52 Loaves

by William Alexander

  Gathering up my sheaf of recipes and my notebook, I stepped outside. Bells tolled ominously as the huge barn of a church drew in the black-robed monks like a giant magnet attracting iron filings, leaving a sudden, still void in the courtyard. I looked around. A speck in the enormous courtyard, I felt infinitely small and insignificant. Cross-legged on the ground outside the bakery, leaning back against its south-facing wall, I closed my eyes, feeling the energy of the sunshine flow into my face, down into my limbs.

  I started pondering the problem, and suddenly pieces of a puzzle, cut during the previous forty weeks of wandering in the baking wilderness, started falling from my subconscious into place, fitting together with a remarkable synergy. Spending the afternoon at Bobolink, experimenting with poolish and levain, learning to weigh ingredients, knowing how to use the baker’s percentage, loading the Ritz’s commercial oven, and most of all, fiddling endlessly and single-mindedly with my peasant loaf recipe—I suddenly realized that all of it, whether I’d been staring at my navel or at microscopic yeast, was not only relevant but critical.

  I laid out the schedule of services and the recipes. The first to go was the pain au levain. There was no way we were ever going to have enough levain to make that bread in sufficient quantity. Still, I had become so used to baking with my levain that the thought of not using it seemed heretical. Besides, I hadn’t given up the fantasy that my starter would still be in use at the abbey a dozen, a hundred, or—why not?—a thousand years hence. I thought maybe we could use just a little in each loaf, not for leavening, but for flavor. I’d never tried this before, but I didn’t see why not.

  The next problem was the long wait for the poolish to develop, a process that was setting the baking back too far in the day. We could do just a straight dough in a couple of hours, but I had come to the monastery as an apostle of artisan bread, which to me meant using some kind of preferment. Otherwise the brothers might as well continue buying that dreary bakery bread. At home on a few occasions, I had done an overnight refrigerated poolish with success. I looked at the monks’ schedule. If Bruno could manage to take the poolish out of the fridge on his way to Vigils at 5:25 a.m., it’d be warmed up and ready to use by the end of Lauds, around 8:15. That allowed sufficient time to mix, autolyse, and knead the bread before Mass. Then we could give it a good two-hour fermentation and return at 11:30 to divide, weigh, and form the loaves before Sext and lunch. After None ended at 2:30, we’d return for the actual baking.

  I thought this timetable would work; now I just needed to come up with a recipe that combined an overnight poolish and some levain. I worked out a formula that made a half-dozen onekilo loaves, using nice round numbers, a formula that we could easily double or triple or even quadruple as needed. I started with three kilos of flour spiked with five hundred grams of levain, then figured out how much whole wheat, rye, water, and salt I would need for that amount of flour.

  Six months earlier, this would’ve been a tedious exercise of ratios and guesswork. But knowing how to use the baker’s percentage—the very same method I had once derided—saved the day. I knew I wanted about 12 percent whole wheat (assuming I could find some) and 6 percent rye. Figuring how much salt to use was easy—salt is always 2 percent of the total flour weight. Where the percentage really came in handy, though, was with the water. I generally used a 68 percent hydration level, but, concerned that working with such a wet dough would be difficult for a novice, I settled on a 65 percent hydration formula. This would give us a moist but still workable dough for shaping. So all I had to do was add up the weight of all the flours and multiply by 0.65.

  Not so fast! Fortunately I had screwed this up at home more than once, or I’m certain, given the fatigue and the pressure, I would’ve made the same mistake here. When calculating the hydration, you have to remember to account for both the flour and the water in the levain. That is, one hundred grams of my levain adds fifty grams of flour and fifty grams of water to the total. Doing all the math by hand, I came up with a recipe and checked it three times.

  Bon. The only thing left was the yeast. I had brought with me a small box of instant yeast in foil packets just to get started, figuring I’d buy a one-kilo bag of SAF instant yeast (still made in Louis Pasteur’s old town, Lille) along the way, but nowhere in France had I seen yeast in quantity. I marveled at the fact that I can walk into any number of stores in the States and buy a jar of French SAF yeast, yet it didn’t seem to exist in France, another reminder that home baking seemed almost unknown here.*

  The unavailability of instant yeast was immaterial, anyway. I could see that Philippe didn’t trust the stuff. As he’d reminded me a few times now, when he was the assistant baker, they’d used fresh cake yeast. He’d questioned my dry yeast enough that I decided we’d go with fresh. Fortunately I had held some of it in my hand at Lallemand, or I might not even have known what it was. Never having used it, though, I didn’t know the correct baker’s percentage—that is, how much to use in my dough.

  What was I going to do? Tomorrow was Judgment Day. We’d be making our first batch of bread for the abbey, and I didn’t want merely to guess at the amount of yeast. Yet I was stuck without my reference books and without Internet access. Wait a second—I’d received e-mails from the prior. Surely there was Internet access somewhere. When Philippe returned from church, I asked if I could get on a computer to send an e-mail. This monk with a degree in business took me to his Dell computer with a seventeen-inch monitor and an external security device that required a smart card. His computer setup was more sophisticated than mine at work, and I’m an IT director.

  Logging on to my e-mail account, I sent e-mails with the attention-getting subject line “SOS from Normandy” to Charlie van Over (and his wife, Priscilla, because I knew that Charlie wasn’t religious about monitoring his e-mail) and Peter Reinhart, hoping that one of them would respond before the next morning.

  Afterward I met with Philippe and Bruno in the bakery. The two test loaves had cooled enough for a tasting. They had risen, yes, but had about as much personality as François Mitterrand. We needed some whole wheat flour. And I wondered again about that boulangère spéciale flour, with all the additives. I didn’t think it was making very good bread. Furthermore I knew Philippe and Bruno were worried about the baking schedule, and I needed to address the issue. It was time for a little tête-à-tête.

  “When I came here,” I began, “I didn’t understand how much bread you had to make, and how little time you had to make it. The recipes I’ve brought are no good for you. But I’ve worked out a new recipe that I think will be much easier and still make very good bread. I’ve never made it before, so tomorrow will be another day of experimentation.” They seemed satisfied with that. “Also, I think you’d prefer to use fresh yeast. Perhaps we can get half a kilo from the bakery?” Philippe smiled. He seemed very satisfied with that.

  “And we must have some farine complète.” I explained the confusion, pointing out the word complet on the bag of flour, attributing the problem to my lack of French, which was partly true. But I could see that Philippe, who’d bought the flour, still felt bad. “And,” I continued, building to the coup de grâce, “I don’t like this flour. This is commercial flour, made to stand up to mechanical mixers and short rises. We are artisan bakers.”

  I paused to let the words sink in.

  “We cannot make artisan bread with commercial flour. When you go to the bakery for the farine complète and the yeast, can you see if they have any type sixty-five without additives? And tomorrow we will make six loaves from my new recipe.”

  Bruno was intrigued. “You’re making a new recipe up just for us? This bread has never been made anyplace in the world?”

  “Jamais, Bruno.” Never.

  I showed him my scratch pad with the recipe. He grinned broadly as he read the title aloud: “Pain de l’Abbaye Saint-Wandrille.”

  Dough-caked bowls and tools littered the sink; flour coated every surface. For two loaves of bread,
I’d made quite a mess, but I was too tired to clean up now, and besides, it was getting late. I went back to the room to change out of my flour-stained clothes.

  After dinner — three courses served in a record fourteen minutes (geese on their way to becoming foie gras aren’t fed that quickly) — I went back to my room to change into work clothes again. I still needed to clean the bakery and prepare the poolish.

  Normandy cools off quickly after the autumn sun sets, but despite the chill, I didn’t bother with a shirt or a jacket, but just changed into my jeans and pulled my apron on over my stained T-shirt. As I left the room, I happened to glance in the mirror over the sink and was startled by the image I saw looking back—the stereotype of a French baker, right down to the bloodshot eyes! The only thing missing was a Gauloise hanging out of my mouth.

  I made the trek across the dark courtyard. It was eight thirty, although it felt like midnight. I’d spent fourteen of the past sixteen hours on my feet, preparing poolish, building levain, baking, formulating, and mopping. I thought I’d be living the life of a French monk in my four days here. How fatuous; I was living the life of a French baker. My spirits revived when I switched on the light in the bakery. Two bags of flour—a bag of whole wheat and a bag of unadulterated type 65—sat on the table. Philippe had come through. Now the only question was, would the type 65, without malt, come through? Was malt really required to kick-start fermentation? I hoped not, for I had none. Perhaps the little bit of levain I was adding, less than a hundred grams for each one-kilogram loaf, would serve the same purpose.

  I mixed the flours, made a poolish with a guesstimate for the fresh yeast I’d found in the kitchen refrigerator, and built up some more levain before returning to my cell. As it was after nine o’clock, the strict rule of silence was now in force. Not that you could generally tell the difference.

  My head hit the pillow and I fell instantly into a deep sleep.

  Day 3: Pain de l’Abbaye

  Just after five thirty in the morning, I groped my way into the basement entrance of the dark kitchen, walking my hands along the cold stone walls until I found the stairs and some light at the top. Philippe had, as promised, taken the poolish out of the refrigerator on his way to Vigils, and it looked nice and bubbly, a good sign. Retrieving the levain from the walk-in refrigerator, I brought it across the courtyard to the bakery, once again pausing to admire—and wonder about—that brilliant star shining brightly in the east.

  By the time Philippe and Bruno arrived after Lauds, at quarter past eight, I’d measured out the flours on the abbey’s antique brass scale and wiped a couple of years of dirt out of the huge copper kettle of the commercial mixer, itself as much a relic as anything else at Saint-Wandrille. “Okay,” I said, projecting as much optimism as I could muster. “Time to make the premier batch of pain de l’Abbaye Saint-Wandrille.”

  Bruno showed that infectious childlike grin. “First ever,” he said.

  “First ever.”

  Before we started, though, I needed to check my e-mail to see if my SOS to Charlie and Peter had been answered. I had responses from both. Predictably, their answers were different—Charlie’s exactly double Peter’s—but Charlie, whom Priscilla had paged out of a meeting, freely admitted he wasn’t sure of his figures, as it had been a while since he’d used fresh yeast himself. I went with Peter’s figures of 0.1 percent for the poolish (I’d used 0.075, a remarkably close guess), and 2 percent for the final dough. I’d learned that, when in doubt, less yeast is better than more.

  We dumped the poolish, flours, and water—over fourteen pounds of dough—into the copper kettle, measured out eighty grams of fresh yeast, gave it a quick mix by hand, and let it sit for a twenty-minute autolyse while Philippe adjusted the heavy brass arms of the mixer. Every modern (or even not-so-modern) kneader I’d ever seen has a single dough hook, which, with some variation, spins while also moving around the bowl in an orbital motion, not unlike the action of my KitchenAid stand mixer at home. But this museum piece had two solid-brass arms, which resembled a giant salad fork and spoon. The bowl rotated slowly while the two mixing arms swung back and forth in opposite directions, just missing each other as the spoon passed through the two prongs of the fork. It was a mesmerizing and wondrous sight to behold.

  After five minutes we switched the machine off, scraped the dough down into a mound, and threw a cloth over the bowl. I looked at my watch. Even with a lengthy autolyse and much fiddling with the machine, it was only quarter past nine—we’d finished with time to spare before Terce. So far, so good. I asked Philippe and Bruno to meet me back in the fournil to form the loaves at eleven thirty, giving them some free time, and the dough a good two-hour fermentation.

  By half past eleven, the dough had risen nicely—a little too nicely, in fact. So much for needing malt. The levain in the poolish had packed more wallop than I’d expected, so next time we’d cut the yeast in half. As Bruno divided the dough into 1.1-kilogram pieces on the digital kitchen scale I’d brought from home, we discussed what shape to form the loaves into. I was, of course, partial to the boule, but Philippe saw a problem.

  “The long loaf is a better shape, as every brother gets the same-size piece. With the round one, the middle slices are much bigger than the ends.”

  This eerily echoed Clotaire Rapaille’s comments on bread democracy, but with the opposite reasoning: Rapaille had thought the boule more egalitarian, for no one got stuck with the pointy end piece, the croûton. But Philippe, reflecting the austerity of abbey life, was more concerned about the size of the portion.* I showed Bruno how to form one bâtard, which is shaped like a skinny football, then had him do the rest. His first loaf was a blunt-end cylinder, so I started to demonstrate how to roll the ends into nice points (a technique I’d just learned at the Ritz), when Philippe interrupted.

  “But it is better not to have the points!” he insisted. “So everyone gets the same-size piece.”

  I thought Philippe was carrying this a bit too far. “But then it is not a bâtard,” I said, smiling. “It is a cylinder. The bread must please the eyes as well as the stomach.” I could hardly believe what was coming out of my mouth, yet I couldn’t help myself. It was as if Chef Didier had stowed away in a portion of my brain and come with me from the Ritz.

  Leaving it up to Bruno, I changed the subject, showing him how to flour and fold the heavy linen couche to hold the shape of the loaves. Bruno was a bright, eager student and a quick study. We assembled six loaves and fired up the ancient oven. Seeing me covered in flour, and nervously looking at his watch, Philippe offered, “You don’t have to go to Sext, you know. It is not required of the guests.”

  “But it leads right into lunch.” As far as I knew, it was the only way to get fed.

  “Yes, but you can also meet in the salle d’hôte. The père hôtelier always checks in there first, to see if any new guests have arrived.”

  Odd—the père hôtelier had neglected to mention that option. Even odder, I turned down Philippe’s offer. Surprising myself, I found I wanted to go to Sext, to sit in that cold, dark church for fifteen minutes, to hear the voices of the monks, soothing, calming, and uplift ing. I was being drawn, whether I wanted to be or not, into the rhythm of monastery life. I had wondered beforehand if attending church services might reindoctrinate me into Christianity, but the chanting in Latin, while beautiful, was to my ears unintelligible. For all I knew, they could have been singing about the internal combustion engine. Yet I enjoyed the services and found that my time in the dark, austere church, listening to Gregorian chant, had the effect of sharpening my senses. I’d started to notice, for example, the repetition of significant numbers, the bells always tolling at the end of a service in repeating sets of three rings (representing the Holy Trinity), and how the lighting of the church varied throughout the day, starting fairly dark for the predawn Vigils, then growing lighter for Lauds and Mass, and dimming again as the day wound down. Always lit, of course, was the ever-present crucifix, hanging from th
e ceiling, Christ poised to loose his bounds and fly down the length of the church.

  Before hurrying to Sext and then following the monks to lunch, I had thrown on a sport jacket but hadn’t had time to change out of my floury jeans, and as I walked down the long refectory, past the rows of monks standing at their places, Bruno eyed me head to toe and grinned broadly. I winked and shook the leg of my pants as I passed, leaving a little puff of flour behind, and almost caused him to burst into laughter, which no doubt would have been a major breach of protocol.

  You are one of us. Indeed, it was beginning to feel that way. Which made what I did after lunch easier. I approached the guest master, who was turning out not to be such a stern fellow after all, but rather likable, about staying another day. “Bruno’s going to be a terrific baker,” I explained. “But he’s not quite ready.”

  Which was precisely half the truth.

  Philippe was pleased but felt guilty about my decision when I told him later. “But I thought you wanted to go to Honfleur,” he said in that gentle voice of his. It’s true, I had wanted to spend my last night in France in a comfortable bed in a chambre, not a cell, spending more than sixteen minutes at dinner, lingering over Normandy oysters and getting drunk on Calvados. Yet suddenly the thought of spending a day in a touristy village, which sounded a bit like a Norman version of East Hampton, the streets filled with British day-trippers from across the channel, was only slightly more appealing than landing on nearby Omaha Beach in the face of Nazi machine gunners. I preferred where I was.