Time to Rise: Learning the Secret of
Paris Boulangeries
An amateur baker apprentices with a Paris
boulanger and learns the secret of artisan bread.
Photos by Brian Doben
IN PARIS, the 9th arrondissement is popular, hip even, dotted with
wine shops, boutiques, and boulangeries, but still has the close-knit
feel of a residential neighborhood. The streets are lined with old
apartment buildings that seem to lean onto the sidewalks. Inside
intimate bistros on these quiet, narrow lanes, maître d’s chat with
locals as they arrive. One Sunday afternoon last winter, when I
visited, the streets were crowded with couples and families out for a
leisurely stroll. By 3 a.m. the next day, however, Rue des Martyrs, a
main artery in the district, was empty, the stores dark except for a
slit of light coming out of the side entrance of the Boulangerie
Arnaud Delmontel. Everyone was still asleep. Everyone, that is,
except for the bakers—whose ranks I was about to join.
Over the centuries, how many bakers have walked Paris’s dark
avenues at night, heading to the fournils—baking rooms—to provide
the city’s daily bread? In the 18th and 19th centuries, les
geindres (the groaners) began before midnight, each laboring over
hundreds of pounds of dough that they kneaded by hand and baked
in basement wood-fired ovens. The poorest slept by the hearth,
inhaling flour and often suffering from tuberculosis. Yet many did
their jobs superbly, faithful to the demanding task of coaxing bread
out of levain, or sourdough—a process that took days. As I walked
toward the bakery that morning, I felt as if I were following in the
footsteps of ghosts.
As an avid home baker with a decade of experience slapping around
dough, I had come to Paris to learn how to make a stellar baguette. I
wanted one with a crisp crust, an uneven bubbly interior (called the
crumb), and a distinctive flavor that would make my friends at home
in Washington, D.C., ooh and aah. I figured Arnaud Delmontel was
the one to teach me: A master baker, he had won the award for best
baguette in Paris in 2007.
I also wanted to investigate a cultural question: Why had bread,
which held a commanding place at the French table, crumbled into
mediocrity in the decades following World War II? By the 1980s, it
was an open secret in the baking trade that truly great French bread
was a rarity, as speed and efficiency increasingly trumped the slow
fermentation necessary for an outstanding loaf.
In 1987 a cultural critic writing in the French news magazine Le
Nouvel Observateur proclaimed that the baguette had become
“horribly disgusting.” It was “bloated, hollow, dead white,” he said.
“Soggy or else stiff. Its crusts come off in sheets like diseased skin.”
Renowned French baking professor Raymond Calvel mused that the
best baguette might soon be made in Tokyo. What had brought this
on? And how was quality bread revived in the 1990s? The answers
to these questions lay in Paris, which is what brought me to the door
of Boulangerie Arnaud Delmontel at three that morning last
February.
When I arrived, head baker Thomas Chardon opened the door to the
fournil and said, “Salut.” A wiry, energetic man of 26, he was
covered in flour, his once-blue fleece now a snowy white. Pop music
blared from a portable radio, and Chardon literally slid across the
flour-specked floor to place a batch of baguettes on a couche, a
linen cloth that supports the shape of the loaves as they undergo a
final hour-long rise before baking. Heat radiated from the deck oven
in the otherwise chilly room, and the toasty, faintly hazelnut-like
aroma of baking bread filled the air.
I put my things away on a shelf and, using my pidgin French and lots
of hand signals, started to assist Chardon. He motioned me over to a
tub of bubbly, glutinous dough that he had just pulled out of a
refrigerator. It had a sweet and faintly grassy aroma—the result of
the luxurious 24-hour fermentation required for Delmontel’s
signature baguette renaissance. We poured the mass into a
mechanical divider that sliced it into small bricks. After a rest, we
dropped the bricks into a shaper to form the baguettes. We rolled
and stretched these preformed loaves and tucked them into the
linen couche for the final rise before they went into the oven.
Next, we headed down a narrow stairwell into a tight basement
kitchen where a half-dozen pâtissiers were busy making pastries
and cakes. We slipped past them into a back room not much bigger
than a closet and knocked out another two dozen or so hearty
loaves leavened with stiff, mildly acidic levain and a pinch of yeast:
big round boules with sesame seeds and flaxseeds, fig and walnut
whole wheat breads, and cheese breads. Chardon guided me slowly
in shaping the loaves, stretching the dough across the counter with
my palm and nimbly tucking the sides of the dough under with my
fingers. After several tries, I picked up the technique, and when the
dough was ready, we moved it into the refrigerator for a daylong
rise. I worked in slow motion compared with Chardon, who was like a
machine that never stopped moving and never took a break.
When I asked Chardon later that morning how he knew a sheaf of
rising baguettes on a couche was done, he pointed to his eyes: It
came down to a decade of observing. I studied a batch of loaves,
poked the skin to feel the tension, and asked, “Finis?” I thought they
were. He peered at them closely and replied, “Cinq minutes.” So we
waited five minutes for the dough to relax, then placed the
baguettes carefully onto a cloth-lined conveyer belt. I had the honor
of making the five swift signature slashes on top of the loaves with
the lame (a curved razor) and slid them into the 500°F oven.
We did these tasks repeatedly that first morning—shaping, rising,
slashing, and baking perhaps 200 loaves, then mixing more dough
for the following day. By 7 a.m. I still hadn’t had a cup of coffee. So
Chardon dashed across the street and returned with a couple
of cafés, which we sipped with hot croissants the pastry chefs had
just pulled out of the oven downstairs. Now the latest batch of
baguettes was baked: darkly spotted, crisp, and well caramelized
here and there. When we removed them, the crusts crackled as they
met the cooler air outside the oven. “Ils chantent,” Chardon said—
they’re singing.
THE BAGUETTE WASN’T ALWAYS so melodic. Steven Kaplan, the
world’s preeminent scholar of French bread, has made this clear in
numerous articles, books, and television appearances in France,
where he’s culinary royalty. A Brooklyn-born bread lover weaned on
Jewish corn rye, he’s studied this arcane field for four decades from
his post at Cornell University’s history department. Now, though, he
lives in Paris, where he critiques bread and writes scholarly tomes.
(His latest, on a poisoning incident in southern France in the 1950s,
took a decade to write and came in at 1,300 pages.)
I met him one morning at a café in Montparnasse. I wanted to find
out why French bread had gone downhill in the decades following
World War II. In his 2006 book Good Bread Is Back (Duke University
Press), Kaplan offered an analysis of how and why French artisans
lost their way before starting to recover the true glory of French
bread in the early 1990s.
“For years I had watched the sensorial quality of French bread
palpably deteriorate,” he told me. The decline first set in, he said,
when bakers switched from levain to commercial yeast in order to
shorten the bread-making process. Yeast could work as an
acceptable substitute for levain, but instead of relying on minute
amounts of yeast and letting the dough ferment over 24 hours— as
Delmontel does with his baguettes—bakers added more yeast and
cut the rise period to as little as one hour, “suppressing the first
fermentation that is the source of all taste,” Kaplan said.
The situation worsened in the 1950s, when bakers started using
intensive kneading machines that satisfied consumer desire for an
ever-whiter crumb. They started sprinkling in additives such as
vitamin C to spike fermentation, and heaps of salt to mask the
absence of flavor. In short, while pursuing the promises of modernity
—efficiency, speed, and whiter bread—what French bakers lost was
the one indispensable ingredient: time.
“For me, bread was a crucial dimension of what the French proudly
call their ‘cultural exception,’” or national identity, said Kaplan.
“They did not seem to be aware that they were putting it in grave
peril.” By the 1980s, the French ate less and less bread.
Boulangeries folded; those that remained competed with
supermarkets, which baked frozen baguettes and sold them as loss
leaders. Kaplan was among a small group of critics and bakers who
fought this trend through newspaper editorials, television
interviews, and, of course, superior bread. Perhaps the most visible
was Lionel Poilâne, who baked celebrated loaves in one of the last
remaining wood-fired ovens in Paris. He called his
sourdough miche a “retro-innovation,” because he was resurrecting
levain when it had fallen out of use.
By the early 1990s, the artisan movement that Kaplan and Poilâne
had championed was gaining traction. Young bakers followed
Poilâne’s lead, using organic and stone-ground flours and levain;
others scaled back on yeast and returned to the long fermentation
necessary for a superior baguette. The French government came to
their aid at an epochal moment in 1993, when it began regulating
the term baguette de tradition, referring to precisely the baguette
Chardon taught me how to make. The loaf, the state deemed, could
be made only with flour, water, salt, and yeast—no chemical
ameliorants allowed. In this way, the state placed a protective
barrier around boulangeries. Since the baguette de tradition
required a longer rise, it was the enemy of efficient production but
the savior of bakeries competing against supermarkets. Once again,
time was the key ingredient for boulangers trying to restore bread to
its former glory.
Delmontel, now 41, began his career in Paris just as this movement
was percolating. Trained as a cook and pastry chef, he initially
looked down on breadmaking. Bakers had a reputation for being
screwups in culinary school, with few prospects aside from
vocational trades. “I thought, All they’re doing is mixing flour and
water—what’s so hard about that?” he said.
But once Delmontel came to the States in the mid-1990s to run the
pastry department at a new Whole Foods Market in Madison,
Wisconsin, his view of bread baking changed. “They were doing all
these wonderful loaves, with sourdough and whole grains,” he told
me, “and I realized there was more to it than just flour and water.”
When he returned to France and began working for a boulangerie,
he visited a test kitchen run by a small milling company in Chartres
—a fairly common arrangement in France, where bakers partner
with flour producers. This one, the Viron mill, was a family-owned
champion of the artisan movement and worked closely with bakers
to develop the best techniques. After his stint at the mill, Delmontel
perfected his baguette renaissance—made to this day with Viron’s
Type 55 flour. In 1999, he opened his first bakery, the one on Rue
des Martyrs. A second followed in 2004.
Delmontel’s shining moment came in 2007, at a blind tasting for the
Prix de la Meilleure Baguette de Paris, a competition that recognizes
Parisian breadmakers. Of the hundreds of baguettes that went
before the judges—Kaplan among them—Delmontel submitted two.
He took home first prize for the loaf with the best crust, crumb,
aroma, flavor, and look. As part of the honors, French president
Nicolas Sarkozy dined on Delmontel’s baguettes at the Elysée
Palace for a year. Sales shot up 25 percent at his two shops.
ONE DAY AT THE BAKERY, during a brief lull I noticed a recipe
taped to the wall: Delmontel’s formula for making several hundred
baguettes. Using the same ratio of water, salt, flour, and yeast, I
calculated the quantities necessary to make three baguettes and
showed my figures to Chardon. “Oui?” he said. “Un test,” I replied.
I weighed out the small batch of ingredients and then, to Chardon’s
surprise, I began kneading the dough by hand. “I haven’t done that
since baking school,” he said. The French flour was noticeably less
absorbent than the American flours I was used to, owing to the fact
that French flour has less protein than American flour. When the
shaggy dough developed into a more solid mass, I showed it to
Chardon, who signaled to keep kneading. After a few more minutes,
I let the dough sit, then kneaded again before each of three 20-
minute rest periods. I put the dough in the refrigerator for a 24-hour
rise, and told Delmontel about my little experiment when he walked
into the fournil. The next morning, I waited for another free moment
to take out the dough, which had risen nicely and was filled with
bubbles. I shaped the baguettes by hand, let them rise once more,
then baked them in the huge oven. They sprang up nicely, and when
we removed them with the long wooden peel (a spatula), I saw they
had a deep golden-brown color, and the slashes were well defined.
Once the loaves cooled, I picked one out 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.
He took a knife and cut the full length of the loaf as if making a
sandwich, then thrust his nose inside to breathe in the aroma. “Ah,
good smell,” he said. Looking at the uneven air pockets in the
crumb, he smiled. “I didn’t know my formula could be done on such
a small scale,” he said. Then he took a bite.
“Ah, c’est bien!” he concluded. A French baker had told me I made
decent bread. What else did I need? I flew out of the office to tell
Chardon the good news.
WHEN I WASN’T PRACTICING at the bakery, I sampled others’
wares. I ate baguettes that contained just a hint of levain at Du Pain
et des Idées, a gorgeous little bakery in the 10th arrondissement
that celebrates the “old-fashioned” style of baking and is open only
on weekdays. I took a train out to Sceaux, a village in the suburbs of
Paris, where I visited the bustling L’Etoile du Berger. Staffers handed
out samples of apple bread to a long and patient queue of
customers. And back in Paris, I made a pilgrimage to Rue Monge to
try the ethereal baguettes made by Eric Kayser, considered the
Alain Ducasse of French bread. But among the most memorable
loaves I ate were those at La Boulangerie par Véronique Mauclerc in
the 19th arrondissement, a working-class neighborhood far from the
center of Paris. Mauclerc’s exceedingly dark, organic, whole grain
breads are made entirely with levain and baked in a century-old
wood-fired oven, one of only four left in Paris. The loaves—some
made with saffron, others with preserved fruit—were exquisite and
unique.
One day, working at Boulangerie Arnaud Delmontel, I walked outside
to the front of the shop in my baker’s coat, dusted with flour. A
middle-aged man standing in line smiled at me—a simple, warm
acknowledgment of the work I was doing to bring him his daily
bread. In each of the bakeries I visited I felt a similar sense of
connection, no matter how long the lines or how rushed the staff.
Good bread, when made with patience and craft, drew people in.
There was no reason to rush this process or to compromise it. True
bread is timeless, and it springs from the patient heart of the baker.
Back home in Washington, I called Delmontel one day to complain
that the flour I used wasn’t as good as his and that the bread didn’t
taste the same. “Look, whether it’s the same flour I use is not
important,” he scolded. “The most important thing is to make
people happy, to love what you have done!” Then I remembered:
This was the lesson I had witnessed every day in France. It was the
source of great bread, the most important rule. And now it was
mine.
13 Tips for Visiting a Paris Boulangerie
Ordering food in a foreign country can be intimidating, especially if
you don’t speak the language, and even more especially when
eating is taken seriously, like it is in France. Follow these tips and
you’ll be able to buy your baguette with confidence next time you’re
in the City of Light.
1. On entering, greet the salesperson with “Bonjour, madame,” or
“Bonjour, monsieur,” and make eye contact.
2. Pay with coins—or small-denomination notes—unless you’re
spending 20 euro or more.
3. Don’t fumble with excessive questions in bad French. If you
can, listen as the people in line ahead of you order, and borrow
a phrase or two.
4. Specify sliced or not sliced: tranché or pas tranché.
5. If you’re eating alone, you may ask for a half-size demi
baguette.
6. Depending on your preference, ask for a baguette that’s bien
cuite (well cooked and crusty) or pas trop cuite (soft and
slightly doughy on the inside).
7. Whole grain bread, tourtes (meat pies), and miches (round
white loaves) are often sold by weight, so you can either
specify a quantity in grams or simply ask for une demi (half) or
un quart (quarter).
8. While salespeople don’t allow customers to dither over bread,
feel free to take your time and ask questions about the more
costly cakes and fruit tarts.
9. Shop during the weekend for specialty breads such as
kugelhopf or large sugared brioches.
10. To get the freshest bread, some French people routinely
visit their bakeries twice a day. Look for displayed baking
times.
11. Ask for pains bio (organic loaves), which are increasingly
common.
12. Those with gluten intolerance can ask for pain sans
gluten.
13. Close out your visit with “Merci, au revoir. Bonne journée.
—Denise Young
Samuel Fromartz is a veteran journalist who focuses on the
intersection of the food, farming and the environment. He is a co-
founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Food & Environment Reporting
Network. In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker’s Odyssey
(Viking 2014) is his second book, recounting a personal obsession
with craft baking. It was shortlisted for the Art of Eating book prize
for 2015 and won the award for Literary Food Writing from the IACP.
