As in, gone bad via the worst excesses of commercial baking; thank heavens that horrid chapter of French history has passed (h/t Kottke).
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.
I’ve spent enough time as a baker to recoil in horror at the thought of a one-hour rise. I learned the job from a few different bakers–including from one what not to do. We weren’t working in a commercial bakery but were baking for a community; during my summer stint as head baker I turned out almost 5,000 loaves, many of which were baguettes, my favourite to make. So the deal in the community was, once you got your allotted baking out of the way for the day (we didn’t work night shifts), you were done. We usually had orders for four to five different kinds of bread. For one of the bakers, the incentive of more free time was sufficiently great that he accelerated the rising process as much as he could– lots of yeast and super-fast rises. The result? Bread that was nearly flavourless compared to its slow-rise brethren. I never did go as far as levain-only, as I heard some subsequent bakers did (and as some before me may well have); it’s hard to experiment with unfamiliar techniques when you can’t afford a flop on an entire batch. But I always did two rises using minimal yeast. Just a few more hours brings out that much more flavour. When I started baking the teensy two-loaf recipes back at home, I generally found the amount of yeast called for in recipes was much higher than needed, so I highly recommend playing round with those quantities– and of course, the warmer the weather in which you’re baking, the less yeast you need.
Although I muddled along pretty well, I still wish I’d had more time to train with seasoned bakers. I’m very jealous of the apprenticeship that the article’s author, Samuel Fromartz, undertakes in Paris. Given how much some bakers in the States, and I’m sure elsewhere, emphasize the science of bread baking– exact measurements of ingredients, taking the temperature of the dough at various stages– I love the intuitive art of the process described here. My kind of style.
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.
angryXer 