In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey (31 page)

He dumped out the bin on a well-floured counter and patted it down gently with his palms. He then took a thin piece of wood—what’s known as a baguette flipper—and straightened out the sides of the dough so it made a rectangle. With the dough in this rough shape, he lifted one side with his hands and forearms and simply folded the dough in half over on top of itself. On this smooth surface, he sprinkled flour to make five distinct lines across the top of the dough. Then he picked up the piece of wood again and made five indentations by pressing down on the lines of flour with the edge of the board, returning again with the wood to cut through the dough. If he had used a bench scraper, or knife, he would have cut through the dough immediately. By using the blunt edge of the wood, he formed a sealed seam before the loaves were cut. (I found that a chopstick or the handle of a wooden spoon achieves a similar effect when I tried the technique at home.) And there it was. One fold and then five cuts to make five loaves. Finally, he lifted up the five pieces of dough and set them in a linen
couche
—a piece of fabric folded like an accordion with a loaf between each of the folds. He set this in a wooden cabinet for the second rise.

“It’s the simplest method,” he said. “It’s also one of the oldest, and it’s very fast.”

When the loaves had risen sufficiently, we slashed a simple pattern on the top and loaded them into the brick oven with a long wooden peel. Despite my skepticism about this loose dough, the bread did spring up. It also had marvelously large and varied holes in the crumb, because it had been shaped so minimally. As for the smell: well, people began to arrive just as the bread was exiting the oven.

 • • • 

T
hat trip to Cucugnan came in 2012 at the end of my travels, and I knew I wouldn’t be coming back to France soon. So after saying good-bye to Feuillas and his family, I returned to Paris. On my final night there, I splurged and took Denise, my friend and translator, to a little neighborhood bistro. We had a great time catching up, but I felt something was lacking in the meal. I mean everything was right, the food was delicious, I had a good Bordeaux with dinner and a friend to share it with, but I realized what was missing was the long wooden table filled with Feuillas’s family and the smell of the meal cooking on the stove. We were eating good food here, but we weren’t with the people who had made it.

The next day, my last in France, I got up, ate a quick breakfast at the hotel, and then went around the corner to a Paris Vélib’ kiosk to get a bicycle. I went for a ride in the morning sun, parked the bike at another stand, and then hopped on the Métro. I wanted to revisit Boulangerie Arnaud Delmontel, where I had worked three years earlier, which was really the experience that set me on this path. I hadn’t called Arnaud to see if he was around. I figured I would just take a chance and show up, since I had only a couple of hours to kill before I had to leave for Charles De Gaulle airport. I got off at Saint-Georges in the ninth arrondissement, and, remembering the neighborhood, walked the few blocks to the
boulangerie
.

The side-door entrance to the baking room was shut but I looked into the glass window and saw my old teacher, Thomas Chardon, working inside. When I rapped on the door he immediately recognized me. I gave him a warm hello, told him why I was back in France—all while he was removing some baguettes from the oven. We chatted for a bit and then he went back to work. It was the same routine, every morning, and he seemed completely in his element.

I asked if Monsieur Delmontel was around, and Thomas pointed upstairs. I went up the spiral staircase to the office and Delmontel looked up, surprised, and stopped what he was doing. As we talked, he told me he had a good laugh when he found out I had won the best baguette contest in Washington. But then he said, “No, I am proud, because you came here, you really wanted to learn, and you did learn.” It didn’t matter that I wasn’t a professional; it didn’t matter that I was doing all this because I simply wanted to; it didn’t matter that I wasn’t going to run a bakery. I had tried to bake a true loaf of bread and I had done it, and that was enough. It was just the kind of recognition you get from someone who appreciates the craft in its own right. We had a coffee and a couple of his croissants, and that was it. I said good-bye, bounced down the street to another Vélib’ bike station, and rode back to my hotel. The sun was shining, the air was warm, and I was heading back home. It was the perfect coda for the trip, actually the perfect coda to the entire journey that had begun one cold February morning three years earlier. Yet I wasn’t quite done. Because Feuillas had spurred some ideas to consider closer to home.

 • • • 

N
ow, I wasn’t Roland Feuillas. I had tried to grow wheat in my community garden plot and failed miserably. So I knew that if I was really going to bake with local wheat, as he was doing, I’d have to find a source other than my garden. Luckily, I didn’t have to look farther than the FreshFarm Market in Dupont Circle in Washington, where Heinz Thomet, a Swiss-born organic farmer, was selling grains at his farm stand.

On Cobb Neck in southern Maryland, about an hour south of Washington, he had begun growing cereal crops as “green manure.” Organic farmers often add grasses or legumes into their crop rotations, plowing them into the soil to build biomass and fertility. But since he was growing them, he figured he could also harvest the kernels, getting at least some revenue for the effort. Grains were also attractive because he didn’t need much labor. Finding workers on Cobb Neck who would plant, weed, and pick his vegetables was a continual headache, which is perhaps why he often worked ungodly hours. Vegetable farming was also backbreaking work, though on one of the days I visited, two young workers had a flatbed contraption that ameliorated any back bending at all. They were lying facedown on a four-wheeled trolley, about a foot off the ground, with a little cushion to support their foreheads. As they rolled along through a row of spinach, they picked out weeds with their hand hoes and flung them aside.

Seeing this work, it was obvious why this produce was not cheap. Perhaps it was also the reason grains looked promising, since they could be harvested with a tractor. As Heinz ramped up this effort, I kept abreast of his work and planned on visiting his farm during the fall season when he would be sowing wheat, barley, and rye.

“Well, we need about three weeks of dry weather before I can get onto the ground,” he said, when I called him one day in October.

“I know, but just give me a heads-up before you do it.”

“Well, there’s not a lot to see. It’s not like it’s a Brueghel painting or anything. I’m on a tractor.”

“I know,” I said. “But I still want to see it.”

One warm day in late October, when planting was finally auspicious, I visited Next Step Produce. The small farm is beyond the suburban sprawl of Washington and it’s not particularly evident that such a bucolic spot—Brueghel painting or not—would sit a quarter mile or so off the main highway. The farm had several fields, all sloping down toward the forest and marshland that is part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. When I arrived, Heinz’s wife, Gabrielle Lajoie—who is French Canadian and started out as an employee on the farm—came out of the house and said hello. His three young girls were climbing on the tractor, and before long, Heinz, in his well-worn work clothes, scraggly beard, and bushy hair, which looked a bit like broccoli rabe, showed up. He was tall and solidly built, perhaps the most husky vegan I’ve met. After shaking my hand, Heinz took me to see the operation.

The business was more complicated than just growing wheat, because the kernels had to be cleaned. Heinz had bought a range of blowers, shakers, and sieves to remove damaged grains, weeds, rocks, and dirt that might find their way into the bags destined for market. It’s hard to appreciate what’s involved when you buy those bags of pristine farro that are now so popular, until you compare freshly harvested grain with the final result. It was quite remarkable what this equipment, much of it new to his farm, could achieve in removing detritus. When he first started growing grain a few years back, Heinz gave me some rye but it wasn’t pure. Weedy legume seeds were mixed in with it, too, so I spent what seemed like an hour sorting the tiny, black, round peas from the greenish rye grains before I just gave up. I couldn’t clearly identify the other seed but figured it couldn’t be all that bad—so I just ground it all into flour and made rye bread. Now, he had advanced, and had all the specialized equipment to address such impurities, and a walk-in refrigerator, too, to prevent bugs from infesting the stored bags of grain. The setup was impressive, especially for the scale of the small farm.

Aside from his reputation among farmers for being an extremely hard worker and tough boss, Heinz also let no opportunity for idle labor to pass, so, as we were talking, he pulled out a bag with a small amount of seed and asked if I might count the number of seeds it contained. Apparently, this was necessary to gauge the number of seeds in an ounce, and ultimately in an entire seed bag, so that he could figure out how many bags he needed to sow his fields that day.

“Of course,” I said, rather naively. So, sitting at a small table in the barn, I used a knife to gently push wheat kernels into piles of ten, then added ten together to make one hundred, and so on. At one point, Gabrielle came out to the barn and smiled. “Oh, I see Heinz has you counting seeds.” After about a half hour, I had counted more than three thousand seeds. Heinz then ripped open the appropriate number of seed bags, emptied them into the seeder attached to the tractor, and off we went to the fields.

It was a good day for sowing wheat but he was right: there wasn’t a lot to see, other than the tractor riding back and forth over the soil depositing seed in furrows. It took a couple of hours to complete the job. One of his daughters came along for the ride and sat in his lap on the tractor, then eventually jumped down and wandered over to a patch of grass where she watched her father ride back and forth over the fields. She picked a wildflower. I joined her in the warm afternoon sun and watched Heinz, too.

 • • • 

W
hen he began this pursuit, one problem that he ran into quickly was finding wheat varieties suited to southern Maryland. Hardly any wheat was being grown in this part of the country, so it wasn’t as if he could turn to neighboring farmers for advice. He scoured the Internet looking for seed stock, and talked to other farmers in different regions of the country about what might work in the mid-Atlantic. But all of this was largely an experiment, since wheat growing on the Eastern Seaboard is relatively rare. Even now, with the locavore movement in full swing, it’s still confined to small pockets.

To find the epicenter of the nation’s wheat production east of the Allegheny Mountains, the clock needs to be turned back to the mid-nineteenth century. At that time, the Shenandoah Valley, that fertile finger of land in Virginia about three hours west of Heinz’s farm, had served as the granary for the Confederacy during the Civil War. The valley is still fertile, but you won’t find much wheat there today. By the close of the nineteenth century, wheat production had shifted a thousand miles west, to Kansas, Texas, and Nebraska. The softer, lower-protein wheats once grown in the East fell out of favor, supplanted by the hard red wheats of the plains states that became the standard for bread making. It became conventional wisdom that bread wheat could not be grown on the Eastern Seaboard.

Heinz, though, was curious, and wanted to give wheat a try, so he experimented with a few modern varieties, as well as Turkey Red. I passed him some wheat seed that Eli Rogosa had given me up in Massachusetts, which came from biodynamic farmers in Germany. I thought that it might be suited to his farm because Heinz used biodynamic farming methods, too. Since there were only about one hundred seeds in the packet, he would have to grow them out and then plant them again the following year, increasing the amount of seed annually before he had enough to sell.