In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey (7 page)

When I asked him where he got the idea for this method, he said that as a younger man, “I was very passionate about wine.” Plus, he came from a family of bakers; he had apprenticed with his father just as his son was now apprenticing with him. “My father always believed there should be dough in the mixer. So when he finished for the day, he mixed one final dough and let it sit overnight. That was a bit like mine, but it did not rest as long,” he said.

There were other differences in this baguette, too. He dramatically reduced the amount of salt in his dough, which is typically twenty grams per kilo of flour, or 2 percent of the flour weight. But I’ve seen recipes that go up to 2.5 or even 3.5 percent, which would verge toward “salty.” Pichard’s view: “Anyone who is adding 2.5 percent salt is trying to mask the lack of flavor, because salt exhausts the taste buds.”

I tend to agree with him. I’ve found that with more flavor in the dough—from a long fermentation, or sourdough, or a higher percentage of whole grain flour—you can reduce salt without ill effect. In fact, on a sandwich with salty cold cuts, cheese, or olive tapenade you can even use a nearly unsalted bread and hardly notice the difference. You get the salt from the fixings. I usually benchmark salt at 1.8 percent, or eighteen grams per kilo of flour, which is an effective 10 percent reduction from the usual amount recommended in baking books. But Pichard cut the sodium in his dough by one fifth, to sixteen grams per kilo. This would be noticeable, and for many the bread might well taste bland, at least on the first bite.

“You didn’t have any customers revolt when you did that?” I asked.

“No. I did it gradually, over time, and no one mentioned a thing,” he replied.

That conformed with what I’ve found as well, which is that no one has ever remarked on the seasoning in my bread. But here is the other thing about salt: Pichard, like many French bakers I met, uses coarse sea salt, such as
gros sel de Guerande
, from the marshlands of Brittany.
Compared with table salt
or kosher salt, this sea salt already has roughly 12 percent less sodium because of the minerals and moisture it also contains. When combined with the already reduced amount of salt in the dough, the bread has perhaps a third less sodium than the norm—at least the norm in the United States. But Pichard’s not cutting down on salt because of health concerns; he doesn’t want salt to mask the intrinsic taste of wheat. He’s not alone in that regard, at least in France. I met other French bakers who maintain salt at levels that would probably be unacceptable in the United States. In fact, the food in general tasted less salty, and while some American chefs might say it was improperly seasoned, perhaps we’ve just gotten used to more salt in our food.

Upstairs, a baker was loading baguettes into the brick oven on a peel, not the canvas mechanical loader that is a common piece of equipment in most other bakeries. The oven’s circular hearth rotated with the turn of a mechanical wheel on the wall. This way, the baker could load baguettes on one portion of the hearth and then turn the wheel so another segment of the floor was exposed to the oven door. Between each baking session, wood was added to a fire box next to the hearth, which blew the hot air into the oven. This way the oven remained free of ash. Pichard clearly loved the wood oven, but when I asked him whether he thought it made better bread than a modern deck oven, he said, “
Non,
” and then paused. The oven was beautiful, folkloric, and related to the heritage of bread. If it altered the flavor at all, it was only because the oven’s heat gradually receded during baking. This, of course, is a hot debate among bakers, because some swear by the flavors a wood-fired oven infuses into the bread. Of course, bread is not baked in an oven filled with burning wood. Even in cases where the wood is burned directly on the oven floor, the remaining ashes are swept out and then the hearth mopped before the bread goes in. In Pichard’s case, the wood never even touched the oven because the firebox was located alongside it. All that’s left is the heat radiating from the floor, ceiling, and thick stone walls, and maybe some residual flavor—or maybe not. Still, the wood fire suited Pichard’s approach: he thought of it as working with the most essential elements—
fire
from the oven,
earth
in which the wheat grew,
water
to make the dough, and
air
, which fueled fermentation.

When we finally ate the bread—a light loaf with one long slash running the length of the bread instead of the usual series of cuts—it was extremely airy, almost floating in my hand as I held it, with a very mild and almost sweet, milky flavor to the crumb. The crust was crisp and chewy, and well done. On the first bite, though, I did notice the reduced salt. As we kept eating, it was no longer apparent.

A lot of work and thought went into this loaf, and the process was quite challenging. Was it worth it? The answer was in the work itself, for Pichard told me he wanted to keep baking intellectually exciting for himself and his bakers. “You have to be engaged and interested in what you’re doing and learn the way dough ferments,” he said. “That takes ten years. Those who say they can teach baking in six months, it’s a big lie.”

In one of his parting comments, he said he wanted to champion the baguette because that was what kept people coming to
boulangeries
each day. He made two to three thousand baguettes daily for his customers. He didn’t knock Poilâne, and the dark
levain miche
the bakery sold, but that bread could last for a week, meaning customers would not have to return to the bakery very often. If you wanted a Pichard baguette, you had to buy it and eat it on the same day. It was the main staple of those who lived in the apartments overlooking the streets around him. “They are the most demanding clientele,” he said, “but also the most loyal.” He only charged one euro per loaf, which was much less than other
boulangeries
in Paris. If he offered the best bread possible to his neighbors, they in turn would support him, and he had no interest in doing anything else. There would be no Pichard chain, no international brand. Just one neighborhood bakery with its unrelenting focus on coaxing good bread from the wheat of one farmer in France. “It’s a good living,” he said. “It’s enough.”

 • • • 

W
hen I returned from Paris, I took all that I had learned and went to work. I made baguette dough nearly every day, following the process I learned at the Boulangerie Delmontel of minimal mixing time, a long rise in the refrigerator, and then shaping what was an extremely wet dough. I also kept the final rise quite short, so that the loaf would get a nice upward burst in the oven. Gradually, I started to get good results, with an open crumb, crisp crust, and wide
grigne
. Still, I was disappointed. The flour was not quite the same, the flavor less sweet and grassy than I recalled. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong, because the flour I used was well suited to artisan loaves, milled from hard red winter wheat with an ideal protein level of about 10.5 to 11.7 percent. Scour the Web and there are all sorts of comparisons between French and American flours, but the main point is that French flours have a lower protein level, requiring less hydration than American flours. So I increased the amount of water in the recipe to account for the higher protein in U.S. wheat, but still I wasn’t happy. The bread smelled and tasted different.

I then returned to Kaplan’s book
Good Bread Is Back
, and read through descriptions of the baguettes made by two influential bakers in France, Éric Kayser and Dominique Saibron. Both bakers added
levain
to their baguette dough in minor amounts along with baker’s yeast. Although a contemporary narrative account of French bread, Kaplan’s book gives just enough information about the technique to craft a recipe. And more important, he talks about why bakers apply certain techniques, which can be more valuable than any recipe. When I spoke to Dan Leader, whose book had started me down this path many years earlier, he mentioned that he, too, added a small amount of natural leaven to his baguettes. It wasn’t as overpowering as a loaf made entirely with sourdough, but instead provided a hint of acidity. In fact, the more I read, the more I realized that many artisan bakers were using the technique, including the American bakers who had competed with French baking teams in the World Cup of Baking. And the Americans began winning these baking Olympics in 1996.

So I tweaked the recipe by adding a bit of sourdough and a minute amount of whole wheat flour to stimulate the fermentation. Soon, I began to get results I was pleased with. On the phone with Delmontel one day, I told him I was getting closer to the baguette I wanted. But I also expressed frustration with the flour I was using, which was not the same as the Viron flour he had in the bakery. But he was dismissive. “Look, it’s not reasonable to import flour so you can make the same exact baguette as mine,” he said. “It’s like strawberries—you don’t eat them in winter. The most important thing is to make people happy, to love what you have done! Whether it’s the same flour, it’s not important.”

I knew he was right. I had to adapt the process to the flour I had. I would create my own baguette—which is what any serious baker would do.

Within a month or two, I felt I had nailed the recipe, finally achieving a slightly more complex flavor. It still wasn’t the same as Delmontel’s baguette but it was a good one just the same, with an open crumb, crisp crust, slight chew, and the slightest hint of acidity. It felt like the end of a very long journey, and a triumph, given that I had concluded so long ago that baguettes couldn’t be made at home. I had just handed in my travel piece on the baking adventure when I got an e-mail from Tim Carman, a food writer then working for the
Washington City Paper
. He asked how things were going, as he knew of my attempt to tackle the baguette. I invited him over and gave him a brief lesson in making the loaf. He had trouble handling the extremely moist dough, which is a challenge for any beginner. From another batch of dough which I had sitting in the refrigerator overnight, I shaped three loaves, let them rise at room temperature for thirty minutes, and baked them in the oven, pouring boiling water into a sheet pan on the bottom shelf to approximate the effect of a steam-injected oven. They came out nicely, golden brown in color, the bread bursting through the cuts. Once they had cooled a bit, we ripped into one.

“These are pretty good,” Carman said.

“Yeah, not bad, for homemade,” I replied.

“No, I mean really good,” he added. “These might be the best I’ve had in Washington.”

I told him the reason I started baking was precisely because I couldn’t find good bread in the city, or at least anywhere near my house. Then, thinking of the Paris competition, I added, “If you really like the bread, why don’t you have a competition and put my loaves against the professionals here in D.C.?”

Tim immediately liked the idea
and a few weeks later had gathered the judges in a drab conference room of the paper for a blind tasting: Joan Nathan, a cookbook author; Eric Ziebold, chef at CityZen, a top-ranked restaurant in Washington; Mark Furstenberg, the local baker and an outspoken perfectionist about bread; and Jule Banville, a home baker and staffer at the paper. I had mixed my doughs the day before, sweating at the prospect of going up against professionals. Trying to gain whatever edge I could, I made sure the bread came out of the oven by around nine
A.M
., which meant that the crust would still be crisp when the loaves were eaten at eleven. Tim had asked several local bakeries to deliver bread, but only two complied—evidence perhaps of how highly they regarded this exercise. So he went around town fetching loaves that morning, and I helped out as well with a couple of samples, seeking out the best specimens I could find. But nearly all of them, it appeared, had been baked long in advance, which is a major drawback of the wholesale bakery business. My loaves were probably the freshest.