In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey (3 page)

A
t three
A
.
M
., Rue des Martyrs, a narrow artery in the ninth arrondissement of Paris, was empty and the stores dark except for a narrow ray of light coming out of the side bakery entrance of Boulangerie Delmontel, nestled in the corner of a rococo building. The day before, the street had been crowded with couples out for a Sunday stroll, taking in the wine shops, bistros, and small food stores. It reminded me of Greenwich Village in the 1970s, before it gentrified. The ninth was popular—hip, even—but still had the close-knit feel of a residential neighborhood, the kind of place where a restaurant maître d’ would banter with the regulars when they arrived. But now in the predawn hours the streets were quiet.

I had woken up a half hour before, weary from the jet lag and the early hour, and gotten dressed in my white cotton baking jacket and pants. I didn’t need a lot of time to get ready for there wasn’t a lot to do—not even a cup of coffee to be had. I drank a glass of water and went down to the hotel lobby, surprising the night clerk. You’re leaving? he asked, perhaps wondering if I were headed to the Pigalle, the red light district nearby. No, I’m going to bake bread, I replied. He looked puzzled as I headed out into the cool February night air.

How many bakers over the centuries had walked these same dark streets, heading to the
fournils
—the baking rooms—to give Paris its daily bread? Marx had called them the white miners. They began well before midnight, sweating over hundreds of pounds of dough that they kneaded by hand in basements and baked in wood-fired ovens. The boys were known as
les geindres
, “the groaners.”
The poorest slept
by the hearth, inhaling flour, often suffering from tuberculosis. “There is no species more repugnant than that of the
geindre
,” a French physician remarked, “naked to the waist, pouring out sweat, gasping in the last throes, spilling and mixing into the dough that you will eat several hours later all the secretions of his overheated body and all the excretions of his lungs, congested by the impure air of the asphyxiating bakeroom.” But if they did their job well in this sweltering basement dungeon, faithful to the demanding and time-consuming task of coaxing bread out of natural leaven, flour, water, and salt, the resulting loaves might well have surpassed many sold today, excretions notwithstanding. As I walked down the cobblestone streets that early morning, I felt as if I was following in the footsteps of these ghosts.

I was closing in on the final chapter of what had been a long quest—one that actually began many years ago when I first began baking. At that time, the baguette defined bread for me and I saw no reason why I shouldn’t try to bake it, even as a beginner. This isn’t unusual. Many novices start out with this iconic loaf. And that’s where the trouble begins, because it’s the equivalent of wanting to knock out a Beethoven sonata when you sit down at the piano for the first time. So what is it about this loaf that nearly guarantees failure? First, there is the flavor, which must be coaxed out of the flour—it doesn’t come by simply mixing the ingredients together. Second, the crumb: It must be light and open, full of holes so prized by bakers that they have their own technical name, alveoli. Third comes the crust. The baker slashes the loaf with a razor blade, right before sliding it into the hot oven. Properly formed, the loaf bursts open through the slashes. But if the surface of the dough is at all flaccid, the slash, or
grigne
, becomes a diminutive wiggly line. Fourth, the crust must crackle when you bite into it, adding depth to the taste and aroma of the bread. To achieve a crust like this requires a method of creating steam in your home oven, which might result in second-degree burns if you’re not careful. All of this, of course, depends on yet a fifth factor—your ability to shape sticky, loose dough by hand into a long cylindrical form that must have a taut skin and yet be open and pliable within. Sprinkle too much flour on the counter and you will fail because the dough will slide around and you won’t be able to create surface tension in the dough. But sprinkle too little flour and the dough will stick to the counter and you might rip the skin open. (You want just a dusting, which you achieve, I learned, by taking a pinch of flour in your thumb and two fingers and flicking it across the surface by snapping your wrist.) None of this is easy, but it’s further compounded by the fact that the baker needs to have a solid understanding of what is perhaps the most difficult aspect of bread making—fermentation. If you misjudge this—and fermentation is truly a judgment call—then the defects will be magnified in every other step of the process. The result is that you’ll often end up saying, This isn’t a baguette, it’s shit.

I became convinced that it was impossible to make the loaf at home despite all the recipes and lessons that baking books contained. (This was compounded by a not infrequent ruse in baking books: the authors often use specialized bread-baking ovens that easily run into the tens of thousands of dollars to bake the breads pictured in their books, putting them out of reach for the home baker.) So, I moved on to other breads. Though I learned quite a bit over the years, I kept the baguette at bay, feeling defeated. I really didn’t return to it until that fateful call with the travel editor, who was willing to commission a story on precisely what I wanted to do.

After we’d spoken, I had no idea how to proceed. I didn’t speak much French—I could order a meal, but not much more. The only French bakers I’d met were in the United States. But then I remembered: I had a friend in Paris who might be able to help out, Denise Young, a former colleague now living in Paris with her French husband and daughter. When I e-mailed her, she graciously offered to help. Within a few days, we had gathered a list of around eight
boulangeries
that looked promising and then she began calling. Now, Denise is well schooled in French manners, but has a kind of full-throttle reporter’s approach that gets results quickly. Her assessments were brief, opinionated: “He was kind of gruff, not what you would want,” or “Sounds like she just got out of bed, and doesn’t speak a word of English, but wants to know the dates,” and so on. Within a few days, she had gotten three positive responses, including one from Arnaud Delmontel, who had recently won the annual prize for the best baguette in Paris. He had also worked in the States for a time and spoke English. “Very charming, typically French, here’s his mobile number,” she said. I e-mailed him pictures of my bread and then gave him a call. I explained the nature of the project. He listened politely. But he was busy, and really, there wasn’t much to discuss: when would I be there, he wanted to know. When I suggested a date, he said it would be best to arrive before four
A.M
. on a Monday. His head baker would meet me. His name was Thomas Chardon. And that was it.

When I arrived that first day in the predawn hours, Chardon let me in. A wiry energetic man in his mid-twenties, he said “
Salut!
,” then slid across the flour-specked floor to go back to his dough. He was placing baguette loaves onto a
couche
, a linen cloth that supports the shape of baguettes as they undergo a final rise before baking. He was covered in flour, his blue fleece a snowy white. Pop music blared from a portable radio. I could smell the unmistakable toasty, faintly nutty aroma of freshly baking bread from the oven that filled about a third of the room. Thomas had to rearrange everything just to let me in the cramped space: he slid aside bins filled with just-baked baguettes, rolled cabinets that held the rising loaves, and pushed aside the steel frame loader which is used to slip the loaves into the oven. There wasn’t much time for pleasantries. He pointed me toward a narrow circular staircase to a small dressing room where I could keep my things. Then I returned to the baking room, where he motioned me to join in.

Delmontel was one of the new artisans in France, uncompromising when it came to ingredients and technique. But as I soon found out, Delmontel mostly spent his time running the business—three dozen workers more or less, two bakeries (now three, as I write this), making breads, pastries, cakes, and macarons—so it fell to Thomas to be my teacher. Although he spoke no English, the language barrier hardly mattered as he guided me through the entire bread-making cycle, prompting me with hand gestures and a few words. The techniques weren’t unique—it wasn’t as if Thomas were sharing Delmontel’s “secret recipe”—but they did reflect methods that serious bakers were now applying to bread. Time was their most important tool: the time to let the dough come together gently, the time to let fermentation work its magic, and the fortitude not to be pushed by anything but the demands of the bread itself.

This approach was evident when Thomas first dumped flour, a small bit of yeast, salt, and water into a massive mixing bowl and let the mixing arm run for a few minutes at a slow speed. Once the shaggy dough came together, he turned off the machine and then let the dough sit for twenty minutes as the flour slowly absorbed the water. This crucial moment of rest is known in French as
autolyse
(autolysis, which means self-digestion, and which is often accomplished without yeast or salt). What happens in this time of do-nothingness is that the water slowly hydrates the proteins and starches in the flour, beginning the process of dough formation. The mixer can develop the dough, too, but it also incorporates oxygen, which can bleach out the flour, tighten the loaf, and alter the inherent flavor of the grain, especially if overdone, as mixing often is. It’s better just to let the dough sit in this initial stage and let time do the work.

We mixed again briefly, with two more twenty-minute rest periods. After this one-hour period of mixing and sitting, we scooped chunks of this heavy dough and put them in plastic bins that went into a refrigerated cabinet for a full day. Again, time came into play. While the dough rested at 40˚F (5˚C) during this first rise (known as the
pointage
), it also slowly fermented, meaning that the flavor, texture, crumb, and crust would all improve. Without this languid first rise, the bread would be bland, lacking character.

Chardon’s sense of craft was also apparent. Sure, there were scales to measure flour and water, since bakers measure by weight, and a timer above the mixer, but the main gauge he used to tell if the dough was ready was observation. He looked at the dough, then pinched it between his thumb and fingers. As the mixer turned slowly, he poured in more water at one point because the dough looked slightly stiff. You can’t teach that in a cookbook. Delmontel later told me he had been flown to South Korea to consult on a new bakery operation; the company timed his every move with a stopwatch, trying to re-create what he was doing as a measured series of steps. “They kept asking me, ‘How long do you do that?’ and I just shrugged.” He laughed. “I do it until it’s done!”