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Gérard Rubaud: the movie (October 2011)

I came home from my visit with Gérard Rubaud last month with a whole series of video clips which I had planned for my personal use. Since they were not meant for posting on the blog, I didn’t pay any attention to the audio part: I didn’t suggest to Gérard that he stick to baking topics or lower the volume on the radio; I also didn’t ask him to speak English.

But when I reviewed the clips, I found myself awed by what they reveal of his quasi mythical reverence for his dough as well as moved by the timelessness of his craft. There is something deeply soothing to watch this man at work in his quiet bakery on top of a Vermont hill. The world may be in turmoil all around but whatever happens, it still needs to be fed. That’s the baker’s job and nothing distracts him from it.

So I removed the audio track and replaced it with music (which is fitting in a way because Gérard loves to listen to music as he works). It is a bit strange to see him speak without hearing what he’s saying and of course you can’t hear me answering either. It’s a trade-off, I know, and next time I’ll do it differently. But at least you can see what I saw and that’s better than nothing…

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Gérard Rubaud on working the levain

For someone who has no means of going online and checking out what’s happening in today’s web of bakers, Gérard Rubaud has formed a rather accurate idea of the way many of us go about our baking. Although he welcomes the renewed interest for boulange au levain (baking naturally-leavened breads) which the Web in general and blogs in particular contribute to feed throughout the world, he also warns against bee-like behaviors which detract from the big picture: going from one blog or one website to the next and picking up fragments of techniques or advice which do not coalesce into a harmonious whole. In his opinion, it is close to impossible to make really good bread that way. The starting point should always be the taste and texture one is looking for. Once that has been decided, then the baker marshals the tools he/she knows to be necessary to obtain that result.

Of these tools, the most important is the levain. Properly fermented, a good levain will get you half-way towards your goal. Three main variables will determine its performance: its degree of hydration, the number of wild yeast cells it contains and its temperature. The baker must seek the perfect equilibrium point between temperatures and fermentation times. In today’s brouhaha about bread, it is easy to forget the two go hand in hand. A one-hour fermentation at + or – 5 degrees F can yield hugely different results: five degrees cooler and you need to wait two more hours for your levain to double. Five degrees warmer and the fermentation runs ahead of you. In the absence of specific fermentation time/temperature indications, a good reference point should be the doubling of the levain at 80°F/27°C. When that has happened, you know you are good to go.
Gérard cannot insist enough on the fact that the baker needs to have his/her thermometer in hand at all times. He himself makes bread five days a week, 51 weeks a year, which means he does three levain builds five times a week. On his two days off (which are not consecutive), he keeps his levain in the fridge and feeds it only once a day. A home baker could keep his or her levain in the fridge for five consecutive days (feeding it once a day and putting it back in the fridge as soon as it has fermented enough to reach the top of its container), take it out on Day 6, give it three or four feedings and bake with it on Day 7. It is fundamental that the levain be brought back to warm room temperature (at least 75°F/24°C and as close to 80°F/27°C as possible) prior to incorporating it into the autolyse (by autolyse Gérard means the shaggy dough resulting from the incorporation of final dough water into final dough flour in the absence of salt). A colder levain is harder to incorporate; the baker has to mix longer, thereby running the risk of tearing the gluten network and over-oxidizing the dough. Gérard advises keeping the autolyse at 80°F. The warmer the dough, the more malleable it will be. That means always controlling the temperature of the water you add to the flour.
A good quality levain will boost the elasticity of a well-hydrated dough provided its consistency and temperature are similar to those of the dough : if your autolyse is hydrated at 55% and your levain at 65%, you need to boost the hydration of the autolyse. Matching the hydration of the autolyse to the hydration of the levain isn’t a routine proposition however: each time Gérard gets a new flour delivery (and we are talking the same brand and quality of all-purpose flour he has been using for years), he needs to run a test to see how much water the flour will absorb. The variations in protein content (which governs absorbency) from one monthly batch to the next had become so distracting that Gérard recently switched his flour delivery schedule from one-month to three-months intervals. These discrepancies between batches of the same flour mean that the quantity of water given in a recipe should always be treated as an indication. The baker has to use his or her judgment to determine how much to add or take away. Another good rule of thumb is to adjust the hydration of the levain to the type of dough you want to get: it is hard to make a very wet dough with a very stiff levain for instance.
As an aside, it is interesting to note that accomplished bakers such as Jeffrey Hamelman and Gérard Rubaud are both somewhat dismissive of the current obsession with huge holes in the crumb: Jeffrey joked during his recent class on Baking with Locally Grown Grains that some bakers seem to consider the number of alveoli in their crumb on a par with their sperm count as an indicator of their masculinity. As for Gérard, he sees what he calls “les bulles” (the bubbles) as important (they do contribute to the taste of the bread) but not fundamental: at the end of the day, “on ne les mange pas” (you don’t get to eat them).
However if an airy crumb is what you want, your levain can help you achieve that goal too: feeding it as soon as it doubles triggers a huge proliferation of wild yeast cells and a proportionate acceleration of the fermentation process. One way to make baguettes au levain with a very open crumb is to feed the levain three times at 6 hour-intervals prior to mixing the dough.
Gérard’s experimentation over the past few months have led him to modify his formulas, both for the levain and for the final dough. He has reduced the proportions of freshly milled whole grains in his bread, using none in the third (last) build of his levain and only 13% (instead of one third) in his final dough. He said that by doing so, he has lost a few rustic aromas but he has improved the texture of his bread tremendously. Also he has found that new, very delicate aromas were being created during fermentation. His dough has gained in elasticity and resilience and can now readily absorb more water, which helps get a more open crumb.
As related in my post Revisiting Gérard Rubaud, Gérard is now retarding his shaped batards for 10 hours and more. The long proofing changes the texture of the dough by making it more elastic and more malleable, which makes it possible to up the hydration even more. There is no doubt in my mind that Gérard’s formula will keep evolving as he lives and works by one simple motto: “Tout peut toujours s’améliorer” (there is always room for improvement).
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Revisiting Gérard Rubaud

Visiting Gérard Rubaud is like taking a huge leap sideways over the Atlantic to the French Alps and once there, a few steps back in time. Maybe not to the 18th century, although judging from old engravings, his bakery looks a lot like the ones found there before the Revolution of 1789: of course those didn’t have electrical light or hot water on demand or a mixer (even a 40-year old one) or an electronic scale or a floury radio blasting Radio Canada 24/7. But you certainly feel you traveled back as far as the fifties at least…
As for himself, he owns neither a television (“When would I have time to read or to listen to music if I did?”) nor a computer (same answer). He doesn’t own a camera, digital or otherwise (“I don’t think I ever took a picture in my life”) and of course no smartphone (or even a simple cell phone). But he does have a regular telephone and it rings very often. Gérard may be short on modern life accoutrements but he is long on true friends and many of them often call or drop by.
In the two years since my first visit in 2009, we have become friends too. We speak on the phone, I visit, we have been on field trips together. I have learned a lot about boulange au levain (naturally leavened bread-baking) and he has discovered a few things about blogs, computers and the Internet. Not that he cares that much, to tell you the truth, except as a new and convenient way to disseminate and perpetuate age-old baking skills. Bread-baking is his lifeline, his raison d’être (literally: reason for being).
When a stroke confined him to a wheelchair a few years ago, he would have let himself go were it not for the tweaking he was constantly giving his dough in his head: he wanted to walk and work again to see if the actual results would match the dreamed-up ones.
When asked how come he doesn’t grow tired of baking the same bread 51 weeks a year, year in and year out, his eyes grow round with surprise: “But it’s never the same, that’s the challenge. First of all, every time I get a new flour delivery, I have to adjust the formula. Plus I am constantly experimenting, adding or subtracting grains, lowering or increasing temperatures, varying fermentation times, etc. It is actually a lot more fun to stick to one dough and see what you can do with it and make it the best you possibly can than to divide your attention between several different ones.”

He probably doesn’t approve of the fact that I am frivolous enough not to be satisfied with a firm levain, so that I keep a liquid one as well and enjoy making “pains fantaisie” (breads that contain ingredients other than cereal grains, flour, salt and water) but he has come to tolerate my difference and not to look (too) skeptical anymore when I tell him how delicious these other breads can taste. I was actually going to bring him some this time so that he could try them for himself but because of the hand injury I sustained a few weeks before our trip, I had to forego baking for a while. That experience will have to wait.
You have probably guessed by now that Gérard has his own (very specific) ideas about the “right” way to bake: he applies the methods he was taught as a teenage apprentice. He is also a fervent admirer of Raymond Calvel whose book Le Goût du pain (The Taste of Bread), he seems to know by heart. So I expected him to balk at my suggestion that he experiment with retarding his dough overnight at a cool temperature and naturally I wasn’t disappointed.
“Retarding has been invented by bakers who wanted to sleep longer nights. It has nothing to do with improving the dough.” (Gérard has trained himself to sleep very short nights, complemented during the day by numerous 12-minute naps: beyond 12 minutes, he gets groggy and can’t function properly. So he sets the timer, lies down on the bench in the bakery, lifts his arms above his head -an old trick which works wonders for him- and seconds later, he is asleep. He wakes up with the timer, fully refreshed and in good spirits, all set to go back to work.)
I had an uphill battle to fight to convince him to try retarding. But I was spending a few days at the bakery, he had time off – no production deadlines – and I gave it my best shot. In the end he gave in, provided we didn’t go for too low a temperature. “Below 68°F, you start getting undesirable acids. It’d be best to let the shaped breads proof overnight at 70 to 74° F.” We settled on 68° (which happened to be the temperature of the bakery that evening).
He mixed the dough. I photographed the process. How I wish my camera could have captured aromas… Those coming from the mixing bowl were simply heavenly.

The breads were set to proof at 8:40 PM. He said he would check on them in early morning. I promised to come and join him the minute I woke up. When I entered the bakery the next day around 6:00 AM, Gérard met me at the door. His face looked grim. “What’s wrong?” I asked innocently. “Come and see! I checked on the breads at 4:00 AM and they were already completely overproofed. I knew it wouldn’t work. I kept them for you to see before I throw them in the trash”. Well, I could see them all right. They had reached over the edges of the couche to kiss each other’s brows and made for a huge mess indeed. And of course I wasn’t surprised either: after all, I had never heard of retarding for hours at room temperature when room temperature is close to 70°…

However, being a morning person, I can be annoyingly cheerful when the day is young. So I told Gérard how two summers ago, when we had friends visiting from France at our little house on the river, I had made a batch of his rustic batards and set them to proof, only to forget all about them and go boating for six hours. When we came back, they had looked even worse than today’s misfits. Still I had baked them and they had turned out a bit flattish but excellent with a wide open crumb.
Gérard didn’t seem impressed. He started tucking at the kissing loaves (which parted reluctantly) and chucking them in the trash one by one. I protested so vehemently that he finally relented and spared two, one of which he disgustedly folded over itself like a limp parcel. Those two, he baked, still grumbling: “We won’t get any rise; all the sugar has been eaten up; they won’t brown; I should have added malt to the dough, etc.”

Meanwhile the bakery was filling with its usual aromas and Gérard’s brow gradually cleared (Has anyone ever studied the mood-enhancing benefits of bread baking?) to finally settle in an expression of amazed delight when the two loaves came out of the oven: they had magnificently risen to the occasion and shone golden in the morning light. By now Gérard was eager to slice them open and had started casting regretful looks towards the trash can where the discarded dough was gasping its last breath like a carp out of water…
The rest, my friends, history and by that, I mean a phenomenon of historical proportions in Gérard’s life as a baker: when he cut open the loaves, he was greeted by a burst of lovely aromas and he saw a crumb which he deemed to be more open than anything he had ever achieved before. We each had a first slice, then a second one slathered with Vermont butter: the flavors were magnificent. Rustic and intricate. Marvelous…
Gérard said: “Well, you were right and I was wrong. I learned something today. Thank you!”. His face was a bright as the rising sun. His mind was running a mile a minute. I could see he was already thinking up various ways of adapting his baking to this new discovery. Meanwhile he kept slicing and savoring, a blissful expression on his face. The man may be a tough nut to crack but I like it that his ego isn’t what gets in the way. Bread is. And it wins. All the time.
Updated news, three weeks later:
I just talked to Gérard on the phone: today is his day off and he is hard at work refining his timeline. Laughingly he tells me he is now retarding his bread for 10 hours at 70-72° F. To avoid overproofing, he has halved the percentage of levain in the dough down to 20% from the 40% he normally uses in the winter. Which means he still gets the acids he is looking and none of the undesirable ones. Wow!
He says his bread has never looked or tasted better. He gets a fabulous crumb, full of oval-shaped holes (interestingly and inexplicably half the holes are vertical, half horizontal). His only complaint is that the crumb is a bit moist on the first day and reaches its peak the day after. To solve that problem, he is planning to bake his bread a bit longer at a lower temperature.
You have got to love that about the man: he may be reluctant to enter the game but once he catches the ball, he does run with it so fast and so far that it’s hard to catch up. I bet that next time we talk, his production schedule will cover three full days (he says he’s leaning that way and I bet he’s serious too). I forgot to ask if he’s now among the bakers who sleep full nights…

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Ask the baker: Gérard Rubaud

Taking advantage of my second stay at the bakery, I asked Gérard all of the questions submitted by Farine readers regarding his fermentation method and bread-baking process. For ease of reference, I am regrouping all of them (and Gérard’s answers) in this post. You’ll also find at the bottom a few questions which were actually addressed to me and not to Gérard, as well as my answers.

Q: MC says in her original post that you feed your levain every 5 hours. 24 divided by 5 = 4.8 times a day. The 5 hours feeding is not a rigid time schedule, right? It depends on the weather, the room temperature, etc…?
A: Right, the time between feedings can be longer if the temperature is lower (in my bakery. it is about 79ºF/26ºC) but don’t go below 72ºF/22ºC, or you would lose the good acids (mostly lactic) which contribute to the aromas. Basically it is whatever works: not too cold, not too hot and no hydration over 65%. Pay a lot of attention to the smallest details.
Q: It would be more like 5 or 6 hours between feedings, right?
A: The time between feedings can go up to 7 or 8 hours. If kept at 72ºF/22ºC, the levain can triple in volume within 7 hours. To know if it is ready to make bread, take a chunk of levain the size of a big walnut being careful not to handle it too much and drop it in a bowl containing one liter (minimum) or two liters of water. If the levain drops to the bottom and comes back up right away, it is ready to leaven bread. If it stays underwater or remains partly submerged, you need to give it another feeding and try again 4 to 5 hours later. [Don’t scoop out some starter with your fingers but take your whole starter out of its container, place it on a flour-dusted table and cut out a small square with your dough cutter. Be as gentle as possible, the idea being to trap whatever CO2 is inside before doing the water test]
Q: Have you ever had problems creating a starter? Has it ever happened that your starter became dormant after a couple of days of starting the culture?
A: Yes, it happens rather frequently. If the starter has moved a tiny bit after 3 to 4 hours, do another feeding to stimulate the yeast. Repeat when it moves again a little bit and do not wait more than 4 hours between feedings.
In such a situation however, the best is to feed the levain home-milled organic whole-grain flours. If you always feed your levain such flours, you will never have a problem (but you need to add malt, up to 1% of the weight of the flour).
Q: Your 50%-hydration stiff levain is ready to be fed every 5 hours. What is your room temperature? It sounds like very fast maturing stiff starter to me.
A: The stronger the levain, the faster it matures, if kept at the ideal temperature of 78-81ºF/26-27ºC.
Q: Unless you feed only a small amount of flours each time?
A: No, not a small amount. The % of starter to the flour must be about 1 to 2. In other words, for 400 g of flour, 200 g of starter. But if you are patient enough to wait more than 4 or 6 hours, you can lower the amount of starter to 25 to 30% in the summer and 45 % in the winter. If you work in an air-conditioned environment, the percentage of starter can remain the same year-round.
Q: What baker’s percentage of all-purpose flour do you use in your final dough? 70%?
A: Yes.
Q: Do you use the same percentage of all-purpose flour when you feed your starter?
A: Yes.
Q: What about the baker’s percentages of rye, whole wheat and spelt flours in both the final dough and in the starter?
A: The blend of organic whole-grain flours is 30% (to 70% all-purpose). I use organic whole grains with I mill right before the feedings (starter) or the mixing (final dough). The proportions are as follows: 30% spring wheat, 30% hard red winter wheat, 30% spelt and 10% rye. It is supremely important to use only organic berries.
Q: You only make one type of bread. MC mentions in the original post that you do not consider “pain fantaisie” a real bread. What is a “pain fantaisie”?
A: In my book, any bread made with ingredients other than flour from a grain that can be made into bread – such as wheat, rye or spelt, water and salt is a “cocktail bread” (pain fantaisie). I am not interested in cocktail breads.
Q: MC shows two drawings of your levain in her original post. The legend accompanying the first drawing says: “Levain after the first feeding”. Is there another feeding before this levain is taken to make the final dough?
A: Yes, there are three feedings. My bread is a three-levain bread.
First levain: 300 g levain chef (mother starter), 400 g water and 700 g flour (70% all-purpose and 30% freshly milled whole grains as described above) = 1400 g
Second levain: 1400 g starter + 800 g water + 1500 flour = 3.7 kg
Third levain: 3700g starter + 2800 g water (2650 g in the summer as I don’t have air-conditioning) + 5000 g flour = 11.5 kg
These 11.5 kg of levain will inoculate about 48 kg of flour. But don’t forget the salt. 1% salt (freshly ground salt from the Dead Sea) is added to each feeding in order to control the fermentation. If a levain ferments too fast, it becomes oily and deteriorates rapidly.
Q: As your starter is a 50% hydration starter and it ferments 7 hours, when you use it to make the final dough, it looks like a piece of dough, as the three little pictures show (after the above two drawings) in the original post. The three small pictures show the cut-up levain, ready to be combined into the autolysed final dough flour and water, right?
A: Yes.

A reader had questions, not for Gérard but for me, as a baker and a bread afficionada.
Q: What is the key element in Gerard’s baking process (levain, timing, …)?
A: I would say “patience and discipline”. Gérard knows how to wait. If the levain is not at maximum fermentation, he waits. If the bread is not ready, he doesn’t put it in the oven. But he is in production and his bread has to go out every morning at the same time, so I’d say he is a stickler for temperature as a means to obtain the desired result in the allotted time-frame.
Q: What didn’t you expect in his baking process (dough hydration, type of flour…)?
A: I’d say that what surprised me the most the first time I visited the bakery is Gérard’s use of freshly milled organic whole-grain flours, not only in his levain but in his final dough as well. Very few bakers do that. I think that’s why he focuses on one type of dough only. Having only one dough to think about enables him to strive for excellence every single day.
As I wrote in my initial post, Gérard had a stroke a few years back and he was paralyzed for a few months. He told me that the whole time he was lying in bed all day staring at the ceiling, what saved him was thinking about his dough. It was like playing virtual chess. In his mind, he changed a tiny detail (upped the temperature a bit, lowered the salt in one feeding, added more water, etc.), imagined the effect of such a change based on his knowledge of fermentation and bread-baking and followed this virtual dough until it came out of the oven, then studied the result.
He now says that even though he wouldn’t want to go through it again, he considers his stroke was a positive event in his life as it helped him focus on tiny details he might have overlooked with less time on his hands. He says his bread is better for it today.
He also says that bread saved his life. Without the prospect of going back to baking and trying out the recipes he had devised when immobilized, he would never have had the energy to heal.
Q: What’s the flavor of Gérard’s bread?
A: It’s obviously really hard to describe. I would say “tangy and aromatic”, like a breath of country air in a cool summer when wheat is slowly ripening in the fields. It is even possible to discern a note of mature pear or peach. It is a very delicate flavor (the word in French would be “subtile”).
Gérard’s philosophy is to use excellent ingredients to produce the best possible bread but never to forget that bread must play second fiddle to food. It has to complement it, not overpower it. I would say that’s true for the bread he makes. I have had it with different cheeses for example (especially a delicious Vermont goat cheese) and found that the association was a marriage made in heaven.

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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…

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