France Report
Who's Saving the Great Breads of France?
a traveling baker's report by Jonathan Stevens(Hungry Ghost Bread, Northampton, MA)
Let's face it: appearances can be deceiving, even when it comes to bread in France. Baguettes rarely taste as good as they look, for one thing. That wheat you can see growing everywhere, even as soon as you land at the airport outside Paris, it's not as wholesome as it seems. It's exciting to see, at first, for a baker from Massachusetts who rarely glimpses a field of grain. This is it! But it's all dwarf wheat, stiff and dull, which requires intensive chemical treatments which have contaminated the water table. Though the French countryside has a very beautiful face, it is done with the make-up of a highly industrialized agriculture that has, among other things, poisoned the soil.
So, it's fallen to a group of organic farmers to re-invent a real loaf from scratch. The “paysan-boulangers” (peasant-bakers) cultivate older heritage wheats, process, store & mill it themselves and then bring the grain to fruition by baking it into delicious bread. An international gathering of this movement in the southwestern region of the Lot-et-Garonne had brought us the opportunity to meet these pioneers.
One hundred and sixty bakers, farmers and researchers from 18 countries requiring a team of simultaneous translators spent four days on the exquisite farm of Jean-Francois and Cecile Berthellot. Four different kinds of wood-fired ovens allowed for simultaneous workshops. A remarkable demonstration field held vibrant plots of nearly 300 different kinds of wheat from around the world. We talked, made, ate, milled and danced around: bread.
There was a consensus there that our staple food is under real threat: not just from industrialized baking techniques or the triumph of form over content, but from the corporate ownership (and in the EU particularly, its bureaucratic allies) and impoverishment of our primary material, the wheat itself. Modern wheats varieties-and all too soon, GMO wheats- are designed for high yield, mechanical cultivation and processing, and proprietary characteristics. The farmer merely “rents' the seeds and cannot really replicate them or multiply them for his own stock. In the EU, there is a list of approved varieties and so selling or even trading most historic types is actually illegal because they are no longer (or never were) registered. So much is lost in this rationalized formula: the farmer's participation in the evolution of the seed, the complex genetic information of traditional varieties, not to mention the nutritional, digestive and taste dimensions of the bread.
These paysan-boulangers get back to basics not only by hand-mixing doughs, using natural leavens and wood-fired ovens, but by re-establishing the ancient relationship to the grain itself- in the field and at the mill.
Most heritage wheats are “land race” plants: the genetic diversity in each seed responds to its given conditions and will in time (in 3-4 years) adapt to the soil and climate of where it is planted -rather than being bred for specialization, like modern purelines. In this way, the grain behaves not unlike a sourdough culture that adapts to a new home. A San Francisco starter will become a Northampton starter after a week or two in my shop. Perhaps the biochemistry and the agronomy of our materials provide the metaphors we're meant to live by.
To be sure, these old wheats have lower yields, but far more nutrition ( the indigestibility of modern wheats was greatly discussed, said to be the source of many new “allergies”), not to mention a free pedigree, un-owned by anyone. Often, many different varieties are planted together in the same field, growing at varying heights, which allows wind and sun to penetrate and for the shorties to support the taller ones when the danger of lodging appears.
In Southern France, the climate is certainly hot & dry. “Winter” planting can happen as late as January or February with harvest in mid-July. The work may be a bit more hands-on with such a crop -as it is with the looser and stickier doughs they make -but who says human ingenuity was supposed to render itself obsolete? Surely we wish to make a bread of wonder and not the other way around...
Many of the paysan-boulangers consider the heart of their operations to be the mill -and a particular mill at that, made by the Astrie Brothers, an elderly pair that take at least two years to fill an order and have apparently spun off one approved acolyte by the name of Poilane (!) in Brittany. These are large stone mils (approximately 24” in diameter, and placed horizontally) with huge hoppers that feed the mills very slowly (so the flour does not heat up). A clamp-spring maintains the optimal distance and pressure between the stones and a sifting box with fine mesh separates out bran and white flour. Oddly enough, even these “fundamentalist” French bakers seem to use only white flour -even when making a “complet” whole wheat, they're just adding back in some of the bran (sometimes in the form of a whole bran starter!).
Some of the linguistic confusion was amusing: the word for spelt in French is “epautre” or more specifically, “grand epautre”. “Petit epautre” refers to einkorn, which while rare in the US is quite popular in France (the word for both in Italian is “farro” which also refers to a few other things, apparently). At this gathering, for a “dream bread”, einkorn was mixed with another problematic nexus of nomenclature and ownership known as “kamut”. Trademarked by the Quinn family of Montana, this ancient and somewhat mysterious wheat ( supposedly found in an Egyptian sarcophagus) is being grown by quite a few in France, some without “permission” who have had American lawyers come to call. So, in an act of agrarian repatriation, they've decided to call it simply “Khorasan” after the northern Iranian region it is actually from. Some state-side sympathizers took up the chorus of Bob Dylan's “The Mighty Quinn” (also copyrighted, not so strictly enforced).
It was so inspiring to see bakers act like craftspeople and not entrepreneurs -expanding their work not horizontally by opening franchises, but vertically by re-designing the very tools of a broken trade. Acting as stewards of a food-chain and not like gold miners (or spinners). We would do well to follow their example.
Original page : http://www.hungryghostbread.com/pages/france_report.php
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