty acids.
Gérard says jokingly that he is a slave to his levain but almost in the same breath, he says that what he loves about his job is that it is constraint-free. I suspect he doesn’t see what he does as a job. It is his life, his “raison-d’être”. He shares his days and nights with Jojo and Bibi, his two black labs who seem to love bread with the same passion. They never come close either to the dough or to the loaves (they even act as though they didn’t exist) but the minute they hear the crunch of the bread knife in the kitchen, they rush in, sit and wait, tongue lolling, eyes shining. They always get a slice. Clever puppies!

Interestingly Gérard renews his levain regularly (every 4 to 5 weeks, sometimes 6 in the summer and every three months in the winter) as he finds it impossible to control the acids otherwise. He never uses high-protein flour (which, he says, is useful to make car tires, not bread) and he is a firm believer in the nutritional properties of wild yeasts as opposed to commercial yeast.
Today he is living his dream, which is to make it possible for people to eat real bread at an affordable price (his breads – which are sold for 24 oz – weigh closer to 26 and they are sold for less than 5 dollars) and to coax out of his levain the complex and heart-warming flavors he remembers from his childhood.
Considering the tastiness of his bread and the enthusiasm with which it is received, I’d say: “Once a champion always a champion! The former topnotch skier and racing coach extraordinaire is today a world class baker”. I would even go as far as to say that he is in a league of his own…

One dough: three breads

Having bought a huge bag of red onions at Costco to make Kathy’s Asiago-Onion Bread, I had to use up these pungent bulbs, right? No sense in letting them go to waste. So after French onion soup, onion omelet, and so forth, I decided to go all out for onion bread.
For the dough I turned to Nancy Silverton’s Italian Ring Bread in her book, Breads from La Brea Bakery as I had already used that recipe for fougasse last summer and I remembered loving it. Try it! You’ll see. It is soft, smooth and flexible and incredibly forgiving. So much so that even though I had dimpled the foccacia all over and it was weighed down by onions and goat chesse, half of it sprang back up in the oven like the throbbing throat of a demented frog…
And best of all, this dough is so versatile, the same batch can yield very different breads:

Onion Twist

Goat-cheese Onion Foccacia

Poppy-seed Wreath

Please note that this is a two-day dough and that there is no onion in the wreath.
Ingredients:
For the sponge
254 g cool water (70F/21C)
57 g mature white starter
227 g unbleached all-purpose flour
For the final dough
556 g cold water (55F/13C)
5 g instant dry yeast
the whole sponge
1136 g unbleached all-purpose flour
25 g salt
54 g extra-virgin olive oil
Other
3 big onions, peeled, sliced and cooked in two spoonfuls of olive oil until caramelized
40 g important parmesan cheese, freshly grated
60 g fresh goat cheese (if desired, for the foccacia)
Poppy seeds for the wreath (optional)
extra-virgin olive oil (for brushing)
Freshly ground black pepper (optional)

Method:

The day before baking, make a sponge by placing water, white starter and flour in a mixing bowl and stirring with a spatula
Cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap and let the dough ferment overnight at room temperature
The day of the baking, place water and yeast in the bowl of a mixer. Uncover the sponge and add it to the yeast mixture, along with the flour
Mix the dough on low speed for 4 minutes
Cover the dough with a proofing cloth and allow it to rest in the bowl about 20 minutes (autolyse)
Add the salt and continue mixing on medium speed for 4 minutes, scraping the dough down the sides of the bowl as necessary with a rubber spatula
Add the olive oil and mix on medium speed until incorporated and desired dough temperature (74-78 F/23-26C) is reached
Remove the dough from the mixing bowl. It should feel soft and resilient. Mix it for a few minutes by hand on a lightly floured work surface
Place in oiled bowl, cover tightly with plastic wrap and let ferment at room temperature until doubled in volume, about 3 hours (mine fermented for one hour at room temperature last night then it went into the fridge overnight)
Preheat the oven to 450F/232C one hour before baking
Uncover the dough and turn it onto a lightly floured surface
Stretch it lightly into a rectangle, dust it with flour and divide it into four equal pieces (each of mine weighed around 570 g)
Pre-shape as 4 balls and let rest, covered, for about 20 minutes
Shape as 4 balls and let proof for 40 minutes, covered
To make the twists, flatten two of the balls into rectangles with a rolling pin, snip 2 inch-strips on the long sides of the rectangles, spread the cooled onions in the middle, dust with parmesan cheese (if desired, use some freshly ground black pepper as well)
Fold the strips onto the middle, forming a braided pattern
Brush with olive oil and bake for 35 minutes (with steam the first ten minutes). Check at half-time to make sure the loaves are not browning too quickly. If you feel that’s the case, tent some foil over them
While the onion twists are baking, uncover one of the two remaining balls, flatten it lightly and using your elbow as a cutter, make a hole in the middle. Widen the hole with your fingers and gently set the crown to rest, covered, on a semolina-dusted piece of parchment paper
Take the last ball, flatten it gently with your hands, dimple it all around, brush with olive oil, dimple again and spread with caramelized onions and crumbled goat cheese (add freshly ground pepper if desired)
Set the foccacia to continue proofing, covered, next to the crown until the twists come out of the oven
When the oven is ready, lightly spray the wreath with water, then dust it with poppy seeds and snip with scissors all around to form the design
Bake the wreath and the focaccia at 450F/232C for 35 minutes, with steam the first 10 minutes. Check after 15 minutes to make sure neither of them is browning too fast (you may want to tent some foil over the focaccia at one point to prevent the onions from becoming too dark. I didn’t do it and I should have)
Rotate if necessary to ensure even baking
Let cool on a wire rack before eating

I can’t slice the wreath open as I am giving it to a friend, so I won’t know what its crumb is like but isn’t the difference between the crumb of the twist and that of the foccacia rather striking? Same dough, different handling and shaping and very very different results.

Twist crumb

Foccacia crumb

But then, it’s a good thing, isn’t? If not, the onion/parmesan filling would have ended up in our lap!

All these breads go to Susan, from Wild Yeast, for Yeastpotting.

Levain

Since I often get asked about levain, I thought I would post this brief recap. If you have other questions, don’t hesitate to let me know and I’ll research the answer to the best of my abilities.

Stained-glass window(13th century) in the Chartres Cathedral

Levain, a.k.a as wild yeast starter, natural leaven or sourdough, is a culture of flour and water used to leaven bread dough. Unlike baker’s yeast which is industrially processed, wild yeasts occur naturally in the kernel of wheat, rye, or spelt or other cereal. Dormant until activated by water and kept reasonably warm, when awakened “they feed on the sugars converted from flour carbohydrate by the action of the enzymes (also naturally occurring)” (Whitley, Bread Matters), producing gas (which raises the bread) and alcohol (which gives it flavor).
Levain has been around for centuries: everybody has heard or read the story of the Egyptian baker who forgot a batch of dough somewhere warm and came back to see it considerably inflated. Being of the waste-not/want-not persuasion, he baked it anyway and found out that it had a delicious taste and great shelf-life.
This may well be a legend but the Roman writer, Pliny the Elder (who lived in the first century) does mention in one of his books (Book XVIII) that the Gauls – ancestors to the modern French – maintained their levain by feeding it brewer’s yeast and that their bread was consequently much lighter than the bread made by other nations (I love that story as it seems to imply that the French are genetically predisposed to making good bread. I wish!).
Being a mixture of flour and water, the levain is basically a dough. However, thanks to successive feedings (with various proportions of flour and water), it develops an active microbial flora from the micro-organisms present in the flour. Bacteria – which are also present – are kept in check by the production of lactic and acetic acids. It is when microbial activity is at its most intense and becomes stabilized that this “dough” is used to leaven other dough.
Levains can be firm (50% hydration) or liquid, sometimes very liquid (up to 200% hydration). The lower the hydration rate, the slower the fermentation and the more leeway and control the baker has. In the old days, levains were mostly firm.
Ruth Allman remembers in her endearing book, Alaska Sourdough, that “while mushing on the trail with the temperature flirting below zero, [her husband] Jack would put some sourdough in an old Prince Albert tobacco can. This he tucked inside the pocket of his woolshirt to make certain it would not freeze”.
She also remembers the old prospector who “buried his sourdough in the top of his sack of flour – warm and safe. When he arrived at camp, many times he only added flour and water to make the right quantity and consistency, without taking the sourdough from the flour sack. Saved a dish when no dish was available”.
Ruth Allman goes on to say that when the first attempt was made to climb Mt Mc Kinley, the expedition carried the starter on top of the flour too. “To make sourdoughs (sic), they poured the glacial water – heavy with silt – and made the dough right in the flour sack. Then rolled the sourdough on the end of a stick and baked in front of an open fire”.
I love all these stories but nowadays levains live a more sedate life. They usually ferment peacefully in the corner of a bakery or kitchen until called to action.
There has been a lot of brouhaha around levain in the past few years, so much so that some home bakers are weary of trying their hand at it. In my experience (and heaven knows that I was a complete greenfoot, levain-wise, when I started my first one in the mid-90’s ), it is fairly easy (not to mention exciting) to start and keep your own levain.
How-to’s abound both in books and on the Internet, so I am not going to add my grain of salt, as we say in French. I just want to say that you don’t need anything but flour and water. I never used grapes, apples, pineapple juice, milk or yogurt to start a culture although some home bakers have to good results (the idea being that the wild yeasts will feed on the sugar present in these ingredients and so be helped along).
I used the Nancy Silverton method (described in her book Breads from La Brea Bakery) but I skipped the grapes and it worked just fine. Go for it!

Pear & Roquefort Babycakes

The recipe for these delicious babycakes comes from Craquez pour les moëlleux salés!, by Isabel Brancq-Lepage, a yummy little book which I bought on my latest trip to France. I changed almost nothing, except that I used 30% white whole wheat flour instead of all all-purpose. Next time, I may even go 50 or 100% white whole wheat and see what happens.
Roquefort is an expensive cheese, I know. They used to carry it at my local Costco many many years ago but no more… Now I get it from time to time at Trader Joe’s as a special treat for the family (our 15-year old grand-daughter is crazy about it, especially when spread on a slice of baguette!).
To my mind, there is a special affinity between the taste of sheep milk and the taste of pear but other cheeses might work just as well. For instance, if I could find here Saint-Agur, a lovely blue cheese made from cow milk, I would definitely give it a try. Let me know if you experiment and come out with other flavor combinations.
The babycakes look like muffins but they contain no leaveners (no yeast, wild or otherwise, no baking powder and no baking soda). Yet they are airy and light. They are great for lunch with a green salad but, sliced, they are lovely for the apéritif with a glass of Prosecco and…they are quickly put together, which never hurts, especially during the work week.

Ingredients (for 9 babycakes)
1 firm pear
90 g Roquefort (or other blue cheese)
50 g grated Swiss cheese (I used Jarlsberg)
3 eggs
70 g unbleached all-purpose flour
30 g white whole wheat flour
20 g milk (I used unsweetened almond milk which is all I had)
20 g sliced roasted almonds (optional – chopped walnuts can also be used)
Pepper (according to taste) but no salt (the cheeses provide it, especially the Roquefort)

Method:

Pre-heat the oven to 410F/210 C
Beat the eggs as you would for an omelet in a big bowl, slowly add the sifted flours and whisk with a fork until incorporated
Heat the milk in a saucepan on the stovetop, add the Roquefort and the grated Swiss cheese, stirring with a wooden spoon until the cheeses melt
Let the milk-cheese mixture cool down a bit and slowly pour it in the flour-egg mixture
Stir well
Peel and slice the pear and dice it into the bowl
Pour the batter in the muffin tray, using liners if you like
Sprinkle almond slices on top
Put in the oven and bake for 20 minutes or until golden
Allow to cool before unmolding.

These babycakes go to Susan, fromWild Yeast, for Yeastpotting.

Baking with Whole Grains: a Jeff Hamelman workshop

…at the Baking Education Center in Norwich, Vermont.

I had been looking forward to this workshop for months and I wasn’t disappointed. Jeff is not only an amazing baker and a talented writer (which I knew already from his book Bread: a Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes) but also an excellent teacher. He is soft-spoken and kind and a pleasure to study with. But beware, his passion for good bread is catching. If you don’t have it when you arrive, you’ll be hooked by the time the workshop ends!
There were only five of us students which means that we had ample opportunities to ask questions and get answers and that we learned a lot not only from Jeff but from each other. What’s more, we had a lot of fun doing it.
We mixed and baked several formulas from the booklet we received upon arrival, such as…

Carrot Walnut Bread

Brown Rice Bread

Vollkornbrot

an all-rye bread for which we used this gorgeous starter:

(Jeff has had his rye starter for more than 26 years and during all this time, it has been fed twice a day, seven days a week. I wasn’t kidding when I said he was passionate about bread-making!)

Miche

Oatmeal Bread

..etc., as well as crackers and lavash (which I forgot to photograph) and Jeff gave us innumerable tips along the way such as:

How to check whether or not one has forgotten to put in the yeast (you take a little bit of your dough and you drop it in water. If it rises to the surface, the yeast is there)
How to calculate the friction factor for your mixer (click here for the answer)
What value should you give to the friction factor when you plan to do an autolyse (click here to find out)
How to determine if a preferment is ready or not (all preferments should dome and be about ready to collapse. If they are concave, then next time lower the water temperature, shorten the fermentation time, if possible, and/or use less yeast)
Never do an autolyse with a rye or a challah-type dough (rye dough wants to ferment quickly so the dough doesn’t over-acidify, hence an autolyse is unwarranted. And challah, an enriched and sweetened dough, wouldn’t benefit—it’s pretty highly mixed intentionally, so considerations about the carotenoids don’t apply)
How do you know when fresh yeast is really fresh (it should be crumbly and break open just as a fresh mushroom)
It is better to fold a weak dough (whole grain doughs are weak by definition) on the bench than inside a container (it gives it more strength), etc.

All this info is very valuable and I am glad to have it at hand but what I found personally most helpful is that, on the second day, Jeff had each of us devise a formula that would be used, on the third and final day, to mix and bake a 5 kg batch of dough.
We wrote out the formulas, made a list of ingredients and Michele (from the Baking Center) went shopping for us and brought back everything we needed. If you read this, Michele and Susan, thank you very much for your help as well as for the lovely meals!

Sandra made a beautiful pumpkin-sage bread…

Monesa’s contribution was a fragrant Roasted Red Pepper loaf…

Lori made lovely roasted butternut and onion loaves and rolls…

…and Bill contributed a scrumptious almond-cherry Celtic bread…

As for me, I baked a pear-cardamom-ginger bread…

…which I had made a few times before at home, always winging it (a pinch of this, a fistful of that) and which had always come out fine, maybe because I never made more than a 2-lb batch and knew exactly what to use and in what amount.
However writing down the formula was a different proposition and I am mortified to say that this time, the bread came out awful. We didn’t get to taste it at the Baking Center: since it was leavened with natural starter with no added yeast, it rose slowly and was baked last. Consequently it was still too hot to cut open when class ended and each of us just took a warm loaf home.
I don’t know what Jeff and the other students did with their loaves (I suspect they will be too kind to say) but I know mine went straight into the trashcan. It literally reeked of cardamom (a spice I normally love). When I make this bread at home, I use just one pinch but there, silly me, I went for 1%. I should have realized that it was way way too much but I didn’t stop to think.
What I like is that Jeff didn’t say: are you sure you are not going over with the percentage of ground cardamom? He didn’t even raise an eyebrow. He let me go on with the formula as I had written it and I am grateful that he did because now I know better than to eyeball percentages for assertive ingredients such as spices.
What I should have done is throw 5 pinches of cardamom in a bowl (since one pinch is fine for 5 times less dough), weigh the result, and then calculate the percentage. Believe me, next time I will. That bread is one of our favorites. I was planning to give it to the Man to take to the office when I got home and was very disappointed to have to throw it away (so was he, poor guy).
However I liked the way my miche Pointe-à-Callière came out. Small comfort, I know, but better than nothing…

And as soon as I am over the cardamom shock, I’ll make the bread again and post the recipe. It is really a good bread when you remember that your brain is one of the main ingredients!

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