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

by Fromartz, Samuel

  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.

  • • •

  My 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 y
east 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.

  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.

  Frédéric Pichard in front of his wood-fired oven

  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.”

  • • •

  When 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 extremel
y 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.