In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey (4 page)

I saw this approach with Chardon after we had shaped a series of baguettes. The loaves finished their second rise—the
apprêt
—resting on a linen
couche
for about thirty minutes. The timing of this final rise depends on the temperature of the bakery, for bread rises more quickly when it’s warm. The key question I always have at this point is, “Are they ready for the oven?” The moment, which can’t really be measured, is a point of tension when the dough is both relaxed and elastic. If the baker gets the timing just right, the loaves will spring up in the oven. But if he doesn’t, the crumb will be tight, and at worst, gummy. The thing is, this inferior crumb can result from either under- or overfermenting the loaf. But how do you know when it’s ready? Ultimately, it’s a judgment call.

This takes time to learn. It took me many awful loaves to know when the dough had fermented properly. When I asked Thomas how he knew when the rise was finished he pointed to his eyes. I studied the loaves closely, poked the skin to feel the tension, which is a common method, and said, “
Finis?
” I thought they were. He peered close without touching a thing and replied, “
Cinq minutes.
” So we waited five minutes for the dough to relax a bit more, then carefully transferred the thin, long
pâtons
onto a canvas mechanical oven loader. I had the honor of making the five swift signature slashes on the top of the baguettes with a
lame
(a curved razor), which create the bulging
grigne
when baked, and then we quickly slid them into the 500-degree oven.

This work slashing the bread was really my first significant lesson—and if I left the bakery at that moment, never to return, it would have been enough, because I slashed maybe twenty-five loaves at a time, and then did so repeatedly through the morning as we loaded more and more baguettes into the oven. At home, I never really got to practice this technique because I’d slash maybe two or three loaves at a time with a razor. At that rate, you tend to obsess over each cut. It’s difficult to figure out the speed and pressure of the blade, or the depth or length. So home bakers tend to slash too slowly and then go back, correcting what they perceive as defects. This is far too fastidious. Watch a professional and they simply slash down the loaf quickly, in a rhythmic series of cuts (and actually if you count the beats while you do it, this helps, for each beat corresponds to the time the blade is touching the dough). Slash dozens of baguettes in the course of a morning or two and pretty soon the action becomes so natural that your wrist, fingers, and arm will never forget it—even when you return to just two or three loaves a day. It’s technique, craft, and rhythm wrapped up in a loaf.

Thomas, a machine, never stopped moving. There was never a wasted moment, never a break, and this wasn’t even Sunday when he knocked out two thousand loaves (so much for the notion of the languorous French worker in the socialized state). After three hours, it was now seven
A.M
. and there was a lull as we waited for the loaves to finish baking. So Chardon dashed across the street to grab a couple of
cafés
, which we sipped with hot croissants that the pastry chefs had just taken out of the convection oven downstairs. They crackled and blasted open when you bit into them. The only drawback was the coffee, which for some reason the French have not elevated to anything near the croissants. Then the baguettes were ready, darkly spotted, crisp, and caramelized in sections. As we removed them, the crust crackled as it met the cooler air outside the oven. “
Ils chantent
,” he said—they’re singing.

 • • • 

T
he baguette wasn’t always so melodic. Despite the worldwide appreciation of the loaf as a symbol of France, its quality had declined so precipitously by the 1960s it was an open secret in the trade. Two decades later, truly great French bread was in danger of becoming an artisanal artifact. Neighborhood bakeries were failing.
By 1987, a cultural critic
writing in
Le Nouvel Observateur
proclaimed that the baguette had become “horribly disgusting . . . Bloated, hollow, dead white. Soggy or else stiff. Its crusts come off in sheets like diseased skin.” Renowned French baking professor Raymond Calvel, who had come up with the
autolyse
method—the resting period for dough so crucial to a superior loaf—wondered whether the best baguette would soon be made in Tokyo. What had brought this on?

One chilly morning, after I unloaded the last batch of crackling hot baguettes from the oven at Delmontel, I took the Métro across the Seine to a café in the Montparnasse. There, I met Steven Kaplan, the world’s preeminent historian of French bread, who has spent his adult life considering such questions. A Brooklyn-born bread lover who grew up with dense Jewish “corn” rye, Kaplan went on to become a historian of French society at Cornell University. Through bread, he believes, one could understand French culture, social and economic organization, the rise of early capitalism, and the political fabric of society, since keeping people fed and bakers and grain traders honest was an enduring concern. Now, as a professor emeritus, Kaplan resides in Paris, critiquing baguettes in the city’s annual competition, writing scholarly tomes, and appearing in French media, where he can frequently be seen thrusting his nose into a freshly cut loaf, which plays particularly well on TV. Back in the States, he’s gotten some media attention as well. On an appearance on
Late Night with Conan O’Brien
, he flew off on a tangent, as he discussed bakers’ “impregnating” flour with a fermenting agent, “mounting the dough” as they kneaded it, then tearing into the freshly baked loaf and encountering a “surging geyser of aromas.” Conan leaned over to the professor and confided, “I’ll be surprised if this actually airs.” He has won accolades for championing French bread and has pissed off numerous bakers for dismissing their products as “insipid.” His harsh critique about the quality of American artisan bread at one time caused such a schism with the Bread Bakers Guild of America that the trade group has never sought out his knowledge on numerous Guild-arranged trips to Paris. French bakers are not so thin-skinned. Behind the scenes in France, he has worked closely with millers and bakers, promoting the resurgence of artisanal breads; he has been named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor—twice—by the government, recognizing his critical work in this arcane field. For me, Kaplan was instrumental in understanding French bread. So over coffee in a two-and-a-half-hour discussion—and several follow-up conversations—I got a full dose of history and professorial digressions.

For Kaplan, bread is the most democratic of foods, because it feeds everyone. Yet, when the imperatives of sustenance are propelled by mass production and efficiency, the results can be disastrous culturally. In his book
Good Bread Is Back
, Kaplan tells the story of how French bakers nearly lost their way, as fabrication speeded up and loaves became more airy and light, devoid of taste. He had seen it himself, as a graduate student in Paris in the late 1960s, when bread was losing its place at the dinner table. “For years I had watched the sensorial quality of French bread palpably deteriorate,” he told me. “And for too long, it remained a professional secret. Bakers refused to talk about it and the specialized press approached it obliquely or in a highly technical way.”

If the decline could be pinned on one thing, he said, focusing his narrow eyes on me, it would be the loss of patience. Bakers compromised when they shifted away from
levain
(sourdough) and increased the pace of fermentation by using baker’s yeast instead. This proved popular because yeast—first obtained from brewers and then commercialized in the late nineteenth century—worked more quickly and didn’t have the acidic overtones of a
levain
-fermented loaf. Plus,
levain
took skill: a fist-sized piece of sourdough would be refreshed repeatedly with flour and water, providing food for the wild cultures of yeast and bacteria that live in the substance and cause a loaf to rise. These species of organisms are many in number and incredibly diverse, whereas commercial yeast consists of one specialized strain that does its job quickly and effectively.
Levain
loaves might weigh as much as four kilos (nine pounds) and last for a week or more because their acidity retards spoilage. They were often made with whole wheat and rye flours, sustaining French workers and peasants well into the twentieth century.

In Paris, where a preference for white flour had reigned at least since the eighteenth century, the switch to commercial yeast was natural, for it made a lighter loaf. It also coincided with a new method of bread making known as
fabrication en direct
—a process of mixing flour, water, salt, and yeast together all at once rather than building the dough through successive additions of water and flour, as with
levain
. “
There was no danger
of a badly maintained
levain
ruining a whole day’s production,” the Montreal baker and writer James MacGuire has pointed out.

Yeast, by itself, wasn’t a disaster. Nor was the so-called direct method of mixing everything together at once, which can make a fabulous loaf, so long as a couple of basic tenets are followed—ones I saw at Boulangerie Delmontel. First, mixing should be kept to a minimum, which Chardon accomplished by running the mixer briefly and then letting the dough rest for the three twenty-minute periods. During these rests, the gluten in the dough develops on its own. (Hand kneading with three or four successive rest periods, which is my chosen method, accomplishes the same thing.) Second, only a small bit of yeast is added so that the dough takes time to rise, allowing the acidity to increase slightly and improving the flavor.
Home bakers experienced
this approach en masse with the “no knead” bread technique developed by New York baker Jim Lahey and then championed by Mark Bittman in
The
New York Times
. Just one-quarter teaspoon of yeast is used; all the ingredients of the dough are mixed together and then fermented for up to twenty hours. The dough is then shaped minimally and baked in a Dutch oven. It’s a foolproof method for beginning bakers.

If you are seeking expediency, however, you start adding more yeast and mix the dough at a high speed to develop the gluten. In a warm kitchen, fermentation speeds up dramatically and you can make a loaf in two hours or less. The results of this approach are frankly disastrous. Without the benefit of a proper fermentation, the crumb will be tight and the crust a pale color; the bread will taste “yeasty.” Such compromises might be rationalized as “efficient”—and this is exactly what occurred in France as baker’s yeast became a crutch. Mixing everything together in a
fabrication en direct
and then cutting the fermentation time became a way to make bread quickly. “What that did was suppress the first fermentation that is the source of all aroma, all taste,” Kaplan said.

The baguette appeared after World War I, with many factors contributing to its ascendance. Aside from yeast, the steam-injected oven, which crisps up the crust, had arrived from Austria in the mid-nineteenth century. Highly refined flour made by Hungarian roller mills—an invention of the industrial age—also had become available. Add in the variable of the First World War, which reduced the availability of white flour, and the rise of this loaf seems to make sense. Customers revolted against whole grain breads of the war years by choosing the long white loaf with the thin crust, just as they did in the years following World War II. The baguette was a kind of highly refined Parisienne loaf made in a matter of hours and then consumed in one sitting while the crust was still crispy. Nothing about it was long-lasting.
Before the 1920s
, you might find similarly shaped long loaves but there was no reference to a “baguette,” food writer Jim Chevallier notes. Then the loaf appears suddenly, spreading out from Paris, though in some regions it took decades to supplant regional breads.