In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey (6 page)

The height of recognition for Delmontel came in 2007, during the blind tasting for the Prix de la Meilleure Baguette de Paris (Best Baguette in Paris). Delmontel submitted two loaves that were among the hundreds that the judges, Kaplan among them, tasted. He took home first prize for the loaf with the best crumb, flavor, crust, and appearance. “When they called me with the news, I said, ‘If this is a joke it is not a very nice one!’” Delmontel recounted. It was no joke. As part of the prize, Delmontel delivered his baguettes to the Élysée Palace for the president’s dinner table for a year. Sales shot up 30 percent. Delmontel was the fourth bakery associated with the Viron mill to win the prize.

 • • • 

A
fter several days at Boulangerie Delmontel, I became familiar with the process. So, I began to think about how I might try their technique at home. Noticing the recipe for several hundred baguettes taped to the wall, I calculated the ratio of water, salt, flour, and yeast. Then, I figured out the amount I’d need for just three baguettes and showed it to Thomas. “
Oui?
” he said. “
Un test
,” I replied.

PHOTOGRAPH BY BRIAN DOBEN

Mixing my “test” dough at Boulangerie Delmontel

During a rare lull, we weighed out the small quantity of ingredients. Then, to his surprise, I began mixing the flour, water, and yeast by hand, until it was just combined, and then added the salt after the
autolyse
, or rest period. “I haven’t done that since baking school,” he said. The flour absorbed less water than American flours, because the protein level was lower (protein soaks up water). It also had a different aroma, more grassy perhaps than my flours at home. I then began kneading the dough, lifting it with both hands, slapping it down on the counter, and then folding it over on itself, a technique that I picked up from a video by the UK-based French baking teacher Richard Bertinet. When the dough looked fully developed, springing back when I pulled on it, I showed it to Thomas. He looked and signaled me to work it a bit more. So I slapped and folded the dough a couple of more minutes. Then I let the dough sit, so that the gluten strands could rearrange themselves and strengthen on their own. I kneaded in short bursts every twenty minutes, just as Thomas had done with the mixer. Then we put the dough in the refrigerator for an overnight rise, a modest round of dough amid the bins that filled each shelf. I revealed the experiment to Delmontel when he walked into the
fournil
. He merely smiled and went on his way.

Returning the next morning, I waited for another lull in the routine and then pulled out the dough. It had risen nicely and domed up slightly in the plastic bin. It was also creamy colored as opposed to the whitish hue of oxidized dough; it was a good sign that it would have a complex taste.

We shaped the baguettes by hand, let them rise once more, for about thirty minutes, then baked them off in the huge oven. They sprang up and opened at the
grignes
, and when we removed them with the long baker’s peel—a flat wooden spatula with a long handle—I saw they had a deep golden brown color. The slashes were nicely extenuated. Once they cooled, I picked out one and took it upstairs to the chef.

“
Le test
,” I announced, entering Delmontel’s office.

He looked amused as I gave him the loaf.

“Nice slashes,” he said. “Good color. May I cut it open?”

Of course, I nodded.

So he took out a serrated knife and cut the full length of the loaf, like a sandwich, then thrust his nose inside, squeezing the bread to release the bouquet—just as Kaplan had done so often. “Ah, good smell,” he said, and looking at the uneven air pockets in the crumb, he smiled and showed the loaf to his wife, Valérie. “I didn’t know that my formula could be done on such a small scale,” he said.

Then he took a bite.

“Ah,
c’est bien!
” he said, smiling.

A French baker had told me I made good bread. What else did I need? I flew out of the office and went downstairs to tell Chardon the good news.

 • • • 

M
y days in Paris fell into a routine: up at three in the morning, over to the bakery until noon, then a nice leisurely lunch at a choice restaurant as my main meal of the day. This is a nice way to eat in Paris, because lunch is as good as dinner, it’s a third cheaper, and you bypass the crowds. Then I’d do a bit of sightseeing, or visit
boulangeries
throughout the city. Sometimes I hopped on the Métro, though I also relied on the ubiquitous Vélib’ public bicycles, picking up one at a stand, then riding to the next
boulangerie
, where I could usually find another kiosk to drop it off. It was an amazing way to see Paris, even in chilly, wet February. When evening came around, I had a light repast—a sandwich, salad, or charcuterie with a glass of wine—then was in bed by eight.

There may be 1,200 bakers in Paris, but the same names often arise when it comes to spectacular bread. So I ate many good loaves, but honestly, not one stood out above all others. Techniques, for the most noble or selfish reasons, spread like wildfire. And luckily, these days, the best techniques were on the rebound, at least among committed
boulangers
.

You could see it at a gorgeous little bakery in the tenth arrondissement, Du Pain et Des Idées, which was open only weekdays. The baker, Christophe Vasseur, had a marvelous selection of loaves, including a
levain
-scented baguette with just a bit of chew in the crust. Or for a really novel take on French bread, there was Véronique Mauclerc, whose bakery is tucked into a working-class neighborhood in the nineteenth arrondissement. Her organic and whole grain loaves, made entirely with
levain
, had won critical notice from Paris to Tokyo. All the breads were shaped by hand and baked in a century-old wood-fired oven. Then there was Kayser, where I stood on a line that snaked down the Rue Monge in the evening, one of many seeking the crackling baguettes coming out of the oven. And, of course, Poilâne, whose bakery was now run by his daughter, Apollonia, and where a pilgrimage was a foregone conclusion. These were just a few of the bakers I visited in Paris whose methods kept the flavor vibrant and the bread alive.

I had tried so much bread in so many bakeries around Paris, I was approaching my limit, if such a thing is possible, and my enthusiasm began to flag. But one day, Kaplan told me that if I wanted to try a really superlative baguette, I should take the Métro down to Vaugirard in the fifteenth and meet Frédéric Pichard. “He might make the best baguette in Paris,” Kaplan said provocatively. By this point I had eaten so many wonderful baguettes I had no idea what “best” meant, but after a few phone calls through my friend Denise, we arranged a meeting at the
boulangerie
.

By the time I arrived at La Maison Pichard that rainy afternoon, I was dripping wet. Denise and I entered the shop, which was quite small, almost utilitarian, without the elaborate displays of bread and pastries that might fill more flamboyant establishments. The place was crowded, bustling with the late afternoon trade. Denise said a few words to the woman behind the counter and we were immediately ushered into the back, past a giant wood-fired brick oven, where a baker stood loading baguettes onto the hearth with a long wooden peel. Pichard, a stocky man dressed in bakers’ whites, said hello and motioned us to follow him downstairs to the basement. Unlike the warm and homey feel of the shop upstairs, the basement appeared almost antiseptic, with stainless steel counters, giant steel mixing troughs, and spotless floor tile. That Pichard had devoted this much attention to designing the bowels of the operation was telling. Many bakeries I visited—including Delmontel’s—were tightly stacked with equipment, the workers squeezing by each other. By comparison, this basement was almost luxurious, with a lot of floor space. It was also a marked contrast to the small store out front.

Before I had even removed my dripping jacket or asked my first question, Pichard launched into a colloquy of his principles of baking, the ideal baguette, the problems with millers, the drawbacks of contemporary flour, the failures of the baking trade, the imbecilic journalists who came to interview him who knew nothing about bread, the poverty of skills among his fellow
boulangers
, a few of them media darlings whom he declared “
imposteurs!
”

“He’s really on a roll,” Denise said, trying to keep up with the translation.

Following him around the bakery for two and a half hours, it became clear he was really trying to make two related points. First, that the baguette stood as the pinnacle of the nation’s culinary culture—“I fight for it because it’s the quintessential French product!” he said. Second, bakers often fell short on reaching the heights of excellence because they were just following rote techniques and didn’t fully understand fermentation. By then, I knew the argument he was making—that proper fermentation had been lost in the headlong plunge toward expediency and efficiency, even if a minority were fighting to bring it back. For Pichard, the stakes were much higher than simply good bread, because the essence of wheat itself had been sacrificed along the way.

In fact, when he began talking with us, he did not even mention bread. Instead, he began describing champagne, which undergoes a two-step fermentation. The grape is first crushed and the wine bottled, so that it ferments with whatever wild yeast is on the grape itself. “This is the first fermentation,” he said, “the ‘endogenous’ fermentation. After that period which can last a few weeks, yeast is added and a second fermentation begins. This is the ‘exogenous’ fermentation.”
This process was crucial
to bringing out the intrinsic taste of the grape, which in turn expressed its
terroir
—the soil, climate, and place where the fruit was grown. There was no reason that wheat itself couldn’t achieve the same exalted heights.

Pichard motioned
us over to a giant stainless steel mixing trough, perhaps three feet in diameter and eighteen inches high, filled with a cream-colored and extremely moist dough. He explained that it had been sitting undisturbed for twenty-four hours. “That’s for the baguette?” I asked. I was incredulous, because if dough sat for that long at room temperature, it could easily overferment and lose the glutinous strength needed to form a loaf. To avoid this, bakers such as Delmontel put the dough in the refrigerator for a full day, developing flavor but not at the expense of the dough’s plasticity. But Pichard explained that it wasn’t the final dough, just a mixture of flour, water, and salt—no yeast. This was akin to that first fermentation in champagne, the “endogenous” fermentation, which allowed the inherent flavors of the wheat to develop,
before baker’s yeast
was added.

“Look closely,” he said.
On the surface of the dough
I could see bubbles, the telltale sign of a fermenting dough, because yeast digests sugar in the flour and then expels carbon dioxide gas. This gas causes the dough to rise. I suggested that the dough wasn’t fermenting on its own, but was inoculated by microscopic amounts of yeast left in the mixer from previous batches. Pichard smiled. “We wash these mixers after each batch, and then clean them out with a bleach solution because we don’t want to infect the dough,” he said. He was sanitizing the mixers the same way beer makers cleaned out fermentation tanks, so maybe they were undergoing an “endogenous” fermentation after all. Then, after the long rest period and the addition of baker’s yeast, the dough was minimally mixed and then left to ferment for four to seven hours. Finally, it was divided into baguette-sized pieces of dough, shaped into loaves, and loaded straight into the brick oven. It was highly unorthodox—in fact, I had never encountered anything like it in the United States or France. “This work is what produces the aromatic bouquet,” he said.

His flour, an ancient variety whose name he didn’t care to reveal, came from a single farmer in Picardy, in the north of France, and it was milled for his bakery. Because the origin was so limited, there wasn’t an opportunity to blend it with other flours to create a uniform product. The baker got what the farmer produced. As a result, he had to keep adjusting his methods to suit the variations in the flour. “That’s why I can show what I do, because no one can reproduce this,” he said, sweeping his arm around the bakery. “You can only learn this by doing the work.” Sometimes the dough fermented for twenty hours, sometimes thirty. At times, he ran the mixer for five minutes to develop the dough after this initial fermentation, but at other times, it ran far longer. It all came down to the flour, which varied by season and by year.