In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey (29 page)

I
n southern France, the wind is known as the
tramontane
. It whips from the northwest, flies over the snow-topped Pyrénées, and blows across the bright sunny coastal region of France along the Mediterranean. In the tiny hilltop
village of Cucugnan
, in the Languedoc-Roussillon region, about an hour in from the coast, the wind is known as
le vent de Cers
. It blows in a steady hum and howl through the narrow streets of the medieval-looking village, and it was the first thing I noticed when I arrived there one day in March. At night, it’s all you hear, slapping and growling and hissing outside. The wind blows through the old-growth vineyards in the Vallée du Triby, flies up the cliff peering over the western side of the village and then hits a formidable windmill that rises out of the craggy rock outcropping.

When Roland Feuillas and his wife, Valérie, bought the windmill in 2006 and moved to the village, only a portion of the brickwork was still standing. Luckily, there were still workers in France who rebuilt windmills, so Feuillas contacted a renowned carpenter in this line of work. One morning, at the end of the project, after a long night of drinking wine with the man, Feuillas awoke bleary eyed to begin making bread at six
A
.
M
. He walked outside, looked up and saw the carpenter, naked with his arms outstretched, balanced on the huge wooden blades of the new windmill, facing the wind from the valley below. “He was howling like a shaman,” he recalled.

Windmills, it seems, can have that effect. Feuillas and his wife had bought the mill after selling an educational software company with forty employees. “I was always on this,” Feuillas said, holding up his cell phone. “Now it hardly rings.” His passion was bread, but he didn’t want to just “bake bread.” He also wanted to grow the wheat, then mill it. He had looked through the south of France for a pristine location and settled on this area because no wheat was grown nearby. The fields had long ago been abandoned, so he didn’t need to worry about pesticides drifting from neighboring farms. Here, he would plant long-forgotten French wheat varieties that had been gathered and shared among a small movement of farmers, or were sitting in gene banks. In one instance, he obtained just ten seeds of a variety known as Toussel, which he read had been favored by Louis XIII. He grew the wheat, harvested the grain, chose the fattest seeds, and planted them again. This planting and selecting went on for several years, with a number of different varieties. He also planted different varieties together so that they might breed with one another. He had eight original varieties in this kitchen biodiversity project, including two types of Toussel. Perhaps it was similar to the grain once grown in the region destined for the Cucugnan mill, which like all mills was controlled by the local throne. Holding up a handful of cream-colored, stone-milled flour, Feuillas looked at me and said, “This was the tax.”

I had first heard about Feuillas from a home baker in Britain, Azelia Torres, who writes the thoughtful bread-baking blog “Azelia’s Kitchen.” When she posted the pictures of his bakery and windmill I knew I had to go. I was curious to see this one-man band who controlled the wheat, the milling, and the baking of his bread. With any scale, these activities are separated and with good reason: each takes a special kind of attention, and once you grow beyond a certain size, it’s impossible to orchestrate them all. But since Feuillas made just a few types of loaves, rather than the dozen or more varieties you might see in a larger
boulangerie
, this wasn’t out of the question. He relied on a thirty-inch electric stone mill for everyday use (when he wasn’t cranking up the windmill) and he made his bread for people in the village, every one of whom he knew. The name of his enterprise seemed to say it all:
Les Maîtres de Mon Moulin
, The Masters of My Windmill, a play on a popular nineteenth-century French novel set in the town.

Feuillas is among a small movement of
paysannes boulangers
(peasant bakers) who grow their own organic wheat, mill it into flour, and make their bread. They remain outsiders in the baking industry. This is an especially tough career to pursue, because the state has strict rules requiring farmers to plant only seed sold by agricultural companies. Farmers who save their seed can sell their crop only if they pay an annual tax at the granary, and they can share varieties with one another only through a tenuous research exemption. The radicals of this world—for they are radicals, or at least on the agricultural fringe—read this as the state’s way of protecting French seed companies in the face of much larger global competition, but it also marginalizes the farmer and
paysanne boulanger
. The rules also impair private attempts to preserve biodiversity and ancient wheat varieties on the farm. “Breeding your own grains is becoming more and more difficult legally,” said Patrick de Kochko at Réseau Semences Paysannes, a group at the heart of this movement, though the farmers have kept at it for now through loopholes and exemptions.

Being on the fringe of the baking trade meant that Feuillas could make his ideal bread. In his view, the grain, the flour, the bread were all connected and he wanted his hand in all of it. “Can you imagine a wine maker making wine without knowing his grapes?” he said. If he was going to be a
boulanger
, he was going to do it his way—not unlike the carpenter howling into the wind.

 • • • 

O
n that first morning in Cucugnan, I had gone for a run on the winding road that swept down from the village and then off onto a dirt path that snaked through the vineyards in the valley. The vines were old, weathered, and gnarled, though young shoots were sprouting out of those branches that had been pruned. It was cool, and the wind, as usual, was howling. The soil was rocky and dry, so the vines had to work that much harder to get any life from it, and perhaps that’s what concentrated the smoky, earthy character of these Corbières wines. It also proved a difficult surface to run on, but I wasn’t complaining. There wasn’t anything like it—running through the ancient vines of France in the early morning light.

Feuillas was baking that day, but wasn’t in a rush, so after my jog I took a shower and strolled into the wooden house that serves as an office, kitchen, and part-time baking school for visitors. He was around my age—in his mid-fifties—and looked, as I often do when I’m writing at home, like he had just rolled out of bed. His hair was askew and he was in his baker’s whites, though he was wearing a black plaid shirt on top, to guard against the chill. He had just lit a wood fire in the hefty iron cook stove, where lunch would be made, and it was slowly heating up the room.

The day had started at a relaxed pace because he was just baking bread for the full-time residents of the village. In the summer, when seasonal residents and tourists arrived, he would ramp up production dramatically, which is why he encouraged me to visit in March. That first day I finally ate the bread he’d made from this mélange of ancient wheat, in the form of three small slices of toast with a shot of espresso. The bread itself was several days old, because he and Valérie had just returned from a trip to Paris, but I paid it no mind. Since it had been made with
levain
, it wasn’t yet stale. The crust was a little hard, but I appreciated it. At home, I eat bread as it progressively gets harder; if it was still edible, why waste it? Of course, you can make bread crumbs with old bread, or soak it in water and add it to new dough, or make bread pudding, but you can also rip it apart with your teeth and eat it, which is what I usually did. Feuillas appeared to feel the same way.

The interior of the bread was darker than I expected—not just creamy colored but edging toward a lightish brown—which surprised me because when we had visited the stone mill downstairs, he showed me how he sifted out the bran when he milled flour. “It’s white bread, not whitened bread,” he had said. Nothing was done to make it appear more than it was, which is true, but I also thought to myself, “He’s taking out bran! The intestinal vitality!” When I brought this up, Feuillas mentioned that the flour
did
have all the germ and most of the aleurone layer—the outermost layer of the endosperm with the highest level of nutrients that usually gets discarded with the bran. This stone ground and bolted flour would have been familiar to any miller or baker who baked bread in antiquity. I looked into the bolting barrel coming out of the side of the stone mill, which was sheathed in silk cloth. As the flour flowed out of the stones, it passed into the barrel, which rotated at a moderate speed. This allowed the finer flour to pass through the cloth and fall into a wooden bin below. The coarse bran remained inside the barrel, emptying into a bucket at the end. The flour was fine, but yellowish in color, not white. I looked forlornly at the bran piling up—“animal feed,” Feuillas called it—and I almost wanted to mix up bran muffins.