Confessions of a French Baker (2 page)

“We've already started,” he said. “But you haven't missed much. Come on in.”

It was still too early for the addict's fix, the warm and heavenly whiff of just-baked bread. That would come in an hour or so, filling the bakery, drifting out through the door, causing nostrils to twitch in anticipation. The very thought of it made me hungry.

For the first time, I saw the bakery in a state of undress, the shelves bare. By six a.m. those shelves would be filling up with loaves—tall and thick, long and slender, plump and round, plain and fancy, whole wheat, rye, bran, flavored with garlic or Roquefort cheese, studded with olives or walnuts—the twenty-one varieties that are baked and sold each day. (If none of these is exactly what you want, the Auzet bakers can also supply made-to-order breads; these include bouillabaisse bread, saffron bread, onion bread, apricot bread, and, for those who like nibbling monograms, personalized bread rolls. You name it, they bake it.)

Gerard led me past the naked shelves and down a ramp that took us into the baking area, a large, airy room, bright white under the fluorescent lights. In one corner was a dough-kneading bowl the size of an infants' paddling pool, and 50-kilo (110-pound) sacks of
flour, from the ultranne to the coarser, almost gritty stone-ground; against the walls, stainless steel three-decker ovens six feet tall; between the ovens, steel work tables on which roughly formed
boules
of dough had been arranged in neat lines. There was no decoration, no stool to sit on, no concession to comfort, nothing that wasn't necessary for the making of bread. It was a functional room, saved from sterility by the earthy, reassuring smell of flour, and by the smiles and whistling of the bakers who were working the early shift, from four a.m. to noon.

That morning there were three of them, dressed in white T-shirts and shorts, their fingers and hands already pale with a dusting of flour. They started to work while I watched. I was at first surprised, then fascinated.

I was surprised because I had always thought that the standard loaves were formed mechanically, by some kind of molding process. I imagined a conveyor belt with dough going in at one end and
baguettes
coming out at the other—
baguettes
of identical size, identical weight, identical color, identical markings. I'm sure there are bread factories where this is exactly what happens, but it's not the way they do things at Auzet.

Every loaf is formed by hand,
faconnage a la main
, and it's a wonderful sight to behold. The preweighed lumps of dough (250 grams per
baguette
—a little more than half a pound) are taken, one by one, and slapped, rolled, squeezed, folded, and tweaked until they assume the familiar shape—if not yet the familiar color—of a loaf you would recognize on the shelf. It's like highspeed sculpture. The shaping of each loaf takes no more than thirty seconds, and after watching a dozen or so, you would swear that there are no differences between one loaf and the next. But of course, there are: the tiny variations, marks of humanity, that distinguish handmade objects from those turned out by machine.

The variations are a little easier to spot at the next stage of the loaf's birth, when the decorative touches are added. With the classic
baguette
, for example, you will find a series of diagonal stripes along the top surface of the loaf. At Auzet, these are made by hand. They start as gashes, swift stabs with what I originally thought must be a special tool—the baker's friend—used only by the pros. When I asked to take a look at one, I saw that it was a sliver of tin clipped from a can, sharp and shiny from years of use.

In a matter of minutes, twenty lumps of dough had
become twenty
baguettes.
After each had been given its stripes, it was put on a length of flour-dusted canvas that had been corrugated to separate one loaf from the next. When the batch was completed, it was slid into the oven on a long wooden board.

By the time the first contingent of
baguettes
came out of the ovens, it was about four-thirty. The loaves were golden, some slightly darker at each end. Baking had caused the gashes to widen and fill in until they looked like indentations that might have been made in the crust by a finger applied horizontally across the loaf.

Gerard took a
baguette
from the batch and held it to his nose, much as a sommelier might check a cork. Then he turned the
baguette
over and tapped the flat underside two or three times, making a sound like a muffled drumbeat. “That's one way of testing the bread,” he said. “You can hear when it's been baked correctly.”

He passed me the loaf, and I gave it a novice's tap. Now that warm air had expanded the dough, the
baguette
felt light, almost hollow, rather than dense. I gave it a squeeze: firm, but yielding. I gave it a sniff. Mmmm. It made me wonder what time bakers had breakfast. I hoped it was soon.

This particular loaf, the standard, slim, everyday
baguette
, is best eaten young. It stays fresh for four or five hours, no more. (“Too good to last,” as Gerard would tell you.) And so it's not unusual for a baker to see many of his morning customers turn up again in the afternoon, when they come by to collect their dinner
baguettes.
Larger loaves stay fresh longer, as do the denser breads like
pain de campagne, pain au son
, and
pain complet.
But the
baguette
remains the most popular loaf, and indeed one of the enduring symbols of France.

Some years ago, this sacred object came under attack. Certain unscrupulous supermarkets, in an effort to seduce the trusting housewife and undercut local bakers, brought out the one-franc
baguette.
It was an inferior specimen,
bien sur
, a miserable copy, but less than half the price of the real thing.

The supermarkets should have known better. Nobody trifles with the bakers of France, and war broke out at once.
Aux armes, les boulangers!
Independent bakers, united against a common foe, counterattacked. Delegations were sent to Paris. Ministers were petitioned. Protests were lodged in high places. The honor of French bread, the very fabric of French life, was at stake.

Finally, a group of bakers (among them Roger
Auzet, Gerard's father) came up with a method of identifying bread that had been made in the traditional way with traditional ingredients. It was a kind of trademark, a guarantee of superior quality. Banette was the chosen name, and you will see it today displayed on bags and signs in every
boulangerie
where proper bread is made.

BY FIVE A.M.
, the Auzet bakers were in overdrive, working with extraordinary speed and precision— rolling and shaping the dough, slashing away with their miniature daggers, sliding the batches into the oven, thumping the oven doors shut. By the end of the day, more than a thousand loaves and
petits pains
would be formed, baked, and sold.

A small selection of the day's work

It was just after six when Gerard felt we deserved our breakfast. Leaving the bakers to their noble work, we went up the ramp and into the public part of the Auzet establishment, which over the years has become an informal mixture of shop, cafe, and art gallery. There are chairs and marble-topped tables along one wall where you can have coffee and a
croissant
still glowing from the warm breath of the oven. Posters by local artists, photographs, and mementos share wall space with shelves lined with bottles of champagne, pots of homemade jams and syrups, baskets of almond biscuits, flasks of truffle-scented olive oil.

And then there's the bread—a panorama of bread, stretching for perhaps twenty feet behind the counter, bread arranged according to type and size, varying in color from pale gold to a deep chocolate brown, a display as tanned and tightly packed as rows of sunbathers on a Riviera beach.

Once the shelves are filled, tables and chairs are set out on the pavement. It's taken for granted that the sun will shine all day, just as it has been doing for the past three months. Outdoor blinds and shutters are folded back from the display window, and the first soft gray light of dawn seeps into the shop. The door is fixed open. Chez Auzet is ready for business.

Veronique Auet. The smile lasts all day.

Six-fifteen, and the hollow feeling of being up so early begins to disappear, thanks to a
cafe creme
and a warm breakfast roll spread with almost-white butter and dipped into the coffee, a messy but delicious combination of tastes and textures.

The first customer of the day appears, trailing behind him a large paper sack. He is from the Hotel du Pare at the end of the street and, this being August, the hotel is full. He leaves with a basket of
croissants
and a bulging sack of
baguettes.
Almost before he's out of the door, the gaps on the shelf are filled with more bread.

More customers arrive, the early-morning regulars, and they observe the daily ritual of handshakes and multiple kisses and enquiries after each other's health. The young women behind the counter wrap each purchase in a twist of paper with a dexterous turn of the wrist. Gerard circulates among his clients and rearranges a couple of loaves that have tilted sideways on the shelf. Symmetry restored to his satisfaction, he disappears down the ramp to commune with the ovens.

For him, it will be a long day. The early-morning batch is the first of many, and while a second shift of bakers will take over at noon, Gerard will stay until closing time, around six. He'll drive home to Menerbes, have dinner with his family, get to bed around ten, and be up again at three the next morning. I ask him how he does it. “You get used to it,” he says. But I think there's more to it than that. I think you have to have baker's genes.

W
HEN
Marcel Pagnol wrote
“Je suis ne dans le petrin”
—I was born in the dough trough—he might have been describing any one of four generations of the Auzet family. For more than a hundred years, the Auzet men have been bakers.

Unfortunately, history in Provence is sometimes not passed on with as much detail or accuracy as one might wish. But we do have an idea of how it was to work as a baker during the second half of the nineteenth century, when Great-grandfather Auzet, born in 1845, was a young man.

His nickname was “l'Ortolan,” l'Ortolan, nobody knows why. The
ortolan
is a bird, a bunting, once much loved by gourmets until it became a protected species. It is tiny, no more than a mouthful of a bird, and it is
hard to find any immediate resemblance to Greatgrandfather Auzet. He is remembered as
un homme robuste
, broad-shouldered and muscular, who wore his baker's apron slung beneath his belly (an impressive belly, by all accounts, described in appropriate baking terms as the
brioche croissante).

He was a traveling baker, making his way along the backcountry roads from farm to farm and village to village throughout the Luberon with his mule and his cart. By his side was a large jug filled with
eau de vie
to ward off the chill of the winter mistral, and a generous supply of precious and all-important
levain.
This is the starter, a mixture of natural yeasts and other microorganisms. It takes time to make, sometimes as much as twenty days. But it is the heart and backbone of good bread, the element of fermentation that, when added to dough, causes it to rise and gives it lightness and flavor. It is one of the oldest examples in the world of gastronomic magic.