In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey

by Fromartz, Samuel

  CHAPTER 1

  Boulangerie Delmontel’s Baguette

  At 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 uniqu
e—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.

  PHOTOGRAPH BY BRIAN DOBEN

  Boulangerie Arnaud Delmontel in Paris

  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!”

  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.

  • • •

  The 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?

  Professor Steven Kaplan inhaling the aromas of a baguette

  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 Fre
nch 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.”