Mars 21-22: One night as a baker

The brother of the Auberge owner is an organic bread baker in St Lo, and Laurent set up a night for me to spend baking with him and his team. Serge is a pretty strange man, “cosmic” in our terms, “mystique” as Laurent said. Really, he’s just a bit spacy, but kind of a religious nut. However, he also has a truly unique bread baking operation.

After the Friday market, I went back to the bakery with Ai and David, Japanese and French bakers respectively, who are interning with Serge for a while to learn about traditional French baking. The method seems to be the important part to the operation. There are three huge wood-fired ovens that are fuelled with fagots, or large bundles of thin sticks. Serge also has two mills that grind flour the day of bread baking, both whole wheat and spelt. This milling is what makes the operation really unique, but I’m not sure I understand exactly why one wants the flour to be so so fresh.



Around 5pm we stocked the ovens with wood and finished mixing up the first round of doughs. Friday night is the biggest day of the week in preparation for four Saturday markets. All in all, there were 700-800 kilograms (or 1520-1760 lbs) of bread baked that night. Serge does six kinds: white, half-whole, whole wheat, rye, spelt and gache, the traditional Norman sort of sweet bread made with eggs and milk.



Dinner at 8:30pm, and then we didn’t stop til 5:30am but for a short juice break around 1:00am and breakfast at 4:30am. I spent most of the night weighing out dough to be shaped into loaves; I didn’t feel fast enough or neat enough to shape loaves much. I also got to transfer hot coals from one oven to the other and do a tiny bit of taking loaves off the peel Serge uses to clear the oven, plus loading the trucks for market. Somehow, I didn’t feel tired, and the time passed quickly enough.



Over all, I felt a bit like a cog in a well-oiled machine. Serge and Martine, the one woman who works for him, were like clockwork filling and emptying the ovens. David and Ai kept the loaves coming. I again got a good sense of the kilogram and at least improved in my weighing over the course of the evening. As important as the process is at this bakery, I think it may overshadow the end product that I find kind of lacking. It’s an old-style loaf, very simple without a greatly defined crust and a very dense crumb, too dense for me. It gets dry quickly, too. But it’s honest to its roots and made with hard work and quality ingredients. I’d like to spend a night baking somewhere a bit more standard…