In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey (5 page)

If made slowly, with a judicious amount of yeast, this would be a loaf to savor. But the shift toward quickly made bread solidified with the semi-industrialization of baking in the 1950s, when another development came along that further improved the efficiency of the bakery. This was the highly intensive kneading machine that whipped the dough around like a roller coaster. Where older mixers turned at about forty revolutions per minute, the new electric-driven motors doubled the speed and kept running for twenty minutes. In doing so,
they drove oxygen into the dough
, bleaching out the yellowish carotenoids in the flour and compromising the nutritional content of the bread. This satisfied consumer desires for an ever-whiter crumb at the expense of flavor. (If you’ve ever tasted a bland white bread that has the texture of cotton candy, you’ve eaten oxidized dough.) Ever more salt was added to make up for the lack of taste, and additives, such as fava bean flour, were used to propel the oxidation process and bleach out pigments.
Ascorbic acid
(vitamin C) was sprinkled in to tighten the gluten and increase the volume of the loaf. The result would be an enormous open cut (or
grigne
), masking the lack of flavor inside.

Pressing forward with these “innovations,” bakers added dividers to cut the dough into properly sized loaves, and then mechanical shapers to form the baguette. This standardized production but also hemmed the baker in to a mechanized and highly predictable world that was the antithesis of craft. He could do little to offer anything distinctive, because the machines determined the direction. Fast forward to the 1980s and even industrially produced frozen dough became acceptable, with trucks delivering “par-baked” bread that would be finished in supermarkets or even
boulangeries
. What was even more ironic was that this frozen bread was, at times, better than the inferior “handmade” loaves coming out of neighborhood bakeries. I saw the latest coup in this evolution—or devolution—at EuroPain, the continent’s largest trade show devoted to bread, held outside Paris every few years. A vast, complex, stainless steel machine much larger than most bakeries I’ve visited had flour going in one end, and hundreds of baguettes coming out the other. The only job of the “baker,” or rather technician, was to make sure the damn thing was running correctly. These industrialized versions of the bread were indistinguishable from the quick, mechanized, oxidized breads that had become popular with bakers themselves. So, naturally, consumers began to vote with their feet, by reducing their consumption of this debased product, or buying it at the supermarket, which was cheaper. In pursuit of modernity, French bakers had lost their most crucial ingredients—time and craft. The quest for efficiency and speed all argued against it.

Not surprisingly,
bread consumption declined
from about 260 grams per person in 1960 to 160 grams in 1980. Some customers never returned. Today in France,
one quarter of the nation
doesn’t bother to patronize their local
boulangerie
. Even Kaplan told me that when traveling, he has found better bread at supermarkets than at
boulangeries
. Though it’s taboo to criticize a “national treasure,” Kaplan did so starting in the 1980s in opinion pieces and eventually in meetings with bakers and millers. “For me, bread was a crucial dimension of what the French proudly call their ‘cultural exception,’ and they did not seem to be aware that they were putting it at risk, in grave peril,” Kaplan said. He was among a coterie of like-minded critics who championed revisionists, such as Lionel Poilâne, who baked bread in one of the few wood-fired ovens left in Paris and became a world-renowned baker. Poilâne described his signature
miche
as a “retro-innovation” because he was taking age-old techniques of sourdough fermentation into the modern era and winning over a new generation of bread eaters with his denser, darker loaves. He was bypassing the baguette altogether to bring back bread from an earlier era.

Prominent bakers, professors such as Calvel, and critics spoke out about the decline. Small and medium-scale millers, cut out of the industrial baking trade, were especially worried about these trends, because if people no longer bought bread from their local bakeries, the millers who supplied the flour would vanish. Only the biggest would survive. So the millers tried a new tactic, forming associations and reinvigorating the trade with breads they hoped would entice back supermarket customers. The millers weren’t just selling flour. They offered bakers expertise in management, logistics, and store design, even bread-baking technique. Then they sold this bread under a single recognizable brand. Banette was the first. Others soon followed, including a family-owned enterprise in Beauce, the breadbasket of France. This was the Viron mill, which supplied flour to Boulangerie Delmontel.

PHOTOGRAPH BY BRIAN DOBEN

A bin filled with Delmontel’s long-fermentation baguettes

Kaplan had spent time with the patriarch of this enterprise, Philippe Viron, who was a fifth-generation miller worried about this national decline in bread. “Viron associated the deepest values of Frenchness, even of humanity, with the best bread in the world,” Kaplan writes. In the late 1980s, Viron was approached by a baker in the nineteenth arrondissement, a working-class neighborhood far from central Paris. The
boulanger
, Gérard Meunier, told Viron he wanted flour without any of the additives millers typically sprinkled in to help fermentation and correct inconsistencies. Avoiding these ameliorants was virtually unheard of at the time, at least for the rapidly made breads designed for the intensive mixing machines. But Meunier had in mind an entirely different method. Viron was at first skeptical. He told Meunier that an additive-free baguette wouldn’t rise—it would end up like a galette, as flat as a pancake. But he sold him the flour nonetheless and when he returned to the bakery to see what the baker had done, he was amazed. Meunier’s baguette was a revelation.

The story is mythic in the annals of Viron Mill, and Philippe’s son, Alexandre, who now runs the company, recounted it for me, when I met up with him at the company’s exhibit at EuroPain. As we talked, assistants brought flutes of champagne, delicate ham and cheese sandwiches, and of course a variety of breads from the massive oven that Viron, like every other miller, had installed on the trade show floor. Below our second-floor perch, bakers strolled about, snacking on the sandwiches, chatting and drinking champagne; most of them were associated with Viron in one way or another.

“It was very hard to produce flour for only one customer and that’s why we developed this,” he said, holding up a baguette. “We thought if we showed it to others, they would want to do it, too.” In other words, Meunier’s baguette was so intriguing that the elder Viron thought the loaf might secure the mill’s future, or at least offer a strategic response to the rise of industrial breads. The mill’s chief baker visited Meunier to observe his technique, which involved minimal mixing time, slightly more water than was usual, half the yeast, and an extended first rise. Meunier himself was a student of Professor Calvel, who had championed these methods and even showed Julia Child how to make a baguette. Calvel pointed out that such practices had been used in the 1920s, when bakers had one-speed mixers and couldn’t ramp up the speed. They had to rely on time to do the work instead.

When this slower method was applied, flavor dramatically improved, with a sweetness that arose from the wheat itself. The minimal mixing allowed the flour to retain its color, rather than losing it to oxidation. The crumb opened up with those uneven holes connected by razor-thin membranes which create an airy but chewy quality. The crust was often well done (
bien cuit
) and richly caramelized, the result of sugars, starches, and proteins combining in the so-called Maillard reaction, which occurs when the loaf is properly baked. This is so rarely the case with supermarket baguettes.

“This forced us to do our job, which is to select and blend wheat,” Viron continued, “because before this time, we were buying wheat and using additives to standardize the flour.” The mill sourced wheat varieties from farms around Chartres, a premier wheat-growing region of northern France, about sixty miles from Paris. In the past, they occasionally blended in U.S. and Canadian wheats to raise the protein level and correct for annual variations in the flour. Now, Viron’s entire grain supply would originate from the region around the mill, which meant that the bread sold in Paris under their umbrella was locally grown, though this isn’t trumpeted by the mill or its retinue of
boulangeries
.

The flour—and the technique—became the basis for Viron’s Rétrodor baguette and, slowly, it took off. Alexandre Viron told me he thought their timing was good. Consumers were growing more concerned about what was actually going into their food in the aftermath of the mad cow scares in Europe in the mid-1990s. “People wanted natural things,” Viron said. “And we said, ‘This is one hundred percent natural, it’s just wheat and knowledge.’”

Viron and its Rétrodor baguette were by no means alone. Many others were also trying to undo a few decades of highly compromising baking practices and rescue the small
boulangeries
that were now competing with supermarket chains. In the midst of this ardent movement, the state entered the baking trade once again, aiding the besieged bakers in their battle. The turning point came in 1993, when the French government regulated the term
baguette tradition
, which was precisely the baguette Thomas Chardon taught me how to make (and which Delmontel branded “
La Renaissance
”). Regulations deemed that this loaf could be made only with flour, water, salt, and yeast—no chemical ameliorants—and it had to be made on the premises where it was sold. The state also cordoned off supermarkets and those selling loaves made out of frozen dough from even using the term
boulangerie
. In one act, both the
boulangerie
and its premier product—the baguette—could stand apart from its industrial competitors. The state had intervened to help save the small bakers and millers.

After I began baking in the 1990s, I read about these remarkable breads in Paris—not only the hearty
miche
at Poilâne, which probably got the most attention, but also Philippe Gosselin’s
baguette à l’ancienne
, Éric Kayser’s baguette on Rue Monge, and many others. The renaissance was in full swing.

 • • • 

D
elmontel began his career in the midst of this fervor. Trained as a cook and pastry chef, he initially looked down upon bread making. Bakers had the reputation of being the screw-ups in school; it was assumed they’d had few prospects aside from vocational trades. “I thought all they were doing was mixing flour and water, and what’s so hard about that?” he told me, over a dish of Catalonian beef cheeks at a restaurant down the street from the
boulangerie
. With his ponytail, cravat, and smart blazer, he had the air of a well-to-do businessman or successful chef.

This attitude wasn’t unusual, since French kids who aren’t suited for school are quickly pigeonholed into the trades—carpentry, baking, cooking—and that class stigma tends to follow them through life. Kaplan told me the psychological scars associated with flunking out of school and entering the working class of French society might have had something to do with its bread, since these young bakers were not particularly invested in the craft. The job chose them, not the other way around. That made sense considering that several notable bakers I met in France had switched careers in midlife, coming from sales or software and seeking something new. They were less prone to just follow a rote system because they had never learned it in trade school. There are prominent bakers who came from families where baking was a generational tradition and highly respected. Others did the usual flunk-out-and-go-to-trade-school route but distinguished themselves in the trade.

In this stratified society, the pastry chef was a cut above the
boulanger
. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s, when he came to the States to run the pastry department at Whole Foods Market in Madison, Wisconsin, that Delmontel’s view of bread baking changed. That he landed in Madison was fortuitous, for it had a burgeoning network of local farms and notable bakers. “They were doing all these wonderful loaves, with sourdough and whole grains, and I realized there was more to it than just flour and water,” he said. Upon his return to France eighteen months later, he worked in a friend’s
boulangerie
, then visited the test kitchen run by Viron, where he went through basic training. He learned how to make his signature baguette—one made to this day with Viron’s flour.