Meet the Baker: Guillaume Viard

Guillaume Viard is a baker with a mission and it is not in the least surprising that his bakery, Le Pain par nature, should gleam like a beacon on Rue Cavallotti, an otherwise rather gray street in Paris' eighteenth arrondissement.

Customer education begins in the window:

(All our ingredients are fresh and seasonal and all our products are "home-made"). 

"People need to learn to live within the Earth's finite resources, they need to pay attention to the weather, to the climate. Once a crop is all in, that's it for the year. In the fall, we use apples and pears in our tarts and cakes, in the winter, lemon, chocolate, caramel and apples (they keep well); in March, we work with dried fruit. Then spring arrives, bringing back first strawberries, then apricots. When someone asks for a fraisier (a fresh strawberry cake) in December, we explain why it can't be done. Our sandwiches and other snack food follow the seasons as well. We offer thick vegetable pies in the fall when varietal diversity is at its peak. As soon as tomato season is over in France, grated raw root vegetables (carrots, beets) or céleri rémoulade (grated celeriac in a mustardy mayo dressing) replace tomato slices in our sandwiches. New customers are baffled. We explain. That's when consumer education happens. Some will never learn, they go elsewhere. Most stay. We have lots of students, many families, old people who are the pillars of our community. Some come three or four times a day: for croissants in the morning, for a salad or a quiche at lunch, for bread at any time." Listening to Guillaume (who, while talking to me non-stop in the bakery's kitchen, is also hand-mixing mayonnaise and chopping and grating vegetables for salads and sandwiches), I feel a sudden longing for a life where I too might be able to stop four times a day by my neighborhood bakery...
The bakery gets its flour from Moulin Trottin, a mill whose owner largely shares Guillaume's outlook on territoriality and the environment: the flours Guillaume buys from him are all French and all organic. He shuns such exotic grains as kamut and quinoa: "They come from too far away. Using these flours makes no sense economically-, biologically- or environmentally-speaking. So we do without. Besides wheat, the flour we use the most is petit-épeautre, also called engrain (emmer). Grown in central France (the one from Provence is too expensive) and rich in minerals, it is redolent of our terroir français.  Since it is low in gluten and absorbs a lot of water, we have developed a special formula and technique to make the best possible use of its characteristics and to showcase its unique flavor. It is quite popular with our customers."

"We use no grand-épeautre (spelt) at all. It is too close to wheat, especially in gluten-content, to be of much nutritional interest." Guillaume stops chopping for a minute. "Gluten intolerance is a modern ailment, a direct result of wheat selection which has consistently favored high-gluten varieties: today wheat can contain up to forty-three percent gluten. Twenty years ago, the percentage was twenty-five percent. There is naturally much less gluten in ancient wheat varieties, such as the ones that are currently being reintroduced in some parts of southern France." His face takes on a slightly mournful expression: "I guess gluten-free baking has a future in this country, sort of." Chopping resumes at a faster rythm.

The loudspeakers are going full blast in the shop and kitchen; Guillaume and Suat, his sale associate, are moving briskly. It is mid-morning. Their shift has started early but not as early as Luc's, who is nevertheless still busy downstairs in the bread lab. The phone rings, the greengrocer is on the line. Guillaume, who is dexterously filling mini-tubs with the salad he just made, wedges the phone between cheek and shoulder and places an order from a list seemingly embedded whole in his memory: "Flat parsley, Reine de Reinettes and Golden apples, leaf celery, eggs, etc." He goes on and on. The seller is a cooperative of producers and everything is organic.
I ask about dried fruit and nuts. "We buy organic French walnuts. I'd love to buy French hazelnuts as well but we just don't produce enough. The best hazelnuts come from Italy. Unfortunately ninety percent of Italian hazelnuts are gobbled up by a huge industrial confectioner. " He shakes his head: "And that's how the best hazelnuts in the world end up in the worst candy in the world. " He looks dejected for a minute but he soon brightens up: "Right now I am looking for a producer of AOC chestnut flour in Corsica but this year's crop isn't completely in yet. I have to wait. Meanwhile I use the Markal brand. My rule is to go as close to home as possible to buy the best I can find: almonds from Spain, hazelnuts, figs and apricots from Turkey."

One thing is for sure: no truck ever lumbers up to Le Pain par nature to delivers frozen pastries and viennoiseries; no order is ever placed for strawberries from Spain, Africa or South America or from anywhere but France, for that matter; mangoes, pineapples, sesame seeds and pistachios never darken the door. Ninety-two percent of the fruit and vegetables used at the bakery is grown in France and organic. Milk and eggs are organic too. But, Guillaume explains, "Organic is becoming a business, and nowadays the only organic butter available in France comes from Holland. It makes no sense to use Dutch butter when we ourselves make the best possible butter for our croissants!" So he buys Montaigu, a conventional AOC butter from Charentes-Poitou.

Suat Adiyaman, Luc Poggio and Guillaume Viard

Among the breads, the best-seller is the Tradi-bio (a naturally leavened baguette with a crunchy crust, a fine crumb and a good shelf-life) closely followed by the Bioguette (a yeasted baguette with a shorter fermentation time).  Bio (short for biologique), means "organic."

Among the special breads on offer on this particular morning, I spy the Cambrousse, a country bread...

...the Pain des champs...

... and a few glorious miches...

I also spy also viennoiseries such as the airy chausson aux pommes below (filled with homemade applesauce)...

...the friand maison (a house pâté made with ground meat -veal, beef and chicken- and fresh herbs)...

...or crumbly pains au chocolat aux amandes (twice-baked chocolate almond croissants)...

Despite using all organic ingredients (save for butter, oil and vinegar), Guillaume and Luc keep their prices reasonably competitive. The Bioguette goes for one euro (a non-organic baguette costs an average of € 0.85 in Paris,  € 0.95 in the neighborhood) and the Tradi-Bio for € 1.20 (against an average of € 1.10 for a conventional baguette tradition in Paris, € 1.15 in the neighborhood). Sandwiches and salads are a bit more pricey than elsewhere, reflecting the added cost of the ingredients but they still fly off the shelves. "People come for the taste. They may grumble about the price but they come back." Guillaume hands a stack of covered salad containers to Suat who takes them into the shop. Noon is fast approaching, the lunch crowd will soon arrive, re-stocking is in-order.

Full trays of just baked snacks are waiting to be displayed...

Roullos made with rolled out tradibio dough smothered with organic ham and cheese
sometimes made instead with julienned veggies or shredded chicken and cheese

"Our customers understand that everything we sell is made in-house. But it took a while for that to sink in. Take the croissants! After years of eating frozen industrial croissants (the bakery's previous owners didn't make their own), they were a bit put out by the fact that the shape of ours varied slightly from one batch to the next. We had to explain that our croissants were hand-made by Luc, an artisan, not by a machine! Now they know and they no longer notice."
Guillaume met Luc at La Boulangerie par Véronique Mauclerc, an organic bakery which I remember visiting it a few years ago, awed by the diversity and flavor of the offerings. (For a picture of Guillaume in front of Mauclerc's woodfire oven, one of only three still in existence in Paris, click here). There is pride in his voice when he adds: "I trained him myself. Now he runs our bread lab."
As for Guillaume, he started as an apprentice in a bakery in Central France (where he is from). Sadly the boss never allowed him to touch anything but a broom and a mop and he spent his days cleaning the floor. So he joined Les Compagnons du Devoir, became a baker, did the customary Tour de France, and after trying his hand at pastry, cooking, and other trades went back to bread when hired by Veronique Mauclerc. "Not only did I learn a lot from her about organic baking but she also taught me self-reliance. At one point though we found ourselves disagreeing about some fundamental choices and we parted ways. I went down South to get my driver's license and started thinking about the bakery I was dreaming of opening one day. I worked a bit for Eric Kayser, a fellow Compagnon and my then-idol (I learned a great deal from his three textbooks). Then Luc and I decided to become partners. It took us more than two years to put the project together: a year and a half to write the business plan, six months to find financing then a year to locate the bakery we wanted.  We found our current premises (where a bakery has been continuously in operation since 1904) through word-of-mouth. There were many other interested buyers but the owners liked us from the get-go. So they sold to us. We opened on November 5, 2012 and did well right away: sales volume increased by 50 to 60% the first year compared to the sellers' turnover of the year before (to be fair, they weren't getting any younger and didn't have their heart in it anymore). Most of their customers stayed with us. Le Pain par nature is a neighborhood bakery and we love it that way."

Guillaume is very proud of the fact that he won tenth place earlier this year for his tarte aux pommes (apple tart) in a Paris-wide competition. "I was raised in rural France and we grew most of our food. All organic of course. We knew no other way. I still do everything the way we used to. For instance, I make my crème pâtissière (pastry cream) from a recipe given to me by a great-aunt. I don't change a thing." When he was a child, he baked cakes every Sunday, so when he joined the Compagnons, he was hoping to become a boulanger-pâtissier (bread baker/pastry chef) but admission was based on competitive exams and "I could only apply to one. I picked 'boulanger' because the trades were listed in alphabetical order and it was the first to come up. I have no regrets: pastry is a very rigorous and technical craft. That's not who I am. I work on instinct, on feeling. But I still like pastry. Although maybe I like cooking even more."
Le Pain par nature is a different kind of business: "We chose to make it a cooperative, which means that the focus is on the business itself, not on the capital. We are required by law to keep it growing as opposed to getting the most money out of it and, again by law, we cannot be anything but salaried employees. Right now the bakery officially has two employees, Luc and myself. Suat - who is a landscape artist by trade - came on board at a later stage, when the company he worked for went out of business. He is expected to soon become a partner."
"We all share the same ideas. Luc was born in Paris but he is keenly aware that organic is the way of the future. Our dream is actually to one day open an école de boulange (a baking school), maybe in my childhood home if we can swing it as it is fairly large and comes with a fruit and vegetable garden. We would just need to build a classroom. We would adopt a holistic approach and teach all aspects of the trade: working with organic ingredients only, we would make sure the apprentices know where everything comes from. They would grow the produce they would use. We would build a mill to help them understand flour. They need to see by themselves that wheat requires time, technique and terroir to grow, that the land has its own nature, origin and history, that life has meaning and that bread is alive. We'd seek accreditation but we couldn't get it, we could remain a private trade school: our graduates would just have to sit for the public exam to obtain their official diplomas. Whether or not we ever open our dream school one day, we already live and work by our principles and I like to think that our bakery is twenty years ahead of our times."
I close my notebook and Guillaume selects a well-baked Tradi-bio among those which have just come out of the oven. He hands it to me. It makes a lovely crackling sound: "Taste it later when it has cooled down a bit". I already know that it will taste just the way it looks, as an honest to goodness baguette, ready to play second fiddle to whatever tasty food will be put on the table but whose crust and crumb make it ideal for that most cherished goûter (afternoon snack) of my childhood: bread with a bar of chocolate inside. The torch is passing to a new generation and it is a lovely feeling.

Giant Kabocha Scone

It all began with a word, potimarron, which is the common name in French for scarlet kabocha (also known as red kuri squash or orange hokkaido squash). That word may not look or sound like much to non-native French speakers, but to these French ears, it evokes two of childhood's cold weather pleasures, pumpkin (potiron) and chestnuts (marrons).
We didn't have jack-o'-lanterns (or potimarrons for that matter) in France when I was growing up but my grandfather grew huge potirons (Cinderella pumpkins) in his vegetable garden (my grandmother made sweet pumpkin soup every fall) and the fragrance of roasting chestnuts was ubiquitous in Paris in late fall and winter: as soon as I was old enough to go to my weekly piano lessons by myself, my mother would give me a few coins so I could buy myself a cornet de marrons chauds (a paper cone of hot chestnuts) when I exited the métro at Place de l'Étoile. I would stick the hot cone in my coat pocket and one of my hands would remain warm all the way down Avenue de Wagram where a bitter wind always chilled me to the bones.
I remember the chestnut man too. He was dressed all in black and wore a thick tweed cap with flaps that covered his ears. He rubbed his hands constantly and when he removed one of his knit gloves to rummage for change in the tin box where he kept his money, I could see that his fingertips were red. As I left clutching my cornet deep inside my coat pocket, I could hear him start calling again in a singsong: "Chauds, chauds, les marrons chauds..."(Hot chestnuts, hot chestnuts) and while I dearly loved my white-haired and soft-cheeked piano teacher, this scratchy little tune has remained alive in my memory when, sadly, her polkas, sonatas and mazurkas have long since sunk into oblivion.
So when I first heard (or read, I can't remember) the word potimarron and long before I had a chance to see or taste the actual squash, I was already under the spell. When I finally managed to get my hands on one of these bright beauties, the spell worked its magic and I fell in love.

Of course the kabocha is an easy squash to love. Since its skin is edible, while it does have to be washed, it doesn't have to be peeled. It can be sliced open, seeded, then steamed or roasted. It can also be cut into chunks and added to a soup where it boils happily with other vegetables. It cooks rather fast in fact. Its flesh is both creamy and dry and does taste a lot like buttery chestnuts. It is also choke-full of vitamins, fiber and oligo-elements.
For all these reasons, when I saw a potimarron cookbook in a bookstore in Paris last March, I couldn't resist, all the more because its author was Cléa, a French blogger I greatly admire for her imaginative and flavorful cuisine. We now live in a part of the country where kabochas are commonly grown (among many other beautiful and tasty winter squashes) and having so many creative kabocha recipes at my disposal means we can take full advantage of this local crop without ever feeling bored or tired.
Witness the giant scone breadsong  and I made for breakfast a couple of days ago. She was in town for a BBGA-sponsored baking class which I also attended and she stayed over at our house. I did the mixing and breadsong kindly did the shaping, giving me a personal demo of her scone hand-"laminating" technique (she normally shapes the dough in a rectangle but it is easy enough to reshape it in a circle once the "laminating" is done).
It was indeed a learning experience to see breadsong at work: seemingly heeding secret orders, the dough shaped up for her in a way it may never have for me. I had thought it was really dry and would require the addition of buttermilk or yogurt but breadsong said, no, it would come together as it was and she was absolutely right, it did. Sheer mastery! Thank you, breadsong, I will always trust crumbly scone dough from now on and also, always, always, "laminate"as it does indeed make for a much airier texture. My heartfelt thanks to you too, Cléa, for being a fellow kabocha lover and for sharing your many ways of enjoying this magnificent squash! 

Ingredients:

• 125 g cooked kabocha puree (I steamed big chunks of the unpeeled kabocha, then ran the cooked squash through the foodmill. I tried using the food processor but it wouldn't work: I would have had to add some liquid, which I didn't want to do)
• 20 g olive oil
• 50 g fresh goat cheese, crumbled (Cléa used fresh sheep's milk cheese but I didn't have any)
• 1 egg
• 100 g emmer flour (I milled emmer berries I had on hand. If you don't have access to emmer, you may want to replace it with all-purpose flour or white whole wheat flour or equal parts of all-purpose and regular whole wheat flour)
• 150 g oat flour (Cléa uses corn flour but I didn't have any)
• 10 g baking powder
• 6 g sel
• 25 g dried apricots, chopped
• 25 g hard sheep's milk cheese, grated (I used a Basque cheese but I suspect Manchego would work fine too and it may be easier to find)

Method:

1. Pre-heat the oven to 350°F/180°C
2. In a big bowl, mix together the kabocha puree, the oil, the goat cheese and the egg until mostly incorporated (I used a fork)
3. Add the apricots and the hard cheese
4. Transfer to a work surface and quickly work the dough into an 8-inch circle (it will look impossibly crumbly at first)
5. Cut in six with a dough cutter without detaching the slices
6. Bake for 30 minutes
7. Enjoy warm or cold (it will keep well for a few days in a ziploc bag).

The Giant Kabocha Scone goes to Susan for Yeastspotting.