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

by Fromartz, Samuel

  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.

  If made slowly, with a judicious amount of yeast, this would be a loaf to savor. But the shift toward quickly made bread solidified with the semi-industrialization of baking in the 1950s, when another development came along that further improved the efficiency of the bakery. This was the highly intensive kneading machine that whipped the dough around like a roller coaster. Where older mixers turned at about forty revolutions per minute, the new electric-driven motors doubled the speed and kept running for twenty minutes. In doing so, they drove oxygen into the dough, bleaching out the yellowish carotenoids in the flour and compromising the nutritional content of the bread. This satisfied consumer desires for an ever-whiter crumb at the expense of flavor. (If you’ve ever tasted a bland white bread that has the texture of cotton candy, you’ve eaten oxidized dough.) Ever more salt was added to make up for the lack of taste, and additives, such as fava bean flour, were used to propel the oxidation process and bleach out pigments. Ascorbic acid (vitamin C) was sprinkled in to tighten the gluten and increase the volume of the loaf. The result would be an enormous open cut (or grigne), masking the lack of flavor inside.

  Pressing forward with these “innovations,” bakers added dividers to cut the dough into properly sized loaves, and then mechanical shapers to form the baguette. This standardized production but also hemmed the baker in to a mechanized and highly predictable world that was the antithesis of craft. He could do little to offer anything distinctive, because the machines determined the direction. Fast forward to the 1980s and even industrially produced frozen dough became acceptable, with trucks delivering “par-baked” bread that would be finished in supermarkets or even boulangeries. What was even more ironic was that this frozen bread was, at times, better than the inferior “handmade” loaves coming out of neighborhood bakeries. I saw the latest coup in this evolution—or devolution—at EuroPain, the continent’s largest trade show devoted to bread, held outside Paris every few years. A vast, complex, stainless steel machine much larger than most bakeries I’ve visited had flour going in one end, and hundreds of baguettes coming out the other. The only job of the “baker,” or rather technician, was to make sure the damn thing was running correctly. These industrialized versions of the bread were indistinguishable from the quick, mechanized, oxidized breads that had become popular with bakers themselves. So, naturally, consumers began to vote with their feet, by reducing their consumption of this debased product, or buying it at the supermarket, which was cheaper. In pursuit of modernity, French bakers had lost their most crucial ingredients—time and craft. The quest for efficiency and speed all argued against it.

  Not surprisingly, bread consumption declined from about 260 grams per person in 1960 to 160 grams in 1980. Some customers never returned. Today in France, one quarter of the nation doesn’t bother to patronize their local boulangerie. Even Kaplan told me that when traveling, he has found better bread at supermarkets than at boulangeries. Though it’s taboo to criticize a “national treasure,” Kaplan did so starting in the 1980s in opinion pieces and eventually in meetings with bakers and millers. “For me, bread was a crucial dimension of what the French proudly call their ‘cultural exception,’ and they did not seem to be aware that they were putting it at risk, in grave peril,” Kaplan said. He was among a coterie of like-minded critics who championed revisionists, such as Lionel Poilâne, who baked bread in one of the few wood-fired ovens left in Paris and became a world-renowned baker. Poilâne described his signature miche as a “retro-innovation” because he was taking age-old techniques of sourdough fermentation into the modern era and winning over a new generation of bread eaters with his denser, darker loaves. He was bypassing the baguette altogether to bring back br
ead from an earlier era.

  Prominent bakers, professors such as Calvel, and critics spoke out about the decline. Small and medium-scale millers, cut out of the industrial baking trade, were especially worried about these trends, because if people no longer bought bread from their local bakeries, the millers who supplied the flour would vanish. Only the biggest would survive. So the millers tried a new tactic, forming associations and reinvigorating the trade with breads they hoped would entice back supermarket customers. The millers weren’t just selling flour. They offered bakers expertise in management, logistics, and store design, even bread-baking technique. Then they sold this bread under a single recognizable brand. Banette was the first. Others soon followed, including a family-owned enterprise in Beauce, the breadbasket of France. This was the Viron mill, which supplied flour to Boulangerie Delmontel.

  PHOTOGRAPH BY BRIAN DOBEN

  A bin filled with Delmontel’s long-fermentation baguettes

  Kaplan had spent time with the patriarch of this enterprise, Philippe Viron, who was a fifth-generation miller worried about this national decline in bread. “Viron associated the deepest values of Frenchness, even of humanity, with the best bread in the world,” Kaplan writes. In the late 1980s, Viron was approached by a baker in the nineteenth arrondissement, a working-class neighborhood far from central Paris. The boulanger, Gérard Meunier, told Viron he wanted flour without any of the additives millers typically sprinkled in to help fermentation and correct inconsistencies. Avoiding these ameliorants was virtually unheard of at the time, at least for the rapidly made breads designed for the intensive mixing machines. But Meunier had in mind an entirely different method. Viron was at first skeptical. He told Meunier that an additive-free baguette wouldn’t rise—it would end up like a galette, as flat as a pancake. But he sold him the flour nonetheless and when he returned to the bakery to see what the baker had done, he was amazed. Meunier’s baguette was a revelation.

  The story is mythic in the annals of Viron Mill, and Philippe’s son, Alexandre, who now runs the company, recounted it for me, when I met up with him at the company’s exhibit at EuroPain. As we talked, assistants brought flutes of champagne, delicate ham and cheese sandwiches, and of course a variety of breads from the massive oven that Viron, like every other miller, had installed on the trade show floor. Below our second-floor perch, bakers strolled about, snacking on the sandwiches, chatting and drinking champagne; most of them were associated with Viron in one way or another.

  “It was very hard to produce flour for only one customer and that’s why we developed this,” he said, holding up a baguette. “We thought if we showed it to others, they would want to do it, too.” In other words, Meunier’s baguette was so intriguing that the elder Viron thought the loaf might secure the mill’s future, or at least offer a strategic response to the rise of industrial breads. The mill’s chief baker visited Meunier to observe his technique, which involved minimal mixing time, slightly more water than was usual, half the yeast, and an extended first rise. Meunier himself was a student of Professor Calvel, who had championed these methods and even showed Julia Child how to make a baguette. Calvel pointed out that such practices had been used in the 1920s, when bakers had one-speed mixers and couldn’t ramp up the speed. They had to rely on time to do the work instead.

  When this slower method was applied, flavor dramatically improved, with a sweetness that arose from the wheat itself. The minimal mixing allowed the flour to retain its color, rather than losing it to oxidation. The crumb opened up with those uneven holes connected by razor-thin membranes which create an airy but chewy quality. The crust was often well done (bien cuit) and richly caramelized, the result of sugars, starches, and proteins combining in the so-called Maillard reaction, which occurs when the loaf is properly baked. This is so rarely the case with supermarket baguettes.

  “This forced us to do our job, which is to select and blend wheat,” Viron continued, “because before this time, we were buying wheat and using additives to standardize the flour.” The mill sourced wheat varieties from farms around Chartres, a premier wheat-growing region of northern France, about sixty miles from Paris. In the past, they occasionally blended in U.S. and Canadian wheats to raise the protein level and correct for annual variations in the flour. Now, Viron’s entire grain supply would originate from the region around the mill, which meant that the bread sold in Paris under their umbrella was locally grown, though this isn’t trumpeted by the mill or its retinue of boulangeries.

  The flour—and the technique—became the basis for Viron’s Rétrodor baguette and, slowly, it took off. Alexandre Viron told me he thought their timing was good. Consumers were growing more concerned about what was actually going into their food in the aftermath of the mad cow scares in Europe in the mid-1990s. “People wanted natural things,” Viron said. “And we said, ‘This is one hundred percent natural, it’s just wheat and knowledge.’”

  Viron and its Rétrodor baguette were by no means alone. Many others were also trying to undo a few decades of highly compromising baking practices and rescue the small boulangeries that were now competing with supermarket chains. In the midst of this ardent movement, the state entered the baking trade once again, aiding the besieged bakers in their battle. The turning point came in 1993, when the French government regulated the term baguette tradition, which was precisely the baguette Thomas Chardon taught me how to make (and which Delmontel branded “La Renaissance”). Regulations deemed that this loaf could be made only with flour, water, salt, and yeast—no chemical ameliorants—and it had to be made on the premises where it was sold. The state also cordoned off supermarkets and those selling loaves made out of frozen dough from even using the term boulangerie. In one act, both the boulangerie and its premier product—the baguette—could stand apart from its industrial competitors. The state had intervened to help save the small bakers and millers.

  After I began baking in the 1990s, I read about these remarkable breads in Paris—not only the hearty miche at Poilâne, which probably got the most attention, but also Philippe Gosselin’s baguette à l’ancienne, Éric Kayser’s baguette on Rue Monge, and many others. The renaissance was in full swing.

  • • •

  Delmontel began his career in the midst of this fervor. Trained as a cook and pastry chef, he initially looked down upon bread making. Bakers had the reputation of being the screw-ups in school; it was assumed they’d had few prospects aside from vocational trades. “I thought all they were doing was mixing flour and water, and what’s so hard about that?” he told me, over a dish of Catalonian beef cheeks at a restaurant down the street from the boulangerie. With his ponytail, cravat, and smart blazer, he had the air of a well-to-do businessman or successful chef.

  This attitude wasn’t unusual, since French kids who aren’t suited for school are quickly pigeonholed into the trades—carpentry, baking, cooking—and that class stigma tends to follow them through life. Kaplan told me the psychological scars associated with flunking out of school and entering the working class of French society might have had something to do with its bread, since these young bakers were not particularly invested in the craft. The job chose them, not the other way around. That made sense considering that several notable bakers I met in France had switched careers in midlife, coming from sales or software and seeking something new. They were less prone to just follow a rote system because they had never learned it in trade school. There are prominent bakers who came from families where baking was a generational tradition and highly respected. Others did the usual flunk-out-and-go-to-trade-school route but distinguished themselves in the trade.

  In this stratified society, the pastry chef was a cut above the boulanger. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s, when he came to the States to run the pastry department at Whole Foods Market in Madison, Wisconsin, that Delmontel’s view of bread baking changed. That he landed in Madison was fortuitous, for it had a burgeoning network of local farms and notable bakers. “They were doing all these wonder
ful loaves, with sourdough and whole grains, and I realized there was more to it than just flour and water,” he said. Upon his return to France eighteen months later, he worked in a friend’s boulangerie, then visited the test kitchen run by Viron, where he went through basic training. He learned how to make his signature baguette—one made to this day with Viron’s flour.

  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.

  • • •

  After 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.