Feuillas was baking that day, but wasn’t in a rush, so after my jog I took a shower and strolled into the wooden house that serves as an office, kitchen, and part-time baking school for visitors. He was around my age—in his mid-fifties—and looked, as I often do when I’m writing at home, like he had just rolled out of bed. His hair was askew and he was in his baker’s whites, though he was wearing a black plaid shirt on top, to guard against the chill. He had just lit a wood fire in the hefty iron cook stove, where lunch would be made, and it was slowly heating up the room.
The day had started at a relaxed pace because he was just baking bread for the full-time residents of the village. In the summer, when seasonal residents and tourists arrived, he would ramp up production dramatically, which is why he encouraged me to visit in March. That first day I finally ate the bread he’d made from this mélange of ancient wheat, in the form of three small slices of toast with a shot of espresso. The bread itself was several days old, because he and Valérie had just returned from a trip to Paris, but I paid it no mind. Since it had been made with levain, it wasn’t yet stale. The crust was a little hard, but I appreciated it. At home, I eat bread as it progressively gets harder; if it was still edible, why waste it? Of course, you can make bread crumbs with old bread, or soak it in water and add it to new dough, or make bread pudding, but you can also rip it apart with your teeth and eat it, which is what I usually did. Feuillas appeared to feel the same way.
Loaves made with Feuillas’s ancient wheat
The interior of the bread was darker than I expected—not just creamy colored but edging toward a lightish brown—which surprised me because when we had visited the stone mill downstairs, he showed me how he sifted out the bran when he milled flour. “It’s white bread, not whitened bread,” he had said. Nothing was done to make it appear more than it was, which is true, but I also thought to myself, “He’s taking out bran! The intestinal vitality!” When I brought this up, Feuillas mentioned that the flour did have all the germ and most of the aleurone layer—the outermost layer of the endosperm with the highest level of nutrients that usually gets discarded with the bran. This stone ground and bolted flour would have been familiar to any miller or baker who baked bread in antiquity. I looked into the bolting barrel coming out of the side of the stone mill, which was sheathed in silk cloth. As the flour flowed out of the stones, it passed into the barrel, which rotated at a moderate speed. This allowed the finer flour to pass through the cloth and fall into a wooden bin below. The coarse bran remained inside the barrel, emptying into a bucket at the end. The flour was fine, but yellowish in color, not white. I looked forlornly at the bran piling up—“animal feed,” Feuillas called it—and I almost wanted to mix up bran muffins.
When I had eaten the toast that morning, I noticed the bread had a remarkable taste that clearly wasn’t the same as white flour. The levain influenced the taste, though Feuillas mentioned something else when I brought up the unique flavor: the water. When I had downed a few glasses of tap water after my run, I noticed it had a remarkably clean and bright taste. It came from a deep spring, filtered by those stones I had jogged through in the vineyard, so perhaps the mineral content was coming through. The bread was more refined than what I usually made, but it was also delicious. And because of the flavor, it didn’t need a lot of salt. Feuillas used only fourteen grams of salt per kilo of flour, or 30 percent less than what most recipes call for. When I returned home I began to experiment frequently with these stone ground and bolted flours, which sift out a portion of the bran. One, a bolted French Mediterranean flour from Anson Mills in South Carolina, which specializes in rare heritage grains, was remarkably similar to Feuillas’s in taste. Glenn Roberts, the company founder, told me the variety was passed down from French Huguenots who settled in the Carolinas and Virginia in the eighteenth century, so perhaps it was similar to what Feuillas was growing.
For lunch that day, Feuillas’s elderly mother, Maryse, who was visiting from Provence, made civet de lapin (rabbit stew). She had marinated the meat in red wine for twenty-four hours, then simmered it the night before in still more wine. While we’d been talking and sipping coffee that morning, Maryse had continued to braise it on the wood-burning stove, filling the kitchen with an intoxicating aroma. Civet de lapin was a specialty of the South, Feuillas told me, and this version dated back to a handwritten family recipe book more than a century old.
Roland Feuillas serving me at family lunch
That was the way it was every day: lunch was the main meal and the entire family sat down to eat it, polishing off a bottle or two of a local vintage along with a loaf of bread. I told Roland that during these meals, I felt welcomed like a friend—a friend in the global family of bakers. I knew if I had just shown up as a journalist to interview him, I would have missed the entire story.
• • •
After lunch that first day, we did bake bread, and I realized that for Feuillas the flour was anything but a blank canvas. It was the essence of flavor and, yes, very much like wine. So many times, when I’d ask him a question about why he did something, he would answer with the simple phrase, “Terre Madre,” Mother Earth. “Do you know what this is? Terre Madre?” he said.
I nodded.
It was the reason for everything he did. Everything went back to the soil and ultimately to God. He was simply a facilitator along the way.
“So Roland, what’s the name of this bread?” I asked one day about a loaf with honey, walnuts, and almonds.
“This is bread with honey, walnut, and almonds,” he replied.
“Yes, I know,” I replied, this time in French. “But what’s the name?”
“Bread with honey, walnut, and almonds,” he said again in English.
I look at him, puzzled.
“I don’t name the bread,” he said, stopping this time, looking at me. “The bread is not mine. This grain is not mine. This flour is not mine. It’s Terre Madre. It’s Jesus Christ—how can I name it?” It was the same when he slashed the loaf, with just a simple diamond pattern.
“I don’t put a special cut into it. I don’t, because it’s not mine.”
I realized that for him, Terre Madre or Jesus Christ was his way of saying that in the totality of bread making, he was part of a larger whole. He was like a pilgrim, this ancient wheat and the bread making his meditation. The Zen master Suzuki Roshi once said, “We should be interested in making bread which looks and tastes good. Actual practice is repeating over and over again until you find out how to become bread. There is no secret in our way. Just to practice Zazen and put ourselves into the oven is our way.” The bread wasn’t his to name because he didn’t own it.
And the bread wasn’t the conclusion of the process. As his customers from the village came into the store, he greeted them by name, shook their hands, and kissed them on each cheek. Bread had been reserved and set aside for his regulars. He chatted to catch up on the news for several minutes. If the customer had a baby, he’d shake the baby’s hand, too, then invite the father around the counter so that the child, held aloft, could see the bread as it came out of the oven.
“Children love levain bread,” he said, “because it has lactic acid and if it’s done right it smells like milk—like mother’s milk.”
I’m not as romantic, or maybe just not as French, though I, too, have experienced a posse of kids scurrying into the kitchen, saying, “Sam, do you have any bread?” Maybe it is like milk, maybe it’s just good bread, but it doesn’t matter. It’s what these hungry kids want.
After we finished baking one day, I asked if we could go look at Terre Madre—the fields where he grew his wheat. Although it was only March, I thought we might be able to see the winter wheat poking out of the soil. The almond trees were flowering with little white buds, and new green shoots were emerging from the grape vines, but little else of spring was evident. He had told me that the fields were only sixteen kilometers (ten miles) away, so I figured we would jump in the car and be there in tw
enty minutes. But once we started driving on the narrow winding roads, I soon grew doubtful. We circled up hills, then went down the other side; we went past farms, through tiny villages and dark forests. A half hour into the journey, my stomach was getting a bit queasy from the twists and turns, and I asked how much longer it would be.
“In total, it will be about one hour,” he said.
“Wait, I thought you said it was sixteen kilometers.”
“Yes, as the bird flies! But we are not birds.”
So we continued on the twisting roads, the once picture-book villages like Cucugnan giving way to smaller and progressively more unkempt places as we ventured farther into the countryside. This region of southern France began to look less like a quaint postcard of stone houses and vineyards than like the scrappy hill country of Appalachia. We passed what looked like nearly abandoned farming villages, with a rusted tractor here and there, a dangling Coca-Cola sign and a few chickens scurrying about, but not much else. The land was too hilly, the fields too small, the farms too scarce to have anything like the critical mass to compete with farms in other regions of France, or with Spain, Turkey, or North Africa, for that matter.
Finally, we reached a clearing and pulled over. The wind was blowing fiercely when we got out, which was quite welcome after the slightly nauseating ride. We walked over to a wire fence surrounding a field and there it was: his ancient wheat. There wasn’t much to look at, for the plants were only a couple of inches high. But Feuillas smiled. This was it—his land, with hardly anything else around. “The closest farmer is twenty kilometers away,” he said. It was perfect, because he didn’t want to be exposed to any agrochemicals that might drift over his wheat. I took a few pictures, then we got back in the car and drove a bit farther down a potted dirt road to another field. “Spelt,” he said, pointing to the field on the right. Again, the land was almost bare. Tiny grass seedlings were poking out of the ground. Feuillas, who was still in his baker’s whites and clogs, braced against the wind as he wrapped his coat around himself.
He looked content, but it was sad, too. The nearby village we had passed through seemed nearly deserted, as if the old stone buildings might collapse under their own weight. The fields just across from his own were filled with underbrush and young trees, with nary a farm animal or cultivated crop in sight. We looked over the landscape, slowly returning to nature. “My farmer friend back in the U.S. calls these ‘dead farms,’” I said. Pennsylvania was filled with them, too small to be productive and too far from any city to attract weekenders or tourist trade. All they had going for them now was oil and gas production from fracking wells.
My first thought looking over this land was, “God, what potential.” It seemed perfect for some young couple who wanted to grow organic produce and maybe sell it on the coast, a couple of hours away. The winter was mild, the sun intense, like northern California. A few greenhouses and the dry summer could keep ambitious young farmers busy for a long time. Yet no one, at least in this vicinity, was trying to do anything remotely close to that except for Feuillas, and he was only growing wheat. When I asked him whether the land was expensive, he just shrugged. “No one wants it,” he said.
Such was the state of Terre Madre.
• • •
The dough from this ancient wheat was unusual: less glutinous, less elastic, and it appeared to stretch out forever. Feuillas handled the dough very gently, letting the mixer run for only a couple of minutes, then giving the dough a rest. “We say the young children are joining hands and in the middle is the levain, the salt, the air, and just the flour and water,” he said. “Then we let the children rest so they can make stronger bonds, and then add more water. If you add all the water at once, the children can never make a strong bond.” He carried out this mixing and resting a few times, taking the hydration level very high, but he was right. Even this extensible, stretchy dough was able to develop strength, which is what you need for the bread to rise in the heat of the oven. He held up a piece of dough to show me, stretching it to a thin window, so that we could see through it—the “window pane” test. It was clear this ancient wheat had the qualities a baker would want.
By the next morning, after an all-night rise in the chilly retarder, we took the dough out to proceed with baking. It looked a bit like soup, with a few bubbles on the top. I was skeptical, wondering how we would manage to turn this gloppy mass into anything resembling a loaf of bread. Feuillas showed me how, and in the process gave me a new bread-making technique.
Roland Feuillas shaping loaves with a single cut
He dumped out the bin on a well-floured counter and patted it down gently with his palms. He then took a thin piece of wood—what’s known as a baguette flipper—and straightened out the sides of the dough so it made a rectangle. With the dough in this rough shape, he lifted one side with his hands and forearms and simply folded the dough in half over on top of itself. On this smooth surface, he sprinkled flour to make five distinct lines across the top of the dough. Then he picked up the piece of wood again and made five indentations by pressing down on the lines of flour with the edge of the board, returning again with the wood to cut through the dough. If he had used a bench scraper, or knife, he would have cut through the dough immediately. By using the blunt edge of the wood, he formed a sealed seam before the loaves were cut. (I found that a chopstick or the handle of a wooden spoon achieves a similar effect when I tried the technique at home.) And there it was. One fold and then five cuts to make five loaves. Finally, he lifted up the five pieces of dough and set them in a linen couche—a piece of fabric folded like an accordion with a loaf between each of the folds. He set this in a wooden cabinet for the second rise.
“It’s the simplest method,” he said. “It’s also one of the oldest, and it’s very fast.”
When the loaves had risen sufficiently, we slashed a simple pattern on the top and loaded them into the brick oven with a long wooden peel. Despite my skepticism about this loose dough, the bread did spring up. It also had marvelously large and varied holes in the crumb, because it had been shaped so minimally. As for the smell: well, people began to arrive just as the bread was exiting the oven.
• • •
That trip to Cucugnan came in 2012 at the end of my travels, and I knew I wouldn’t be coming back to France soon. So after saying good-bye to Feuillas and his family, I returned to Paris. On my final night there, I splurged and took Denise, my friend and translator, to a little neighborhood bistro. We had a great time catching up, but I felt something was lacking in the meal. I mean everything was right, the food was delicious, I had a good Bordeaux with dinner and a friend to share it with, but I realized what was missing was the long wooden table filled with Feuillas’s family and the smell of the meal cooking on the stove. We were eating good food here, but we weren’t with the people who had made it.
The next day, my last in France, I got up, ate a quick breakfast at the hotel, and then went around the corner to a Paris Vélib’ kiosk to get a bicycle. I went for a ride in the morning sun, parked the bike at another stand, and then hopped on the Métro. I wanted to revisit Boulangerie Arnaud Delmontel, where I had worked three years earlier, which was really the experience that set me on this path. I hadn’t called Arnaud to see if he was around. I figured I would just take a chance and show up, since I had only a couple of hours to kill before I had to leave for Charles De Gaulle airport. I got off at Saint-Georges in the ninth arrondissement, and, remembering the neighborhood, walked the few blocks to the boulangerie.
The side-door entrance to the baking room was shut but I looked into the glass window and saw my old teacher, Thomas Chardon, working inside. When I rapped on the door he immediately recognized me. I gave him a warm hello, told him why I was back in France—all while he was removing some baguettes from the oven. We chatted for a bit and then he went back to work. It was the same routine, every morning, and he seemed completely in his element.
I asked if Monsieur Delmontel was around, an
d Thomas pointed upstairs. I went up the spiral staircase to the office and Delmontel looked up, surprised, and stopped what he was doing. As we talked, he told me he had a good laugh when he found out I had won the best baguette contest in Washington. But then he said, “No, I am proud, because you came here, you really wanted to learn, and you did learn.” It didn’t matter that I wasn’t a professional; it didn’t matter that I was doing all this because I simply wanted to; it didn’t matter that I wasn’t going to run a bakery. I had tried to bake a true loaf of bread and I had done it, and that was enough. It was just the kind of recognition you get from someone who appreciates the craft in its own right. We had a coffee and a couple of his croissants, and that was it. I said good-bye, bounced down the street to another Vélib’ bike station, and rode back to my hotel. The sun was shining, the air was warm, and I was heading back home. It was the perfect coda for the trip, actually the perfect coda to the entire journey that had begun one cold February morning three years earlier. Yet I wasn’t quite done. Because Feuillas had spurred some ideas to consider closer to home.
• • •
Now, I wasn’t Roland Feuillas. I had tried to grow wheat in my community garden plot and failed miserably. So I knew that if I was really going to bake with local wheat, as he was doing, I’d have to find a source other than my garden. Luckily, I didn’t have to look farther than the FreshFarm Market in Dupont Circle in Washington, where Heinz Thomet, a Swiss-born organic farmer, was selling grains at his farm stand.
On Cobb Neck in southern Maryland, about an hour south of Washington, he had begun growing cereal crops as “green manure.” Organic farmers often add grasses or legumes into their crop rotations, plowing them into the soil to build biomass and fertility. But since he was growing them, he figured he could also harvest the kernels, getting at least some revenue for the effort. Grains were also attractive because he didn’t need much labor. Finding workers on Cobb Neck who would plant, weed, and pick his vegetables was a continual headache, which is perhaps why he often worked ungodly hours. Vegetable farming was also backbreaking work, though on one of the days I visited, two young workers had a flatbed contraption that ameliorated any back bending at all. They were lying facedown on a four-wheeled trolley, about a foot off the ground, with a little cushion to support their foreheads. As they rolled along through a row of spinach, they picked out weeds with their hand hoes and flung them aside.
In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey Page 22