Meet the Baker: Éric Marché

For me, stepping into Boulangerie Pains, Beurre et Chocolat (PBC), in Nantes, France, was like entering Dame Tartine's famous edible palace (if you didn't grow up to the accents of Il était une dame Tartine you may need to check out the English version of the lyrics to see what I am talking about): my pulse quickened and my brain went into serotonin overdrive as I took in the dazzling display of breads, bretzels, viennoiseries and pastries. I had definitely entered another, wondrous, dimension. The young salesperson flashed me a glorious smile. Before I could introduce myself, Éric Marché stepped out of the lab and came towards me. He too was smiling. We shook hands and talked a while. Then, picking up a buckwheat Menhir nantais (a menhir is a standing stone), one of his signature breads, he good-naturedly agreed to pose for a picture before shepherding me to the back to put my coat down and meet his wife Cathy. Five minutes later we were chatting like old friends.

  

     

Like several of the bakers I have met over the years, Éric came to bread from another walk of life. He was 40, working for a regional newspaper and living in southwestern France when he switched tracks. He was already a serious home baker: "I couldn't find bread I liked where we lived. The only way to get the kind of bread I was looking for was to make it myself." Five years earlier, Cathy had quit her job as a business facilitator working for the local chamber of commerce to become a pastry chef. Now it was his turn. He applied to École Banette near Orléans and was accepted. Within six months, he had graduated with two diplomas: the CAP (certificat d'aptitude professionnelle or certificate of professional competency) and the BP (brevet professionnel, a higher professional certificate). Within the Banette system, a beginning baker may be supported by a miller who helps him or her get a foot in the door by providing market research, technical and commercial assistance, etc., in exchange of which the baker becomes a customer. Éric and Cathy thus learned of a bakery coming up for sale in Le Croisic on the coast of Brittany, fifty miles or so west of Nantes. (Le Croisic is right near Guérande, known worldwide for its famous sea-salt). They sold everything they owned and in 2004, as soon as school let out for the summer, they uprooted themselves and their three kids and moved to Brittany.

 Baguette de l'Erdre (tradition au levain)

The bakery was a big one.  In high season when business was brisk, it employed up to six people in the back and seven in the front: Éric and Cathy worked hard and managed to increase production by forty percent compared to the previous owners. But the low season was long (Le Croisic mostly comes to life when school is out: to give you an idea, the bakery used to sell one thousand and five hundred baguettes a day in the summer against two hundred in the winter), the miller's flour contained more additives than Éric cared to use and the work wasn't nearly as creative as he had hoped: locals were not really interested in trying out different breads. By 2007, they knew they had to move to a larger city and become independent. They picked Nantes partly because they wanted to stay in the Loire region and partly because competition was fierce in the city: there were many excellent bakers there including La Petite Boulangerie, owned and run by MOF Franck Dépériers, (MOF means Meilleur Ouvrier de France). Making it in Nantes would definitely be a challenge. But at that point in their lives, a challenge was exactly what they were looking for.

Brioche

Éric and Cathy found a bakery in Saint-Félix, a lively and prosperous part of the city, in a spot where there had always been a bakery although at the time the premises were reduced to bare walls. Once again they sold everything (at a loss because they were still paying back their loan) and moved. They chose a local mill, Minoterie Girardeau, which had been in the same family for four generations and still stone-milled all of its organic flours. By then it was 2008. They went to work. This time though Cathy was no longer in the back making chocolate (something she had greatly enjoyed doing in Le Croisic's cool climate and big lab): the new lab was simply too warm and too small. So she put on a new hat and took charge of sales and catering. "I love interacting with people, so I am fine," she told me with a twinkle in the eyes before leaving the floor to Éric, only to reappear a few minutes later with a luscious little cake that I was made to sample on the spot, the gâteau nantais, a regional specialty. The taste was like nothing I had every had before: a cross between a French almond cake and a baba-au-rhum. Now I am not a cake person and I never liked rhum very much (my older brother's favorite cake was baba-au-rhum and I always dreaded his birthday growing up) but were I to be magically transported to Dame Tartine's actual palace, Éric and Cathy's gâteau nantais is what I would wish the walls to be made of! "Very easy to make!," proclaims Éric, "The secret is to use good butter, good rhum (and a lot of it) and the best almonds you can afford." There was indeed so much rhum in the slice I had that, had I indulged in a second one, I would probably have been over the legal alcohol limit for driving. (For the recipe which Éric and Cathy generously offered to share before I even asked, click here).

But back to bread. Everything in the bakery (including viennoiseries) is leavened with a natural starter. Éric keeps several different ones, some of them seasonal.

• A liquid starter (100% hydration) based on T65, a farine de tradition française, a wheat flour to which no additive can legally be added and which retains 0.62 % to 0.75 % minerals (see this classification of French flours - in French). Used for baguette de tradition.
• A firm starter based on organic T80 wheat flour (flour which retains 0.75% à 0.90% minerals). Used for all organic breads besides the kamut and the spelt.
• A firm spelt starter. Used for the kamut and spelt bread because of its lower gluten content.
• A high-gluten starter based on farine de gruau (T45). Used at Christmas time for panettone.
• A levain nantais: liquid starter based on farine de tradition to which beurre roux (brown butter) is added at feeding time. Used for viennoiseries as well as for fouace, a regional bread traditionally made at vendanges (grape harvest) time. 
• A starter based on levain nantais to which brown sugar syrup is added at feeding time. Used for fouace as well.

For baguette dough, Éric feeds the starter and lets it ferment for two hours. Next he incorporates flour and water by mixing them together for three minutes, lets the mixture autolyse for two hours, does the final mix (four minutes on first speed), lets it bulk ferment at room temperature for two or three hours, divides and shapes, then retards it for sixteen to twenty-four hours. He explains that by treating the dough gently and barely mixing it, he helps preserve the aromas and taste a prolonged high-speed mixing would inevitably destroy.

Menhir nantais

The menhir nantais is made with 15% sarrasin (buckwheat) and 85% farine de tradition and leavened with firm levain. But Éric roasts 5% of the buckwheat flour which gives the bread the unmistakable aroma of the crêpes de sarrasin (buckwheat crêpes) Brittany is justly famous for.

Buckwheat flour: roasted (top) and raw (bottom)

Visually, it is hard to tell the two flours apart but the minute your nose comes into play, you know which is which.

Buckwheat dough, retarding (for up to 48 hours)

Everyone has a favorite bread, right? Éric's is the tourte de seigle (100% rye) with its subtle hints of honey and spices.

Mine is the tourte de sarrasin, a buckwheat loaf so powerfully aromatic I took one home and had a slice for breakfast for the remainder of our stay in western France. Sliced, toasted and spread with butter speckled with sel de Guérande, it tastes like Brittany itself. So, yes,  I am a convert and next time I make buckwheat bread, I too will roast 5% of the flour.

In 2013, PBC won the fourth spot among a hundred or so bakeries selected to compete at the national level in M6 TV show La Meilleure boulangerie de France.

In the two weeks following the announcement of the results, traffic increased by fifty percent: people came in for the menhir, for the gâteau nantais, for the bi-color croissants and for other viennoiseries.

Croissant & moulin à vent au citron (lemon pinwheel)

Pain aux raisins (raisin roll) and raspberry croissant

When traffic went back to normal, Éric found out that his regular customers had become more adventurous: they were willing to try different grains and to trust him with new flavors. Today he makes an average of thirty-two different breads on any given week, including eight or nine organic ones. There is a rule in the lab that everyone must come up with a new bread or viennoiserie every month: some of these creations make it into the bakery's regular répertoire. So it went for l'Italienne (made with herbs and tomatoes on ciabatta dough)...

... and for the Algeria-inspired Mathloun, among others.

At PBC, flours are either organic or the product of sustainable farming. Ingredients are sourced locally whenever possible: salt comes from Guérande, butter from Laiterie de Montaigu in nearby Vendée, honey from Ruchers du Pays blanc in Brittany, etc. Unsold bread goes to food banks and customers can buy an extra baguette and leave it at the bakery for the first person in need who will walk in and ask for it. Cathy keeps track on a big slate behind the register. On any given day, an average of fifteen baguettes are thus shared. I love it.

When asked what best advice he would have for a young baker, Éric doesn't hesitate: "Your first concern should be taste. Shape, length, grignes (cuts), they all matter, but at the end of the day, you don't share a shape, you share a taste. Never lose track of that." Being a baker is a demanding job: it requires long hours (Éric and Cathy are on their feet from 4 AM to 8 PM with a thirty-minute nap in early afternoon) and it seriously disrupts your social life. Looking back though, they only have one regret: that they didn't start at a younger age. But their three kids have remained their first tasters and customers and now that a grandchild has joined the family, they know the taste of good bread will pass on to yet another generation. If that isn't a good enough reason to get up at dawn and fire up the oven, then what is?

Crème des pains

Left: Seeded country loaf. Right: Le Rustique.  Front: Le Norvégien
A slice of Norvégien

Crumbs

• PBC makes no gluten-free bread
• All flour blends are done in-house
• Except for the baguette, all bread is sold by weight
• Dough for the baguette is hydrated at 78%. The starter gets only one feeding and a two-hour fermentation before being put to work. It gets incorporated in the final dough at the same time as the coarse sea salt
• All seeds are toasted then soaked
• To roast the flour, Éric puts it in a 320°F oven for a total of fifteen minutes (mixing it every five minutes to prevent it from burning)
• Spelt bread contains 40% seeds (sunflower, soy, buckwheat and brown flax). Made with malt syrup and firm levain and hydrated at 120%, it keeps five to six days and is a best seller
• The fruit purées that go into some viennoiseries contain only 10% sugar
• Crème des pains is made with farine de tradition and crème fraîche. It has a brown butter aroma
• The Saint-Félix is made with farine de tradition and wheat germ. It has a thick crust and a robust chew
• Le Norvégien is made with three different whole-grain organic flours (spelt, rye and wheat), six different seeds and three kinds of dried fruit (fig, cranberry and apricot). It bakes for two and a half hours in large 3-kg pans. It keeps for several days
• Salt content: from 1.77% for baguette and related doughs down to 1.13% for rye, with spelt and kamut hovering at 1.50%.

Moulin à vent au chocolat (Chocolate pinwheel)

London: The Bikery

And no, there is no typo in the title of this post! Better Health  Artisan Bakery at 13 Stean Street in London, England, is officially changing its name. The new sign is already up.

A bit confusing for visitors from abroad trying to find their way without a map (our phones are useless in Britain), to this remote spot in East London. Spotting the sign from the end of the street, we thought for a minute that we had the wrong address but a helpful breeze brought the unmistakable whiff of baking bread and, bereft of Google Maps, we simply followed our noses.

 

The Centre for Better Health -which has active here in Hackney for more than fifty-five years- is a "community-based charity that promotes well-being and supports recovery from mental distress,'  through counseling, classes and on-the-job training. It operates three social enterprises: the afore-mentioned Better Health Bakery soon to be known as The Bikery, Better Health Bikes and Better Health Products Ltd. We only saw the bakery.

Yann Lamour, the head baker (who is French and trained at Ferrandi in Paris), was in the shop when we entered. He kindly took a few minutes of his time to tell us more.
The twelve-month training program has been in existence for two and a half years. Geared towards men and women with mental issues, typically referred by their "carer," their doctor, a counseling centre, but sometimes self-referred as well, it isn't meant to train future bakers as much as to provide a stepping stone towards a new life. The participants are all dealing with some mental issue or other (from depression or anxiety to schizophrenia or other forms of psychosis) but they are all in remission. They have to have been stable for at least two years before they can join.

"Bread making is a form of meditation, " says Yann, "Touching the dough, seeing it grow and transform is a healing experience. " The participants also have their own goals: some seek a chance to meet people in a controlled environment, others want to learn how to develop a routine by sticking to a schedule (arriving on-time, etc.), others still wish to learn teamwork. When their twelve months are over, they don't all become bakers. One has discovered in himself a passion for plants and the open air and is now a gardener. Another plans to be a driver. Another yet is interning in a social restaurant, etc. The common denominator is that for each of them the time spent at the bakery has helped unlock the future.

The breads are all-leavened with natural starters, either a wheat levain at 55% hydration or a rye levain at 100% hydration.

The bakery -who employs four to six bakers- sells at the market on Saturdays and has wholesale accounts with restaurants and natural food stores. It is open for retail Tuesday to Saturday. If you ever are in London, hop on the Overground and follow your nose. You won't regret it.

Meet the Baker: Frédéric Pichard

I am filing this post under the Meet the Baker label but in fact the two hours of this time Frédéric Pichard so generously gave me on a recent Saturday morning were less about him than about his all-consuming passion, le pain français. Pain français means "French bread" of course but I won't use the translation in this post because Monsieur Pichard would have a fit if he could see what comes up when one googles "French bread," definitely not the kind of bread he is devoting his professional life to. He has no website and zero interest in the Internet, so hopefully he won't see these pictures but, out of respect, I'll stick to the original French. I first met Frédéric Pichard in a chapter of Sam Fromartz' excellent book, In Search of the Perfect Loaf, a Home Baker's Odyssey. Despite the fact that Pichard had won best croissant in Paris in 2011 and that his baguette had placed in the top ten in the 2009 Grand Prix de la Baguette, I hadn't really paid much attention before but when I read what Sam had to say about his methods, I knew I had to go see him. And even though I am not sure Monsieur Pichard knows what a blog is,  he was most welcoming when I called. And at the appointed time, we sat under a tree at a long table in the quiet courtyard behind the boulangerie. Madame Pichard came to say hello and brought me coffee and a croissant.

 I thought of Sam who described Pichard's baguette as almost floating in his hand as he held it. Well, that croissant was so crisp and light it practically levitated. Definitely worth crossing a continent AND an ocean but hard to eat elegantly: as it dwindled, it kept showering my open notebook with golden flakes which I tried to brush away while still writing a mile a minute... Not an easy feat. Fortunately Monsieur Pichard paused long enough to let me catch up.

Croissant dough (made with milk levain)

As you will see if you read on, what Frédéric Pichard gave me that morning was a treatise on pain français, complete with practical information and historical references, and because he was so intensely involved in his subject, listening to him was an unexpectedly moving experience. Monsieur Pichard knows full well that he is un oiseau rare (literally a rare bird) among French bakers. When I told him that he reminded me of Don Quixote, he laughed and he shrugged. Like all of us, he can only do his best, right?

If an eighteenth-century French baker time-traveled to Maison Pichard, 88 rue Cambronne in the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris, he or she (were there women bakers then?) would feel at home almost immediately. The technology and equipment have evolved but the process has remained almost identical. They would find the flour and its sometimes erratic behavior eerily familiar as well. They used farines-mères, a flour whose only ingredient was wheat. Frédéric Pichard does too: no additive is ever allowed into his flour, not even malt. The grain is grown and milled to his specifications in his native Beauce, a region so fertile that, from time immemorial, its vast plains have been considered France's breadbasket. One of his grandfathers was a farmer and he used to say: "France is divided in two parts: one half is to the north of the Loire River, the other half to the south. Pain français comes from the northern part of France where wheat grows best." Today Mr. Pichard makes his baguettes with the very same high-protein wheat varieties that this grandfather used to grow: Capelle, Capitole, Hardi. Why high-protein? To prevent gluten degradation during fermentation.

Pichard bakes his baguettes in a wood-fired oven because falling heat makes for better development. The bread gets a bit chewier and therefore tastier. The cost of wood isn't an issue: "Because I use my own flour and don't pay a premium to a miller for putting in additives and test-developing recipes, I can afford wood and still sell my baguette at a very competitive price."

What follows is a synopsis of what Frédéric Pichard told me, based on a translation of my notes.

What is pain français?

• "Le pain, ce n'est que de la fermentation;" (Bread is nothing but fermentation)
• Pain français is bread made of pure T55 flour sublimated through the fermentation process (according to this article, the ash content for T55 flour is 0.50-0.62 and the extraction rate 75-78). The flour must contain no additives of any  kind: a baker who uses additives is alienating his or her profession. To use a wine-making metaphor,  it is like adding raspberries to Romanée-Conti; 
• Pain français must taste lactic and its flavors be subtile; using a higher extraction flour would make for a stronger taste and the resulting bread wouldn't be pain français; 
• There is no prescribed recipe for pain français; the baker must adjust to the flour: wheat has its vintages as does wine. Moreover, "les blés bougent à chaque écrasement" (wheat changes with each milling);
• Pain français is all about the baker's savoir-faire (know-how);
• When properly made, the baguette is the ultimate pain français.

In the eighteenth century, bakers of pain français:

• Always worked en masses importantes (in large batches). The size of the batch was proportional to the oven capacity;
• Used as much water as they possibly could and mixed until the dough started to look homogenous and the gluten network to develop; didn't work from a recipe (there was none);
• Let the dough ferment for a while (sometimes up to ten hours) then added fresh flour and water to prevent pourriture (decay), i.e. the formation of undesirable acetic bacteria. These additions were called rafraîchis. Their object was to "launder out" the unwanted bacteria which routinely appeared because the bakers used wooden troughs (where germs tended to proliferate) and worked in labs that were not immaculate;
• Let the dough ferment again and added the salt at the end of the mixing; then did the last rafraîchi, called tous points;
• Worked in the room where the oven was, which means that there could be tremendous variations in ambient temperature. Typically the oven wasn't lit yet when the mixing began. The lab went from really cold at the beginning to really hot towards the end of the process. Such variations in temperature were detrimental to the yeast micro-organisms.

To make pain français today, Frédéric Pichard: 

• Applies the CELFEL (Culture Endogène Longue/Fermentation Exogène Lente) method that he has developed over the  years (lengthy endogenous culture/slow exogenous fermentation);
• Mixes flour, salt and water in stainless steel cuves (see picture below: the word is normally used for wine and means "vats") which are scrubbed and bleached between each batch and allows the mixture to rest for as long as needed to get the endogenous fermentation he is looking for. This fermentation differs from autolyse (whose function is to relax the gluten.) Here there is no prescribed duration: the process can take twenty hours, it can take more than thirty. The key is to add as much water as the flour can take. The more water, the more active the fermentation; no recipe can help the baker determine how much water to use. If a baker applying the CELFEL method underestimates the amount of water that the flour can absorb, then the baking goes south: there is less fermentation which means the development won't be optimal and the bouquet aromatique will be less complex;

Fermented baguette dough ready for the addition of yeast and for mixing

• Adds a minute amount of fresh yeast (0.2 to 0.4% of flour weight, sometimes even less than 0.1%) at the time of the final mixing "pour imprimer au pain une poussée gazeuse" (to facilitate a gaseous thrust) which, combined with the bulles sauvages or wild bubbles created during the long endogenous fermentation, will help give the crumb its honeycomb structure);
• Mixes only as long as necessary to develop the dough;
• Allows the dough to ferment again for four to seven hours after mixing; 
• Doesn't proof his baguettes: once shaped, they are ready for the oven after one single long slash with a lame;
• Uses a wood-fired oven in which he burns hornbeam wood (the young tree growing in his courtyard is a hornbeam which he planted to honor the wood that helps make his pain français);
• Bakes his baguettes for 20 to 22 minutes or so;
• Never uses his retarder for pain français, only for bulk viennoiserie and specialty doughs. 

A bit of history

• Le pain français first appeared at the time of the First French Empire: Talleyrand, France's most important diplomat under several kings and one emperor, was a gastronome; his chef Antoine Carême made it his mission in life to refine French cuisine as a whole, bread-baking included. He had flour sifted so that only the white endosperm was retained. No longer able to rely on the strong taste of grain, French bakers learned to use fermentation to create flavorful and airy breads: they invented pain français;
• Pain français became famous because it was the bread of the rich and powerful (lower classes ate miches which generated no interest). Almost every country in the world has a bread tradition, yet twenty years ago nobody talked about Italian breads or pita bread; multigrain loaves started appearing thirty-five years ago in Paris; Parisian bakers began using dried fruit in bread twenty years ago or so. These breads are tasty because they contain ingredients suitable for pastry. They are not to be confused with pain français.

Further remarks

• One gram of flour contains thirty to forty yeast micro-organisms, one gram of baker's yeast contains one hundred billions. Most bakers use way too much baker's yeast with the result that no characteristic aroma is produced; that's why they use flour to which malt has been added;
• The Meilleurs Ouvriers de France (MOF) bakers have considerably evolved over the years in terms of shaping and presentation. But bread must be judged based on both its esthetic and its organoleptic qualities and unfortunately only esthetics seem to matter today. The French no longer know how to taste their bread. If they did, they would know it isn't good. Aromas are what make bread interesting, the reason we get it day after day and never get tired. Combining aromas is an art, l'art du boulanger, the baker's art;
• When the wheat varieties that Pichard uses were developed, there was no seed lobby, no studies. Only know-how. Money wasn't the only factor then: work ethics and honor were important values. Today two criteria enter into play when creating new seeds: resistance to disease and productivity. In the old days, organoleptic qualities were taken into account as well. Pain français was at his best from 1900 to 1960 because that's when wheat was at its best.
• Nowadays, more often than not, pain français is an imposture. The fault lies with the millers who strive to normalize flour. In France, four milling companies produce 68% of the flour used by the bakers. They eliminate all possible variations, come up with a recipe and standardize the bread when there should be as many baguettes as there are bakers;
• Learning how to make pain français takes ten years. Everything else (pastry, viennoiserie, specialty breads) can be learned in six months; 
• The baguette is key to the survival of individual bakeries in France. In Germany where manufacturing plants are humongous, stores sell for more money a bread that costs less to make and bakeries are disappearing. The beauty of the baguette is that it must be eaten fresh, so that customers have to come in everyday. If all bakers made only miches, there would soon be no more bakeries in France;
• Maison Pichard makes three to four thousand baguettes a day.

Brioche dough

Maison Pichard's laminated brioche

Before leaving, I asked Monsieur Pichard what recommendations he would have for a serious home baker who wanted to make good baguettes. He sighed. He knew I live in the United States where access to a local bakery is more problematic than in France and I could see he was trying to come up with an encouraging answer. After a minute, he said: "Use nothing but pure wheat flour, water and salt and rely on fermentation alone to develop aromas. That should give you a good wheat bread." He didn't say pain français.