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Crazy for Bread

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Teresa’s Mill Grain Loaf

My friend Teresa Greenway, of Northwest Sourdough, certainly needs no introduction.  Anyone who has ever researched sourdough baking on the web is familiar with her most informative website and companion blog (Discovering Sourdough) and may have experienced directly how prompt she is with advice and a helping hand when support is needed. But what you may not know if you haven’t checked back with her lately is that she has shared her journey and experience from fledgling apprentice to seasoned baker in an eponymous e-book, Discovering Sourdough, available from the Kindle Store at amazon.com. In the interest of complete transparency, let me add that Teresa never asked me to review her book and that she only learned I had bought it when I wrote to congratulate her and say I was planning to review it on Farine.
Divided in four volumes (Beginning Sourdough, Intermediate Sourdough, Advanced Sourdough A and Advanced Sourdough B) all available separately, the book covers everything you need to know about baking with wild yeast, from making your own starter(s) from different grains and at various hydration levels to mixing, folding and proofing your dough, then scoring your bread and baking it to golden perfection. Each volume contains recipes (22 in Beginning, 20 in Intermediate, 18 in Advanced A and 30 in Advanced B), all of them illustrated by photographs and listing the ingredients by volume, standard units, metric units and percentages.
Having the book on your mobile device is like having a teacher at your side ready to hold your hand every step of the way: for instance, in the Intermediate section, it explains in what order it is generally best to add the ingredients when mixing and suggests different possible solutions to the problem of keeping the dough warm enough when proofing; it also shows pictures of beautifully scored loaves and explains how the slash influences the direction the dough expands while baking.
The recipes range from easy or batter breads (Beginning) to complex motherdough  loaves (Advanced B). A reader who would endeavor to make them all would be kept busy for a good while and would also be embarking on a learning journey that would bring his or her skills to new levels as each booklet builds on knowledge acquired along the way. Short of going to baking school, there are probably not many better ways to learn for a novice baker. More experienced bakers may learn new tricks or techniques and will enjoy following a fellow bread lover on her voyage of discovery.
In an ideal world, I would like the book to contain more hyperlinks (it would be helpful for instance if the words “desem” or “motherdough” were referenced throughout the text) but the Kindle search engine works well and once a definition is found, it is easy enough to bookmark it for later retrieval.
Also, many of the recipes are based on a 166% hydration starter: I keep my liquid starter at 100%. But Teresa has foreseen the objection: Volume I points the reader to an online hydration conversion calculator  for the recipes that require it.
Finally because the color photos are a big help, it is best to read this book on a mobile device with a color screen, such as a Kindle Fire or an iPad or, if you don’t have either, on your computer. I can’t imagine the book being easy to use on a black and white Kindle. I read it on a second generation iPad and I love the way I can pinch the tables bigger or smaller as needed.
At a loss to choose between the many tempting recipes, I asked Teresa for advice and knowing I am a big fan of multigrain breads, she suggested I try the Mill Grain Loaf. I followed her suggestion and made the bread. I loved it (I have a huge weakness for crunchy crusts over creamy crumbs) but then I suspect I would love most of the breads in the book. I will certainly try them all over time, one after the other. I find it a big plus to have the recipes at my disposal in electronic form: no schlepping of heavy bread books for me this summer when we go back to our little camp…
I didn’t have to use the conversion tool and adjust my starter to 166% hydration since Teresa has thoughtfully provided a converted recipe for the Mill Grain Loaf @ 100% on her blog. So I kept my starter at 100% and cruised merrily along, following her suggestion to replace part of the white flour with whole wheat flour (white whole wheat in my case).  My only change was to roll the loaves over a wet towel and then onto a seed mixture (sesame, fennel, sunflower and poppy) before scoring and baking.

 

Teresa’s Mill Grain Loaf is going to Susan for Yeastspotting.

In Normandy, a different kind of bakery: Boulangerie Les Co’Pains


There is so much that blows my mind about this bakery that I find it hard to even start writing about it. Part of me would be tempted to let the photos tell the story (there is something singularly eloquent about the way light settles on flour, dough and bread), another part needs to talk about the bakers and yet another part wishes to dwell on the bakery’s unique bread-baking philosophy. Each of these elements, the visual, the people, the philosophy, tells it all and yet there is more. So I’ll just forge ahead and try.
I’ll start by setting the decor: the bakery is located in Saint-Aubin-sur-Algot, a small village near Lisieux (Calvados), a lovely area of Normandy famous for its apples, its cider, its apple brandy, its cheeses (Camembert, Pont-L’Évêque, Livarot), its milk, cream and butter, etc… Barely off the main road between Caen and Lisieux, the place is so rural you wouldn’t be faulted for thinking you have crossed an invisible border and find yourself in a different country or, possibly, century.


The treehouse Erik the baker built with his teenage son

The bakery gets the wood for its oven (wood scraps really) from the nearby sawmill: cutting it to the right size is a three-hour job that two of the bakers tackle every week (they alternate).


(above photo by our friends from Tree-Top Baking, along for the visit. Reproduced with permission)



The wooden troughs and boxes are the work of a local artisan. As for the molds and sheet pans, their previous owner was an old Dutch baker whose family had used them for more than a century of artisan bread-baking. When he retired, he couldn’t bring himself to throw them out. Erik’s mom lives in Southern Holland in the same small city as this old baker. When he learned her son was opening a bakery in France, he was glad to give them to him…


But here I am using first names when I haven’t even introduced any of the bakers. Let me do it now:

Meet Erik Klaassen, 52, one of Les Co’Pains’ co-owners (“Co’Pains” is a play on words: the bakery is a cooperative (a “société coopérative ouvrière de production” or SCOP) which initially had three owners, hence the “Co'”. “Pains”, well, you know it means “bread” in French, right? As for “copains” -all in one word, mind you- it means “buddies”.)
The three original baking buddies were Erik, Antoine and Manu. Antoine has moved on to open his own little bakery; Manu is still there but currently apprenticing to a farmer for a year because he’s planning to eventually grow and mill the grain for the bakery. We didn’t get to see him. We heard about Mickael, another of the current bakers, but he wasn’t working that afternoon and we didn’t meet him either.
Getting back to Erik, this giant of a Dutchman didn’t plan on becoming a baker. He trained as a forestry engineer in his native Holland but after one boring meeting too many, he quit his job to travel around the world. In 1984-85, a girlfriend led him to France.
Determined to work with his hands, he started baking three breads per hour in an old gas stove he had refurbished and installed in his small city apartment (he then lived in Caen). He sold them at the open-air market. After a while, eager to move closer to the grain, he left the city for the country, soon getting his hands on more castaway gas stoves… At one point, seven of those could be counted lined up in his living room.
He dreamed of a wood-fired oven but his budget didn’t allow it. Luck intervened: he heard of a baker up north who was planning to dismantle his old oven and would be willing to sell the metal parts for scraps. He bought the scraps and trucked them back and with his buddies’ help, he finally built his wood-fired oven. It took him a year…
That was in 1993-94. The oven has been in constant use since then. Erik says that once he switched ovens, his bread quickly became so much better that he could no longer satisfy the demand. He needed to make more. He had a choice: invest in equipment or invest in labor. He chose to make more bread with more hands instead of with more machines. He also decided he no longer wanted to be boss: time had come to share the burden of garanteeing a steady income to all those who worked at the bakery. The cooperative was born.

Meet Seth Wiggin, 27, employed at the bakery. Like Erik, Seth didn’t originally embark upon a career as a baker. His degree is in civil engineering. Although he comes from a small port on Lake Erie in Ontario, he holds dual British-Canadian citizenship which gives him the right to work in the European Union.
As he tells it, about two years ago he biked his way around France for a month, exploring the countryside and eating baguettes every day. Once back home, he realized that he wanted to make bread. So he built himself a levain from scratch and started baking. The first bread turned out okay and it spurned him to make more, much more. He finally made it back to France the following April, first working as a volunteer (wwoofing) at an organic goat cheese farm (cheese is his other passion), then seeking an organic bakery that would use a wood-fired oven.
He contacted Les Co’Pains through a mutual acquaintance and they agreed to let him “wwoof” at the bakery, at the beginning just for room and board. He is now a full-time salaried employee. He enjoys many aspects of the bakery and finds great personal satisfaction in the atmosphere it fosters among the bakers and their network of friends and acquaintances.

Meet Didier Bodelot, 44. I didn’t get to talk to Didier as much as I would have liked to. I have since written to him. If he decides to share more about his life as a baker, I’ll be sure to update the post. At this point, all I know is that he too comes from a different professional background (he used to work for Doctors without Borders) and is taking advantage of a French government’s re-training program to go back to school and get certified as a baker. Within this program he must alternate between classes and internships. He chose to intern at Les Co’Pains because he is interested in the cooperative bakery model.
Now that you have met the bakers, let’s talk about the baking.  Erik describes an epiphany he once had as a student in a high-school chemistry class: “Aaargh! I never want to be precise again!”, he vowed, and to this day, he describes himself as a “latitudinarian”. He bakes by feeling, not according to any formula. There is nothing written in the bakery (except a schedule of bread prices) and no ingredient is ever weighed or temperature measured.
As Manu writes in Boulange: “Empty the bag of flour into the trough. Throw in pinches of salt (more or less one for each kilo of flour plus another for the sheer beauty of the gesture). Dip your hand into the levain. Estimate how much you need depending on the temperatures, both indoors and outdoors, the proofing time, the flour you are using, the composition of your levain… Careful! Things get a bit more complicated. Head towards your source of water. Use cold water if the temperature is warm, warm water if it is cold. If you don’t know whether the temperature is warm or cold, ask Erik. If Erik isn’t around, improvise! The dough will let you know the day after if the water was too warm or too cold…”(my translation).
On the whole it surely evens out. The bakery has been successfully selling its bread for more than 20 years, so it must know what it is doing. I imagine an intern has a hard time of it until he finds his bearings though. And it is hard work, no doubt about that. Although to the onlooker, it may look like sheer poetry…


Shortbread cookies are made the same way: nothing written, nothing measured. Asked how many eggs he uses, Erik will tell you: “As many as necessary…” Sugar? Butter? Same answer. Would I be able to reproduce his recipe? Not really. Did I love watching him make it? Yes, totally! Out of one dough, he makes four different batches: plain, sesame seeds, chocolate and raisins. I only took pictures of the chocolate ones. There is magic in the way a shaggy mess of flour, butter and eggs slowly morphs into an orderly line-up of ready-to-bake cookies. Look!



La marche des sablés (The march of the shortbread cookies)




Let’s turn to the bread…


(above photo by our friends from Tree-Top Baking. Reproduced with permission)

You are probably thinking that, save for the occasional baguette, the bread doesn’t look much like bread normally found in France and you are right. Erik says his customers mostly want bread they can slice and freeze and conveniently re-heat in their toasters. That tells me that many of them are probably foreigners and when I ask, Erik confirms that indeed many British or Dutch families own country homes in the area. They want organic and they buy his bread. He knows what they like and he gives it to them. 80% of his customers are return customers.

Four days a week he sells at markets: Wednesdays in Honfleur, Fridays in Caen, Saturdays in Lisieux, Sundays in Caen again. He delivers to several natural food stores and CSA’s. People in the know even make their way to the bakery on baking days to pick up their bread as it comes out of the oven. But local villagers typically do not get their bread from Les Co’Pains: first of all they are not necessarily able or willing to pay a premium for organic and secondly, they prefer the baguettes they can buy at Carrefour or Leclerc, two ubiquitous chains of supermarkets typically found in most cities or on their outskirts.

Did I like Les Co’Pains’ bread? After a whole afternoon spent at the bakery, you’d think I would have an opinion, right? Well, to my everlasting mortification, I can’t say anything about the way the bread tastes because I never thought to sample it! I was so spellbound by the slow ballet of the bakers at work, the heady fragrance of the wholegrain levain as it incorporated with the flour and water, the smell of the burning wood, the play of light on the loaded peel, the song of the cooling breads that I went on sensory overload and completely ignored the fact that my tastebuds needed to be consulted.
We did buy a baguette and had it that night with cheese. It tasted wonderfully wheaty but it was also saltless. Yes, you read it right: there was no salt in it. Clearly the follow-no-script method has its pitfalls ! But then what method doesn’t? I have taken to always measuring the salt first and putting it very close to my mixing bowl so I can’t possibly not see it when the autolyse is over. Salt-less does happen. Levain-less too sometimes… Not fun! The baguette was otherwise excellent. 
Erik explained that they basically mix three different doughs, all organic and all-levain based: one entirely wholewheat (based on T150 flour), one semi-whole wheat (based on T80 flour) and one all-white (based on T55 flour). For more info on the French classification of flours, you may want to refer to this page on the artisan website.
Out of these three doughs, they make nine to ten different breads, adding various seeds (sunflower, poppy, sesame or flax) and other flours, including spelt, buckweat and a 5-grain mix, also walnuts or hazelnuts. They make an emmer bread that Erik describes as their most expensive at € 5.30/700 g ($ 7/24 oz.) but which always sells very well.
Mixing is typically done at the end of the day, entirely by hand. There is no mixer. No stretch and fold or other form of gluten-development either. Erik describes the resulting dough as slightly more than no-knead. That’s all. Fermentation takes place from 8 PM to 4:40 AM. The dough is never refrigerated or otherwise retarded. That’s baking like it was done in the old days, folks! A mind-boggingly different business model from the ones we saw in Paris during our BBGA-sponsored visits (see In Paris with bread on my mind, Two more Parisian bakeries and Award-winning baguettes in Montmartre) where shiny modern stores hide diminutive labs (often located in the basement) and where the husband toils in the back while the wife officiates at the cash register. No cash register is visible at Les Co’Pains, only a cash box and Erik’s wife commutes to a nearby small town where she teaches French. There is no woman in sight actually and I forgot to ask if the bakery ever had a woman apprentice.
When at Europain I attended a roundtable of women bakers and I remember the participants bringing up the issue of pénibilité (the demanding nature of the work) and the way labs could be adapted to women’s physical requirements to make professional baking more appealing to them. Well, at Les Co’Pains, such adaptation hardly seems possible. But what goes for women also goes for aging workers. Erik is probably already thinking of the day when his back rebels or his arms slow down.
Young partners and/or workers will need to be secured and he himself might choose then to focus more on what he already says he greatly enjoys: perpetuating a skills by training apprentices and teaching breadbaking to school children. Many classes already visit regularly as a group. For a set fee of € 6 euro per child, the kids play with flour and levain and get to bake pre-shaped loaves that they can take home. These visits are a good source of income for the bakery and they help strenghthen its ties with the community. They may also help train the tastebuds of future generations of local customers…
As Manu writes in Boulange, today the Co’Pains are bakers. Tomorrow they might be farmers too (he’s working hard towards that goal). Together with other like-minded artisans in their community (such as Lin or Sophie, who make cheese, Nicole, who makes cider and apple-juice, etc.), they are forging ties both to the land and to the people who nurture it by working it the old-fashioned way. Their network grows with every passing year and their hope is that twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now the artisan model will the prevalent one. The land will have been re-parcelized and supermarket-shopping will be no more than the memory of a quaint aberration in a not-so-distant past… We will all be thinking like stewards of the Earth. The Co’Pains already do.


External resources:

A slot machine for baguettes? Only in France!


The company’s flyer as given to me at the show

When I was a child growing up in Paris, my grandparents moved from their native Southwestern France to Normandy to be closer to us. We used to go visit them every weekend and sometimes for small vacations as well. They grew all their own fruit and vegetables, raised poultry and rabbits, got milk and eggs from the farm next door, foraged in the nearby woods and meadows for wild greens and mushrooms and generally-speaking lived pretty much off the grid. One thing they didn’t make though was bread.
They had grown up in households where breadbaking was a bimonthly chore and they probably felt that it was a huge improvement to be able to buy bread instead of making it themselves. An itinerant bread-delivery van circled the villages, it beeped outside the kitchen door, my grandma got out with her change purse, exchanged a few words with the driver (who might have been the baker doing his rounds but I never thought to ask, so I can’t vouch for that) and went back inside with her bread. On the days the van driver was off, my grandpa got onto his Solex (motorized bike) and, into his early eighties, rode 2.5 miles to the nearest bakery. He came home with long fat yellow loaves fastened to the back of his Solex and since he wore a béret at all times (even indoors, except at night when he replaced it with a night cap), he must have looked like the poster Frenchman of bygone years we all have seen at some time or other.
I don’t know if many bereted grandfathers still roam the roads of France on Solexes but while bread is still delivered door to door in some communities, I suspect that with the multiplication of grandes surfaces (large supermarkets selling everything under the sun) on the outskirts of most little cities, many families get their bread another way.
However there may still be a need for an alternative: elderly people with no means of getting around may live in remote villages with no bakeries and no bread deliveries; workers on different schedules may not want industrial bread and yet can’t make it to the bakery before it closes for the day; gridlock and parking issues in busy downtowns may make it a hassle to actually get to the bakery; costs of doing the rounds may be too high for itinerant bakers, etc.
Whatever the reason, I saw at Europain an automatic baguette dispenser that stopped me dead in my tracks. Here is how it works: the artisan baker loads the machine with a batch of baguettes (62 is the maximum number) and the machine keeps them at room temperature. There is an optional alarm-system which alerts the baker when the distributor is empty and needs to be re-loaded. There is also a lockdown mechanism which prevents the sale of day-old baguettes. Sold at the same price as at the bakery, the baguettes are as good (or as mediocre) as the baker makes them.
The company, aptly called maBaguette, has sold and installed fifteen of these distributors in Western France since it started in July 2011 and it is looking to expand. Its main hurdle is to convince bakers that the machines shouldn’t be installed right outside their bakeries where they can keep an eye on them but in remote places where bread isn’t easy to come by. It emphasizes the fact that they are very low-maintenance and should be seen, not as stop-gap devices, but as additional points of sale which can be put inside shopping malls, offices, gas stations, railroad stations, even hospitals, and make it possible for the baker to reach a new customer base.
Whether or not the company will succeed is anybody’s guess. Personally I know that I’d rather get my bread from a bakery where it is most likely fresher and where I can ask for “bien cuit” (nicely browned) but in a pinch, hey, why not? The baguettes thus distributed are probably better than their supermarket equivalents. As for the machines, they do make it easier for bakers to perform what some of them consider as their professional duty, i.e. facilitating acccess to artisan bread in their communities.

Maison Kayser: Le restaurant du boulanger (The Baker’s Restaurant)

Gourmets will tell you that wine and food should complement each other. Restaurants therefore sometimes go to great length to pair different wines with different dishes. In Gaillac (in Southwestern France), we once dined at a restaurant where you could pick either your menu or your wines but not both as the chef was adamant he wasn’t going to let his carefully prepared meal be marred by the choice of the wrong wines. It wasn’t a fancy place and my very elderly parents (with whom we were traveling) were a bit taken aback: in all his born days, my Dad had never heard of such a display of authority by a restaurant owner. Since he wasn’t about to let anybody dictate his choice of wines though (too momentous a decision), he picked one for each of his three courses (he obviously wasn’t the designated driver) and ended up quite happy with the dishes that accompanied them (anticipatory curiosity probably had a lot to do with it as I don’t recall the cuisine as particularly memorable). We did the opposite and picked the dishes and were equally happy with the mystery wines that were brought with them. Altogether a different kind of dinner and a fun evening…
But have you ever been to a restaurant where food is systematically paired with bread? Well, thanks to Jean-Philippe de Tonnac, author of the compelling Dictionnaire universel du pain (a must-have reference for French-speaking breadophiles) whom I met in Paris last week and who recommended I try Maison Kayser‘s new restaurant in Bercy Village, I now have and I love the idea. The restaurant is so new that at the time of this writing, it isn’t even listed on the Kayser website.  
It is located 47, Cour Saint-Émilion in the 12th arrondissement. Prices are not cheap but considering the location, they aren’t outrageous either: a lunch consisting of an appetizer plus an entrée or an entrée plus a dessert (I am not a dessert person so I picked the soup but the Kayser desserts are gorgeous) will set you back €14,90 (about $20) per person, tax and service included.

I took this picture of Kayser pastries at Europain as the Kayser bakeries seem to have a very strict policy against in-store photography. At the restaurant they reluctantly let me photograph what was in the plate in front of me when I told them I would blog about it but they clearly didn’t like it. So I kept it to a minimum.

Of course pairing food and bread isn’t a revolutionary concept in France. Certain cheeses are best accompanied by specific breads, oysters on the half-shell are traditionally served with thin slices of buttered rye bread and my paternal grandmother wouldn’t have dreamed of serving her famous “civet de lièvre” (hare stewed in red wine) without “galettes de sarrazin” (buckwheat crêpes).  But Eric Kayser, the famous Parisian baker whose liquid levain tsunamied through the home-baking web some years ago, went one step further recently by opening a restaurant where each course is served with a different bread.

Among other offerings, the menu pairs “coeur de sucrine” (bib lettuce salad) with pain au levain, foie gras with fig bread (a classic), lamb tagine with olive bread, entrecôte Béarnaise with buckwheat pavé, etc. It doesn’t make use of the full array of Kayser breads but I suspect the breads will change with the seasons. What I had was both light, tasty and fresh. Ironically though, the mushroom soup that I picked as an appetizer was supposed to be served with a slice of buckwheat pavé (garnished with slivers of smoked salmon) and it actually came with turmeric bread, the very same bread that also accompanied the main course (poached chicken breast and vegetables with horseradish sauce). I didn’t even notice because we were too busy talking and by the time I did, it was too late. So if you go, make sure you get the “right bread” for your dish. It wasn’t a big deal (I couldn’t see myself  complaining about fragrant turmeric bread studded with almonds, nuts and hazelnuts) but the whole idea was to try a new bread with each course and that didn’t work as planned!
Still we had a most pleasant lunch. Of course it doesn’t hurt that Maison Kayser is located in picturesque Cour Saint-Émilion, the center of the French wine trade in the 19th century and well into the 20th. The friend we were with had grown up in the Marais and has fond memories of coming to Bercy with her father to pick up small barrels of wine for family consumption (I too grew up in a family where wine was normally bought by the barrel and bottled at home but our barrels usually came straight from the producers and I never visited Bercy when I was a kid). 

The neighborhood has grown on me though and Parc de Bercy has become one of my favorite spots for dreaming in the city. And now that it has a good bakery, I can even dream about living there, cooking my way through my favorite recipes and pairing them off with the whole gamut of Kayser breads…


Award-winning baguettes in Montmartre

It was drizzly and cold as we climbed up the street from the métro station to the rue des Abbesses but we hardly noticed. As part of the bakery tours organized by the Bread Bakers Guild of America, we were on our way to Au Levain d’antan (6, rue des Abbesses), the bakery who won the best baguette in Paris award in 2011, and we were excited. The owner, Monsieur Barillon, was away in Japan but he and his wife had kindly agreed to let les boulangers américains visit the lab and talk to Jean-Luc, the head baker.



The baguette which wins the prestigious award becomes a staple at Palais de l’Élysée (the French equivalent of the White House) for a year. Eating the best bread in Paris everyday, now that’s a presidential perk I truly envy! If I lived in France, it might even be enough to make me want to run for office… 
Since the baguette is presidential material, I thought its specs might be a secret d’État (a state secret) but no, Jean-Luc kindly agreed to answer our questions: the baguette is made with T65 flour (the only flour that can be used by law in baguettes Tradition, it contains no additive whatsoever) over a 6-hour period (from start to finish), using .8% of yeast and 74% water. It is autolysed for 45 minutes and mixed for 17 minutes on first speed. It ferments in the mixer for one hour with one fold at the 30-minute mark.
Another fold is done just before taking out of the mixer and divided into several bins. It ferments for another hour in the bins, then it is divided and shaped. Proofing time is an hour. The baguettes you see Jean-Luc dust with flour had been shaped an hour earlier. 
We had a taste before we left (Jean-Luc even gave us a few baguettes to take with us). The crust was delicate and crunchy at the same time and the crumb literally melted in the mouth. I thought the taste was rather bland but then that has been the case with all of the “best baguettes in Paris” we tasted so far during these bakery visits. That’s because bread -and especially the baguette which is eaten daily at every meal- is not supposed to be the star. Its job is to accompany a dish or a cheese or any other type of food and showcase its flavor. From that perspective these baguettes are indeed ideal.