
Baking with the Bread Whisperers of Paris - bootload
http://www.saveur.com/baker-apprentice-frederic-lalos
======
kendallpark
During college I did something similar to what the author did--volunteered at
a local bakery to learn the secrets of bread making. That volunteer work lead
to a summer job.

A few sporadic notes from the experience:

\- Good bread is less about secret ingredients and more about process.

\- Milling flour on site was how we made moist loaves with little to no added
oil. The natural oils in the wheat go rancid quickly after the wheat is
milled. Similarly, nutrient levels tank.

\- Bakery hours are awful. In order to have fresh loaves for the day, the
sponge person is up before 3am mixing everything for the first rise.

\- Breadmaking is an _art_. Ingredient proportions are more like guidelines
and the actual amount of flour/water/etc can vary wildly with the
weather/climate.

\- Random skill acquisition: I can "dual-wield" loaves of bread on the
kneading table (aka knead two loaves at the same time for higher throughput).
Also I can roll rolls. Which is harder than you'd think.

Zero regrets with the experience. A few days ago I realized we forgot to buy
buns for the pulled pork sandwiches we were making and I was able to look up a
recipe and make my own from scratch. The pulled pork was good, but people
flipped out about how fantastic the buns were.

~~~
keithpeter
Interesting: so when you say 'no added oil' you mean just the fresh-milled
flour, salt, water and sourdough/yeast?

~~~
Pulcinella
Pretty sure GP means yes. Bread literally just needs flour, salt, yeast, and
water. White flour has little to no oil. Whole wheat flour does but the oils
to go rancid too quickly. You don't need just-milled whole wheat flour to make
good whole wheat bread. White flour doesn't need any added oil.

Edit: Anyone interested in learning to cook, Americas Test Kitchen Cooking
School (And also Cooks Illustrated Cooking Science and Science of Good
Cooking) would probably be good for much of HN's audience. It is much more of
a cooking "textbook" than most cookbooks. It explains what you are doing and
why you do it instead of just a big list of recipes. There is also Modernist
Cuisine but those are really pricey.

~~~
AdamJacobMuller
For bread, I don't think you can get much better than Tartine Bread [1]. Chad
Robertson takes you through making bread from just flour, salt and water by
making your own yeast starter.

For general cooking, I will also recommend La Technique [2], its short and
digestible (puns always intended) increments of learning that, while old, are
fundamental and classic.

If you can work through La Technique and something like Julia Child's
Mastering the Art of French Cooking [3] (Which is great, but, very dense) you
could move on to (and invest in -- they really are expensive) Modernist
Cuisine [4], for which I think you need a good basic education on the
fundamental building blocks of cooking.

[1]
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F8H0FNW](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F8H0FNW)

[2]
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/0812906101](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0812906101)

[3]
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00WTIW93C/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00WTIW93C/)

[4]
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/0982761007](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0982761007)

~~~
MikeTheGreat
Anyone interested in the Modernist Cuisine might check their public library.

We've got copies here in the Seattle system.

------
gumby
The bread under discussion is itself part of a revolution. Since the invention
of the steam oven a century before, French bread was the insipid, if iconic,
industrial baguette. TOday's loaves are the result of a 1980s a reactionary
movement in bread baking led by Lionel Poilâne. Poilâne revived artisanal
bread, much more delicious and satisfying, which now we take for granted.

(Amusingly people liked his bread so much that there were always queues
outside the bakery in the morning. In the Soviet Union they printed photos of
this in the newspaper to show that even in the West there were bread queues,
so all the claims of a better life there must be propaganda.)

The article also mentions Guy Savoy: his restaurant has three stars which is
presumably why he is name-dropped. What they should have mentioned is that
when you eat there, not only does the sommelier pair wine with your course,
but a bread "sommelier" comes by with a special cart and recommends specific
breads for each course as well.

Poilâne's shop in the 7th retains a lot of anachronisms: walk in and everybody
greets each other, and the ladies behind the counter liked to hand little
treats to my son when he was small.

~~~
joshrotenberg
We were in Paris on vacation a couple of weeks ago and visited Poilâne. Wow.
Lots of variety in this tiny shop, and everything we tried was amazing. We
ended up going back the same day for more.

------
FoeNyx
> a meal without bread is unthinkable in France.

It's an overstatement, it's totally thinkable (and in fact people often don't
eat any bread depending on the kind of meal).

------
dk1138
This article is really doesn't tell me much about the bread-making process,
the people who make it, or what the author actually did while on-site besides
touch a hunk of dough. Was expecting more, especially from Saveur.

~~~
neaden
Agreed. It did make me hungry for bread though. I have a friend who is a baker
here (in the US) but I imagine it is quite different then working in France.
The bakery she works does make bread, but the vast majority of what they sell
are different kinds of sweets. I think there is a much lower demand for fresh
bread here.

~~~
CocaKoala
I spent some time post-college working as a baker; our primary output was
bread (with some cookies, cakes, and brownies etc as well), but the vast
majority of our bread was sold to local restaurants. If you're running a
bakery that's selling direct to consumers, I can imagine that it would be
pretty hard to make ends meet on bread alone.

This had the curious result that when I was in Carmel-By-The-Sea a few weeks
ago, I went in to what was ostensibly called a "bakery" and tried to buy a
baguette, only to be told that they only sold pastries and cookies and didn't
make bread at all. I was extraordinarily put out by this.

~~~
smacktoward
Was it a French bakery, by chance? The French have traditionally distinguished
between bakeries that bake breads and rolls (which they call a _boulangerie_ )
and bakeries that bake pastries and sweets (a _pâtisserie_ :
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A2tisserie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A2tisserie)).

I dunno how much that distinction still holds in modern France in the era of
the supermarket, of course. But it wouldn't be surprising to a see an upmarket
French-inspired U.S. bakery using it as a way to signal authenticity.

~~~
CocaKoala
It was called "Carmel Bakery", so it didn't label itself as either a
boulangerie OR a patisserie. It was very misleading.

~~~
schoen
About 400 miles to the north, there used to be a palindromic bakery (the Yreka
Bakery):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yreka,_California#Palindromes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yreka,_California#Palindromes)

------
patrickg_zill
If I can find the recipe I will post it , there is a great French style bread
I have made in the past. It takes a lot of elapsed time but not much extra
time in terms of what you have to do. And the results are sublime.

~~~
patrickg_zill
Not "exactly" the same recipe, but close.

I remember that I let it rise 3 times and punched it down and re-kneaded (not
just the stretch-and-fold), separated by maybe 45 minutes each time.

I seem to recall that I used King Arthur brand flour (no GMO's) and used bread
flour with a smaller amount of thoroughly mixed in whole wheat flour.

Using the oven, I pre-heated to 375F and used a spray bottle to mist water
onto all sides of the oven. Another suggestion of putting a cup of water into
a cast iron skillet placed on the bottom rung of the oven, would probably work
also. The purpose is not to dry out the crust so much that it becomes
uncomfortably hard.

[http://www.tastebook.com/blog/recipes/2699447-Pain-l-
Ancienn...](http://www.tastebook.com/blog/recipes/2699447-Pain-l-Ancienne-
Rustic-Bread/?redirect=true)

------
noahmbarr
Ghostery counted 95 libraries -- without blocking, it literally cripples my
MBPr on load.

~~~
devopsproject
> cripples my MBPr on load

AMD E-350 laptop from 2011 loads fine. Something is terribly wrong with your
computer or your config.

~~~
keithpeter
Thinkpad X200/4Gb/Chromium 57/OpenBSD: takes around 20 seconds to load (not
very good adsl) then scrolls fine and smooth. No add-ins.

------
paromi
nice baking video
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUuKstAWof4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUuKstAWof4)

