> In addition to winning this illustrious competition, Bouattour and M’Seddi have a few other things in common. Both forewent the traditional trade school that many aspiring French bakers enter at age 16. Both have been professional bakers for less than a decade (as has this year’s winner, former engineer Fabrice Leroy). And both are first-generation Frenchmen with what Bouattour euphemistically dubs ‘origins’: family backgrounds from elsewhere – or in their cases, Tunisia.
> “I stopped thinking of myself as a foreigner a long time ago, but my origins make me the person I am today,” he said. “We all start with the same tools, the same teachers, but some people are going to understand things differently. That has nothing to do with origins; that’s just talent.”
For all the rhetoric on the right about how people from other cultures are not "suitable" for "western" countries - some of the proudest citizens and torch-carriers for tradition, are foreigners.
It also absolutely works both ways - Australia was virulently anti Italian and Greek in the 50s and 60s. Now we almost couldn't imagine brunch without espresso and feta on our smashed avocado. The diversity made us better.
What I've always found interesting as a Frenchman living in North Americ, is that there's no real equivalent to "black american" or "afro American" or "hispano American" in French. The closest you'll find is "of Tunisian origins", but that's usually left out, and not really the same.
The "official" results[0] don't mention anything about his origins. The local press[1] does say his parents are from Tunisia, but only after introducing him as a Parisian. The right national press[2][3] does mention that he is... a chemist, which seems more relevant to the story than the country in which his parent were born.
Surely this is an anecdote, but it does match the general observation I've made. (although be sure that would he have killed a person rather than cooked a baguette, his origins would be of the utmost importance for the story telling).
>For all the rhetoric on the right about how people from other cultures are not "suitable" for "western" countries - some of the proudest citizens and torch-carriers for tradition, are foreigners.
That's not quite right--the premise you're I think you're alluding to is that certain cultures themselves are not compatible with the values of Western society. But people like the bakers featured here, who choose to assimilate headfirst instead of creating an enclave of the country they left behind, can prosper.
>“Whoever wins the contest is a winner,” M’Seddi said. “He’s a champion, whether he’s descended from immigrants or not... That’s someone who’s passionate about French culture, who has become integrated as a French person. We need to make people proud to be French.”
It’s interesting that the modern baguette is such a symbol, as it’s a product of the Industrial Age (steam driven ovens) and its introduction alsmost drove artisanal breads from the market over a period of 50 years (until, it seems, Poilâne revived it. Of course people continued to produce non-baguettes all along, they just weren’t iconic or common).
So now there’s a lovely assortment of brads available again...and with all that choice I still continue to enjoy a humble baguette as well.
Plenty of national symbols are products of the industrial age. England and ale that doesn't taste sour comes to mind as another example. Or, hey, the USA and cars.
This article reads like the quotes in https://www.wired.com/1995/02/chess/ about how computers would never beat people at chess. Winning at chess required "fantasy" and "creativity" and here baking requires "passion" and "magic".
There is a lot of decent industrially-produced baguette. Here's an example showing an automated line for forming baguettes from dough: https://youtu.be/qVB5EOAJT1w
Btw I don't know if the comparison with chess is right. Maybe I would think of the cooking arts as any other art, like painting or sculpture - nobody is the "best" at art. Once a certain point is passed in terms of mastery of the technique, at the high end, the kinds of things that set apart different artists tend to be very subjective, and subject to changing tastes. Not to say machines can't do decent art, but perhaps it's a game where it is harder to define the rules...
The quotes in the Wired article are all kind of the opposite though. For example:
"Today, 99.9 percent of humanity cannot beat the best commercial software at blitz chess. Within the decade, it's likely the machine on your desk will know how to play chess better than any human has played the game since its invention in AD 600."
I suppose that really just makes your point though. Even in 1995 we were only really trying to delay the inevitable. If playing chess is ultimately a mechanical process and baking bread is ultimately a mechanical process, then ultimately we should be make able to make a machine that does it better than we can.
When I was a kid, we'd go to the Amish stands at the farmers market and get fresh made loaves of bread (just white bread), dinner rolls, cinnamon rolls, strawberry jam...it was dirt cheap and delicious, even if it wasn't a baguette (which I love).
Now that farmers markets are 'in', you can go there and get the same stuff. But it's so marked up it's not funny. 12 dinner rolls for $5.50? $8.00 for a jar of jam? A loaf of bread for $4.00!
My grandmother is long gone but I guess I could get some mason jars and research on the internet, make my own jam and can it. I can already make bread, but only bother to do it a few times a year.
I'm sure in another generation or so it will be a black art. Very few people do that sort of thing anymore, but if you went back 60 years, everyone did it.
Bread and jam making and baking seems like probably the single most popular hobby for young women and many young men, next to something like running, from what I see from Facebook friends. Baking is also the subject of a major internationally popular TV competition for years. I can’t see why you’d think it was likely to become a black art.
Find a French Cafe run by a Frenchman. I used to go to one by my old job that sold loaves and half loaves. He had a sign that read “Life’s too short to eat bad bread”. The prices were reasonable for everything.
Canning equipment isn't cheap. You need to have storage space, time to actually can things, and access to bulk fruit (or food). If you go beyond a narrow selection of canning, you need a pressure cooker. All this, and you might find your jars didn't seal properly. Botulism is a real issue with home canning.
Freezing, however, is generally safe and you can make "freezer jam". Freezing most vegetables generally only takes blanching and prep. I'd suggest this if you have some freezer space.
I'd pay those prices for something I knew was made with quality ingredients and when I knew the money was going directly to the producer of a good. Heck, I've paid $10-12 for a loaf of bread from some of the places around here and not regretted a single penny.
I'd rather have small business farmers, bakers, and jam makers around, and although it costs me more I know that less of the money is headed to big food conglomerates.
How long does it take you to make 12 dinner rolls?
- More than 15 min of work? Then 5.50 sounds OK to me.
- More than 30 min of work? Now 5.50 are a bargain!
The Japanese always manage to excel at importing delicacies and perfecting them. Take for example Japanese whiskey, which is renowned and considered by some to be superior to the Scottish variety.
I put a lot of time into perfecting my baguettes. Well, not perfecting, but getting them to the point where they don't make me anxious.
I don't think reliably good baguette is as simple as a recipe. The recipe conveys very little of what goes into it. It takes a lot of practice to get down all the manual techniques. Just learning how to knead the bread properly is an art in and of itself, and, even if you use a mixer, you'll still need to experiment with the speed and mix time to get things dialed in. A lame can be a tricky thing to work with, and your slashing technique will show through in the final product. Pre-shaping and shaping the bread takes practice, and, unless you're really into climate control at your house, learning how to adjust ingredient quantities and rise times to account for changes in temperature and humidity is a science in and of itself. You'll have to fiddle with the bake time and temperature and steaming technique to figure out what works best in your oven.
Baguette is the pale lager of breads: Most the flavor comes from the technique, and the ingredients - four simple ingredients, very nearly the same four simple ingredients - have such delicate flavors on their own that there's not really anywhere for even the slightest mistake to hide.
Which isn't to say that you shouldn't do it. But I would say that you should do it because you sincerely love the process of baking bread, not simply because you enjoy eating the final product.
FWIW, one of my favorite books on the subject is Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes by Jeffrey Hamelman. The recipes are mostly meant for baking on a commercial scale, but the book also covers everything you need to know to adapt them to your home kitchen.
Here is one from a discussion in French about the recipe (automatic translation, but it seems ok)
In order to match the capacities of a robot and a household oven, let's start with 500g of flour, which will give you 4 baguettes of about 40 centimetres, the following recipe:
Flour T65: 500g
Water: 330 g
Baker's yeast: 10g
Salt: 9g
The French poolish is prepared from half the pouring water of the basic recipe; the equivalent quantity of flour is then added.
This gives us for our poolish:
Water: 165g (330g/2)
Flour T65 : 165g
We then have to add yeast to ferment our water-flour mixture. The amount of yeast depends directly on the time we allow our poolish to ferment at room temperature (generally from 3am to 6pm).
The quantities of yeast (per litre of water) are as follows: 3H: 15g 5H: 8g 8H: 5g 15H: 1 to 2g
Let's keep it overnight, about 12 hours, which will give a quantity of yeast of about 2g per liter of water. As we put 165g of water (or 0.165l), the amount of yeast will be 0.33g.
We see that the amount of yeast to put in a poolish over 12 hours is almost infinitesimal
So let's go back to our poolish recipe which will be:
Water: 165g
Flour T65 : 165g
Baker's yeast: 0.3g
Note that you never put salt in the poolish
Mix everything together, cover with a cloth and leave to work overnight.
The next morning you will see your poolish full of bubbles and slightly dug in its center, a sign that it is ready. I invite you to smell the wonder you have just produced....
You will now have to add your poolish to your bread dough ingredients.
All you have to do is take the basic recipe and deduct the quantities used for your poolish, i.e.:
Flour T65: 335g (500g - the 165g of the poolish)
Water: 165g (330g - the 165g of the poolish)
Baker's yeast: 9.7g (10g - the 0.3g of the poolish), which can be rounded to 9g
Salt: 9g
and we add our entire poolish to it.
Then continue in the classic way.
Remember to cover the dough and dough pieces well during rest periods to prevent them from crushing.
Don't hesitate to bake your bread well; barely browned white bread seems to be out of fashion (except in baking terminals and supermarkets) and that's good.
That isn't really something that can be done at home, though.
Like the other reply stated, a lot of bread is technique. This is simply going to take some practice and/or experimentation. Sponge or no sponge? Are you going for a quick fix or are you willing to let part of the dough sit overnight, and the rest have 8 more hours to develop flavor?
Ingredients, as they said. Flour makes a difference. YEast makes a difference. Your water makes a difference, as does whether or not you put a bit of sugar in your dough.
But the other part of this is things like humidity. The humidity and temperature in the room is going to affect how much flour you need to use to produce identical results and will also affect how the bread rises.
All this stuff basically means that you have to practice, and then you might need to experiment a bit if you move to another part of the country or to another country - and why there is so much leeway in home recipes. Industrial bread can control for a lot of this stuff.
Is not really factory produce-able like original ciabatta- cause one part of the recipe that makes the taste, cant be effectively integrated. Its time.
You need little yeast, you put the poolish in a olive-oil covered cup, and put it somewhere cool. And there it stays - for nearly a day. Then you add flour- and let it slowly come all the way. Then for all your work you get little bread.
But it tastes oh so good.
French bakerys - have a very limited supply of baguetts - because they have limited space to let the dough ripen for a hour or more (if it ripens cold).
https://bakerbettie.com/french-baguette-recipe/
Not interesting on a industrial scale.. which is why you usually get only the tasteless whitebread you usually get.
All the French bakeries I went to actually had a huge amount of fresh baguettes, absolutely delicious and 35 cents each. Maybe they were bad compared to gourmet baguettes, of course, but they were great compared to the American variants
We manage to factory produce prosciutto, which takes 18 months, cheeses that require years to mature, alcohol that takes decades, etc. 24 hours is no obstacle to a factory.
They sell mass produced 'french baguettes' at the grocery store i go to regularly. They're not as good as the in store baked ones but they're passable. Definitely noticably different to the standard mass produced white bread.
[+] [-] tomlockwood|6 years ago|reply
> “I stopped thinking of myself as a foreigner a long time ago, but my origins make me the person I am today,” he said. “We all start with the same tools, the same teachers, but some people are going to understand things differently. That has nothing to do with origins; that’s just talent.”
For all the rhetoric on the right about how people from other cultures are not "suitable" for "western" countries - some of the proudest citizens and torch-carriers for tradition, are foreigners.
It also absolutely works both ways - Australia was virulently anti Italian and Greek in the 50s and 60s. Now we almost couldn't imagine brunch without espresso and feta on our smashed avocado. The diversity made us better.
[+] [-] charles_f|6 years ago|reply
The "official" results[0] don't mention anything about his origins. The local press[1] does say his parents are from Tunisia, but only after introducing him as a Parisian. The right national press[2][3] does mention that he is... a chemist, which seems more relevant to the story than the country in which his parent were born.
Surely this is an anecdote, but it does match the general observation I've made. (although be sure that would he have killed a person rather than cooked a baguette, his origins would be of the utmost importance for the story telling).
[0] https://www.paris.fr/pages/goutez-et-choisissez-la-meilleure... [1] http://www.leparisien.fr/paris-75/paris-il-fait-la-meilleure... [2] https://www.bfmtv.com/societe/la-meilleure-baguette-de-paris... [3] http://www.lefigaro.fr/sortir-paris/2018/04/13/30004-2018041...
[+] [-] homonculus1|6 years ago|reply
That's not quite right--the premise you're I think you're alluding to is that certain cultures themselves are not compatible with the values of Western society. But people like the bakers featured here, who choose to assimilate headfirst instead of creating an enclave of the country they left behind, can prosper.
>“Whoever wins the contest is a winner,” M’Seddi said. “He’s a champion, whether he’s descended from immigrants or not... That’s someone who’s passionate about French culture, who has become integrated as a French person. We need to make people proud to be French.”
[+] [-] gumby|6 years ago|reply
So now there’s a lovely assortment of brads available again...and with all that choice I still continue to enjoy a humble baguette as well.
[+] [-] ridaj|6 years ago|reply
As many things that people consider iconically French (Eiffel tower, "Haussmann-style" architecture...)
[+] [-] mumblemumble|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mathnerd314|6 years ago|reply
https://www.cnet.com/news/bread-making-robot-makes-everyone-... is a fully-automated bakery, although it doesn't produce baguettes, and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zfb456YrsM is half-automated from dough to finish; maybe we'll get a IBM Watson-style "robot bread" entry in the competition sometime.
[+] [-] ridaj|6 years ago|reply
Btw I don't know if the comparison with chess is right. Maybe I would think of the cooking arts as any other art, like painting or sculpture - nobody is the "best" at art. Once a certain point is passed in terms of mastery of the technique, at the high end, the kinds of things that set apart different artists tend to be very subjective, and subject to changing tastes. Not to say machines can't do decent art, but perhaps it's a game where it is harder to define the rules...
[+] [-] paulific|6 years ago|reply
"Today, 99.9 percent of humanity cannot beat the best commercial software at blitz chess. Within the decade, it's likely the machine on your desk will know how to play chess better than any human has played the game since its invention in AD 600."
I suppose that really just makes your point though. Even in 1995 we were only really trying to delay the inevitable. If playing chess is ultimately a mechanical process and baking bread is ultimately a mechanical process, then ultimately we should be make able to make a machine that does it better than we can.
[+] [-] bluedino|6 years ago|reply
Now that farmers markets are 'in', you can go there and get the same stuff. But it's so marked up it's not funny. 12 dinner rolls for $5.50? $8.00 for a jar of jam? A loaf of bread for $4.00!
My grandmother is long gone but I guess I could get some mason jars and research on the internet, make my own jam and can it. I can already make bread, but only bother to do it a few times a year.
I'm sure in another generation or so it will be a black art. Very few people do that sort of thing anymore, but if you went back 60 years, everyone did it.
[+] [-] chrisseaton|6 years ago|reply
Bread and jam making and baking seems like probably the single most popular hobby for young women and many young men, next to something like running, from what I see from Facebook friends. Baking is also the subject of a major internationally popular TV competition for years. I can’t see why you’d think it was likely to become a black art.
[+] [-] wil421|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Broken_Hippo|6 years ago|reply
Canning equipment isn't cheap. You need to have storage space, time to actually can things, and access to bulk fruit (or food). If you go beyond a narrow selection of canning, you need a pressure cooker. All this, and you might find your jars didn't seal properly. Botulism is a real issue with home canning.
Freezing, however, is generally safe and you can make "freezer jam". Freezing most vegetables generally only takes blanching and prep. I'd suggest this if you have some freezer space.
[+] [-] Pfhreak|6 years ago|reply
I'd rather have small business farmers, bakers, and jam makers around, and although it costs me more I know that less of the money is headed to big food conglomerates.
[+] [-] bobjob|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tasogare|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ttul|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amriksohata|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rdtwo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mumblemumble|6 years ago|reply
I don't think reliably good baguette is as simple as a recipe. The recipe conveys very little of what goes into it. It takes a lot of practice to get down all the manual techniques. Just learning how to knead the bread properly is an art in and of itself, and, even if you use a mixer, you'll still need to experiment with the speed and mix time to get things dialed in. A lame can be a tricky thing to work with, and your slashing technique will show through in the final product. Pre-shaping and shaping the bread takes practice, and, unless you're really into climate control at your house, learning how to adjust ingredient quantities and rise times to account for changes in temperature and humidity is a science in and of itself. You'll have to fiddle with the bake time and temperature and steaming technique to figure out what works best in your oven.
Baguette is the pale lager of breads: Most the flavor comes from the technique, and the ingredients - four simple ingredients, very nearly the same four simple ingredients - have such delicate flavors on their own that there's not really anywhere for even the slightest mistake to hide.
Which isn't to say that you shouldn't do it. But I would say that you should do it because you sincerely love the process of baking bread, not simply because you enjoy eating the final product.
FWIW, one of my favorite books on the subject is Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes by Jeffrey Hamelman. The recipes are mostly meant for baking on a commercial scale, but the book also covers everything you need to know to adapt them to your home kitchen.
[+] [-] _eLRIC|6 years ago|reply
In order to match the capacities of a robot and a household oven, let's start with 500g of flour, which will give you 4 baguettes of about 40 centimetres, the following recipe: Flour T65: 500g Water: 330 g Baker's yeast: 10g Salt: 9g
The French poolish is prepared from half the pouring water of the basic recipe; the equivalent quantity of flour is then added. This gives us for our poolish: Water: 165g (330g/2) Flour T65 : 165g
We then have to add yeast to ferment our water-flour mixture. The amount of yeast depends directly on the time we allow our poolish to ferment at room temperature (generally from 3am to 6pm). The quantities of yeast (per litre of water) are as follows: 3H: 15g 5H: 8g 8H: 5g 15H: 1 to 2g Let's keep it overnight, about 12 hours, which will give a quantity of yeast of about 2g per liter of water. As we put 165g of water (or 0.165l), the amount of yeast will be 0.33g. We see that the amount of yeast to put in a poolish over 12 hours is almost infinitesimal So let's go back to our poolish recipe which will be: Water: 165g Flour T65 : 165g Baker's yeast: 0.3g Note that you never put salt in the poolish Mix everything together, cover with a cloth and leave to work overnight. The next morning you will see your poolish full of bubbles and slightly dug in its center, a sign that it is ready. I invite you to smell the wonder you have just produced....
You will now have to add your poolish to your bread dough ingredients. All you have to do is take the basic recipe and deduct the quantities used for your poolish, i.e.: Flour T65: 335g (500g - the 165g of the poolish) Water: 165g (330g - the 165g of the poolish) Baker's yeast: 9.7g (10g - the 0.3g of the poolish), which can be rounded to 9g Salt: 9g and we add our entire poolish to it. Then continue in the classic way. Remember to cover the dough and dough pieces well during rest periods to prevent them from crushing. Don't hesitate to bake your bread well; barely browned white bread seems to be out of fashion (except in baking terminals and supermarkets) and that's good.
[+] [-] Broken_Hippo|6 years ago|reply
Like the other reply stated, a lot of bread is technique. This is simply going to take some practice and/or experimentation. Sponge or no sponge? Are you going for a quick fix or are you willing to let part of the dough sit overnight, and the rest have 8 more hours to develop flavor?
Ingredients, as they said. Flour makes a difference. YEast makes a difference. Your water makes a difference, as does whether or not you put a bit of sugar in your dough.
But the other part of this is things like humidity. The humidity and temperature in the room is going to affect how much flour you need to use to produce identical results and will also affect how the bread rises.
All this stuff basically means that you have to practice, and then you might need to experiment a bit if you move to another part of the country or to another country - and why there is so much leeway in home recipes. Industrial bread can control for a lot of this stuff.
[+] [-] kwhitefoot|6 years ago|reply
Not much actual work but it takes quite a lot of elapsed time.
[+] [-] l2p|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] growlist|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LifeLiverTransp|6 years ago|reply
Not interesting on a industrial scale.. which is why you usually get only the tasteless whitebread you usually get.
[+] [-] nostalgk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ceejayoz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grawprog|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryptocheetah|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] peteretep|6 years ago|reply