French Bread

Bread - the one absolute staple of French cuisine.

The modern steam injected stone based oven in one of the bakeries in our village. The water bottle is for adding water into an external inlet to periodically top up the steam reservoir.

Like most things French, bread is not just a simple matter of water, flour, yeast, and common salt - although by law these are the only ingredients allowed in the item labelled "pain".

One of our local bakers at work.

 The traditional french loaf is not the baguette, nor is it the croissant, or even the "pain de
 campagne", it is the boule. A round loaf, usually obtainable in two sizes, the petite boule and the boule.

A typical boule, cut.

 

A good boule stays fresh a long time - essential back in the days when you made your own bread, because you don't want to have to bake every day. When bread started to be baked commercially, the shops you bought the bread in were called boulangeries. The traditional boule was naturally leavened in the fashion of a sourdough rather than the modern variety using baker's yeast. Interestingly it still stays fresh quite a long time…

 

Boule.

 

It is, though, the baguette most people think of as being the archetypal French loaf. Indeed, in anglophone countries a baguette is called a 'French stick' or 'French loaf' or even just 'French bread'. This is ironic - the all pervasive baguette only came about as the result of a technological advance made in Vienna and a law passed in 1920. In some places in France, the baguette is still known as a vienne.

 

A long loaf made for a food and art festival (L'Art et Lard) in the next village to where I live. Customers buy chunks of the loaf which is priced by weight.

 

The technological advance necessary was the invention of an oven with steam injectors, perfected (or at least made reliable) in Vienna in the mid 19th century. The law was one which stated that bakers couldn't start work before 4.00 am, thus making it impossible to get a traditional loaf made before opening the shop for trade at 6.00 am. I am not sure if the law was a labour law or a law passed for the convenience of those trying to sleep.

 

Traditional breads on display.

 

What I do know for sure is that is is extremely difficult to stop eating good pain, fresh from the boulangerie and still warm from the oven. 

This parking sign indicates that parking is not allowed, but stopping for 10 minutes will be tolerated. You only ever see these signs outside bakeries and pharmacies.

 

Claudette parked outside a bakery in one of Loire Valley's officially most beautiful villages.

A glimpse into the back of a bakery near Blois.

Organic sourdough bread at the market in my village in the Loire Valley.

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