STIR THE POTS

Pan Cubano

“Diet” was more effective than any kind of powerful medical therapy according to Ernest Hemingway. I wonder if he ever ate a media noche, or Cuban sandwich? It's said he's attributed to the Sloppy Joe. Its actual origins are unclear, though from what I heard it is Cuban-influenced Floridian creation. Since I had some suckling pig in the fridge from Christmas, I made a batch. But first I made an adapted version of Cuban bread, which still needs tweaking considering there aren't many sources as a reference. Here's what I got...

 

 

 

 

Laurent L'Hénaff

Laurent L'Hénaff is a baker who switched from his career as an IT engineer to working in front of an oven. Like his pal Thierry Delabre, who also started baking as a hobby, Laurent is from Brittany with an inspiring website and Facebook presence. I connected with him on Facebook and invited him to answer some questions for Stir the Pots. Here is what he shared.   

 How did you decide to become a baker?

It all started when I decided to switch from IT engineer to cooking, I then started making bread at home and found a real interest in understanding the process. Google+ was up by the time, and there was a “home baking community” set, which helped me a lot. I then got in touch with Thierry Delabre who definitely taught me a lot about sourdough bread. A few years later after moving to the west French coast (La Rochelle), I created my home cooking company,  but the bread took over and I decided the right path was creating a bakery, which I did after 2 years spent to set it up, finding the budget, getting the right diploma. The bakery opened its doors on November the 15^th 2017.

Who is Thierry Delabre and what did he do to influence your baking?

He’s the guy who started making bread in his kitchen, and as he communicated a lot using social network (Google+, later Facebook), we got in touch, obviously :) He uses ancient grains, sourdough and introduced me to them one day in his kitchen, showing me how the fermentation was the key feature in bread making. This day was definitely the most important one for me on my bread route, since then the numerous talks we have together strengthen our friendship, and obviously his influence is permanent, although each bread produced in the bakery carries my energy.

What memories as a child do you have of bread?

The first one I have is about me baking with my mom, “something” called bread as it was very thick, but I kept one thing: hands in dough, and the feeling it brought.

CAP, what is it, how difficult is it, is in important?

Necessary in France if you want to open a bakery, I learnt on my own in my kitchen, of course stressful on the day I had to make bread in the facility as I had no clue how the devices worked: oven, proofing cabinet, rolling mill…  I passed nevertheless, painfully. This exam proves you can bake, but I choose to work with 100% organic flour, ancient grain, and sourdough. I could have trained to get the CAP in a classic facility using classic flour, full of add-ons and producing unsigned bread, it would not have helped me today, this is why I decided to pass the exam on my own.

What is your favorite bread grain?

Each one I use has its own signature, they are all so different, texture, taste, baking those grains is a day to day challenge, my preferred bread I’d say is the rye bread, made with a 100% rye flour. 

Levain or levure, or both?

Levain, definitely, but we also use levure in the bakery like in ciabatta, brioche, cocoa bread for instance.

 

Is French bread in crisis or Renaissance?

Crisis. Huge companies set their bakery at the edge of town, easing access, and consumers get in rather than getting into towns, so lots of bakeries in villages get closed every year. Also, there’s not much difference between bakeries as most of the time the flour is very similar, it’s the baker’s job to look for quality flour, quality ingredients. You can’t make good products using low quality ingredients; the key to the success is quality, no other word.

We are only a very few of us baking with ancient grain and sourdough in France, but more and more bakers (most of the time who had an initial professional experience before) understand the interest in feeding people with good bread made with organic products.

 

Why is Kouing Aman, a Breton specialty, making a resurgence even here in the USA?

Really? Happily surprised :) Kouign-amann (which means in Breton buttered cake) was initially made using bread dough, in which you add butter and sugar like a puff pastry. I changed the recipe to get a lighter cake (still using butter and sugar of course) but the objective is to have the very specific taste which can only be found back home (yeah, I’m Breton…) and at the same time to get a light cake in mouth. I make it very Friday, about 25 of them. They are all sold most of the time prior to being baked.

What most symbolizes French bread?

Crust :)

Is bio marketing working well in France?

It is, unfortunately like any other marketing the quality is not there all the time, especially when held by big companies. I work directly with farmers who grow the wheat, and mill it, no one in between us. A trusty relationship was built over the time, and we both appreciate it.

Ancient grains, is it branding or marketing scheme, or just better product making better bread?

You definitely get flavored bread using those grains but as I said above, each grain is different so you got to agree to think each bake, and not simply add ingredients and let it go (even more true using sourdough…). Those grains’ production is lower than conventional too.

What or whom inspires you?

Creating new products is very motivating.

What describes a good bread, crumb, taste or shape?

You see it first, so the shape, then crust and taste in the end.

What is your favorite part of baking, mixing, shaping or baking?

Shaping is the most sensual part, mixing is the most stressful, and cooking is the most exciting :)

 

END OF Q&A

Jason Osburn

Today I received sad news regarding a young chef's passing. Jason Osburn was a talented young chef from Michigan who I'd met at the Charcuterie Masters in 2016. We corresponded, most often regarding food and life. Food is the chef's life. From what I saw and hear, Jason was a  fine chef who delivered a lot of joy to the world with his food, someone I felt lucky to know.

Cassoulet

Picasso said, “Lesser artists borrow; great artists steal,” He might as well as been talking about French cooking. It's an arena where you need to borrow and steal techniques if you're going to learn, not to mention excel. Cassoulet is a good example. It's a deceptively tough dish to get right. Take my latest attempt. Between working with Toulouse sausages, braising lamb, rendering duck legs for confit, all together had to work together as a composition with beans at the center. But at the end, it worked. There's nothing more satisfying to me (at least sometimes) than seeing a crusted dish bubbling out of the oven. So recently we did some cassoulets at work. With our new Maitre'd at the helm, it sold out the door and I had to continue remaking it to keep up with the sales!

 

 

Cassoulet from Jeremy Shapiro on Vimeo.

Jean Michel Gammarielo

Jeremy talks with his first Chef Jean-Michel Gammarielo, who built a career working in three Michelin-starred restaurants in France, he is both manager and sommelier of the Union League Cafe in New Haven, CT. For this conversation, Gamarielo talks about cooking (and hanging out) with his good friend Jacques Pepin, moving from the kitchen into the world of wine, and reflects on the larger world of chefs and food.   

 

 

 

Somehow our file of this  interview with Jean-Michel was lost. Good  fortune or fate made it available from this page The Hyperion. Arthur Mullen's history project about the  historic Chapel street in New Haven Connecticut...

 

 

Sophie Williams

 

Sophie Williams is a baker who peddles her bicycle and breads to markets, rain and snow! I found her on Instagram, intrigued by her passion for grains. Sophie is busy but she's taken some time to answer some questions on Stir the Pots and tell the story of Raven Breads.

 

How did you become a baker?

I came at baking sideways. I studied soil science and ecology in school, which tipped me out of academia and into farming. In my mid-twenties I decided I wasn’t going to be a farmer. Baking seemed like a good alternative: easier, but still rooted in the local food economy and a good way to keep working with both my hands and head. The fact that I’d never worked in a professional kitchen made starting the business much easier. Sometimes, I think, it’s useful to be ignorant of how hard things are going to be.

I made a lot of ugly bread and not a lot of money my first year. My second year, after a three week stage with Dawn Woodward in Toronto, I decided to stop using white or extracted flour because our local hammer mill only produced wholemeal. I had to learn to bake all over again, and I made a lot of more ugly bread, and not a lot of money. But it’s gotten easier since then.

 

What is your favorite grain?

Rye! It’s so beautifully flavorful and nourishing. Rye breads keep for weeks. And I love that rye is such a weed: tolerant of cold, drought, and poor soils.

 

 

How do you mix all that dough by hand?

I generally try to do as little work as possible. I don’t preshape. I don’t even shape, if I can get away with it. I mix doughs just to incorporation and then build strength (in wheat doughs) with folds. I know I’ve gotten significantly more efficient at mixing over the years because I used to be able to do a bunch of finger tip pull ups, and now I can’t do any.

 

What is the symbiosis of bakers and bicycles?

I think bicycles are the most logical, cost-effective, fun mode of urban transportation. Everyone, not just bakers, should be riding bikes. 

 

How do you develop or dream bread recipes?

I start most recipes with the ingredients: a grain I’m excited about, a product in the bakery that needs to be used up, the fruit I’ve just gleaned, or produce I’ve bartered for at the farmers market. From there I might adapt an existing recipe or look through my cookbook library for inspiration.

 

 

 

What is the acceptance of people to whole grain breads?

There are definitely some people who want lighter breads, but more people are excited to find breads that are flavorful and filling. My rye breads, which are basically edible bricks, are far and away my best retail sellers. Convincing chefs to use wholemeal wheat bread, never mind rye, is a much bigger challenge. Most try the bread and say something along the lines of, “That’s nice, but it has too much flavor. Could you make baguettes or ciabatta?”

 

Are you 100% sourdough, or does yeast ever enter the equation?

The few times every year I make rich breads, like challah and babka, I throw in a pinch of yeast along with the prefermented flour because my sourdough doesn’t have enough kick, but other than that it’s natural fermentation all the way down.

 

 

How does one reach the plateau of brick and mortar business?

I’m trying to figure that out! Though I imagine it more as another hill to climb than a plateau. 

Are you the long distance baker, going the extra kilometer for the bread?

Well, given that I run the business by bicycle, glean almost all of the fruit for my pastries from back alleys and abandoned orchards (on my bicycle), don’t use any extracted flours, and was just running the 2019 numbers and calculated that I bought 67% of my ingredients last year directly from local producers (plus another 5-10% spent on locally produced food purchased through a distributor), I think so. 

 

How does one pull off doing idealism in business?

With blind optimism, the ability to tune out the capitalist mainstream, and willingness to work some very long days. I’ve been in a unique position to stick to my ideals, I think, because I’ve kept my overhead very low to this point by renting space in restaurant commissaries that don’t have any baking equipment, skipping out on car ownership, and doing nearly all the work, from baking to bookkeeping, myself. When you add major expenses like high rents, debt payments, and payroll, there’s a lot more pressure to compromise one’s ethics.

 

How did dense flavored bread become your signature style and why?

Location: our local hammer mill produces only whole-meal flour.

Stubbornness: baking wholemeal, sourdough breads is more technically challenging, and once I started I felt like I couldn’t stop until I’d mastered the skill.

Personal taste and frugality: I like food that has substance and good keeping quality.

Self preservation: I eat a lot of bread. Like, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with bread snacks in between. Eating a lot of refined flour is a terrible idea, as every nutritionist since the invention of the roller mill has told us, but a lot of fermented whole grains? No problem!

 

Does quality driven philosophy work, with so many industrial factory breads in the market?

It does. People want to eat good food. It can be maddening to watch the local food movement and the artisan bread movement being copied and corporatized by the industrial food system, just as organic was a few decades ago, but even if they’ve stolen the language for their marketing, they haven’t actually figured out how to make good bread yet. People can tell the difference between a supermarket “artisan” bread line and bread made by skilled hands with good ingredients. At least, that’s what I tell myself!

 

What’s your favorite bread?

I’m very fond of the vollkornbrot I make with a smoked red rye malt. It’s sour and smoky and sweet and really just quite lovely.

Who inspires you?

Oh, so many people, and I’m going to forget most of them. I’ve been inspired by Dawn, of course, with her business built on whole grains and other Ontario grown foods. Every time I talk to bakery owners who prioritize their workers—Randy George with Red Hen in VT, Scott Mangold with Breadfarm here in the PNW—I’m impressed and inspired, because arguing for fair labor practices is one thing, but actually implementing them is another entirely. The grain movement in the UK is really exciting—have you listened to the Farmerama podcast yet?—with the Real Bread Campaign, and population wheat breeding projects, and bakeries like Small Food in Nottingham working to make food deeply rooted in their place.

 

THE END

Bürli Brot

On a current shopping spree through downtown New York City's Essex Market, we found an outlet of the legendary uptown store Schaller Weber. An icon of a city section once known as "German town," (running between 80th to 86th street east of Third Avenue), Schaller Weber was known for its great German delicacies. Me and my brother often visited for their varied meats, especially St. Gallen Kalbwurst and bürlibrot. Bringing home some of these delicious sausages, I ended making a batch of home baked rolls, all leading to a very satisfying lunch.  

 

Baba

Baba, which are rum-soaked yeast cakes, were a featured dessert on a party menu. I first made them while working with my chef Jean Michel. Together we turned them into savarin - a ring moulded variety with basically the same characteristics as the traditional baba. We've been testing them and, so far, everyone who has sampled our efforts has agreed they are delicious, especially doused with a good amount of rum!