It is as if they were all at a crossroads. There is Sylvain who, after working at France 3 Nouvelle-Aquitaine for several years, chose to open a bakery on his own. He trained at the International Bakery School and then managed to get a stand in the new Halles du Centre in Limoges. With little money and good contacts, he opened Chez Renard just a stone's throw from the Halles. So close that every day, the bakers transport the bread from the oven with a trolley from the bakery to the sales area. I didn't ask Sylvain what prompted him to open an organic bakery with leavened bread (a method of fermentation): the desire to change his professional life, the love of bread made the way it used to be, or the commercial opportunity of a quasi-monopoly position in relation to the "traditional" bakeries, coupled with the growing attraction of consumers for organic products, a return to tradition, and the handmade. A bit of all that? The question remains open. In the week of November 11, 2020, Chez Renard has been open for exactly one year. The bakery offers its bread from Wednesday to Sunday. There is no bread production on Mondays. However, Sylvain goes to the laboratory to refresh the sourdough at around 2pm. On Tuesdays, although Chez Renard says "closed", the baker works during the day to prepare the breads sold the next day from 8am. It is the technique of making sourdough bread that obliges Sylvain and his employees to carry out a skilful division of the work and above all to make a large part of the production the day before for the next day. Unlike yeast, sourdough requires a long fermentation time: during the growth of the sourdough itself, then of the dough pieces made with it. This restrictive aspect requires Sylvain to be particularly well organised, as there can only be one batch of the same bread in 24 hours. (Every day, he provides the bakers with very precise recipe tables and a flow chart indicating the actions to be followed for the preparation of each loaf according to its growing time.
Aymeric, a baker by training at the Aurillac Bakery and Pastry School, worked in several traditional bakeries before joining Chez Renard in December 2019. While Sylvain seems to have found a new lease of life here, a turning point in his life, Aymeric is not there yet. But the crossroads may not be so far away. Listening to him, you can already imagine yourself in South Korea, in the lively districts of central Seoul, those that never stop living, neither during the day nor at night. And there he is, Aymeric, manager of a large-scale traditional French bakery, which operates 24 hours a day. The departure for Korea is not for now, but from Aymeric's little compound, it is already K-Pop that resounds in the lab at 5am. It's as if Aymeric is in a transitional space, a sort of antechamber: a bit like the laboratory at night, where he works from 3.30am to 11am from Wednesday to Saturday and from midnight to 8am on Sunday. Aymeric prepares the day's breads: he kneads the dough, puts it to ferment (this is the pointing), gives it turns, and bakes it. He also bakes the farmhouse loaves that have been shaped the day before, as well as many other tasks that leave him little time to breathe.
Mathieu has not always worked as a baker. A few years ago, he retrained to become a baker by completing a CAP (vocational training certificate). Numerous trips to Europe, particularly to Norway, gave him the opportunity to work with bakers of different nationalities and to acquire a practical knowledge of the bakery trade. He joined Chez Renard in the summer of 2020. Mathieu works during the day. He usually arrives around 8:30am and leaves around 4pm. His job is to prepare the breads that will be sold on the stand the next day at 8am. He kneads, supervises the growth, shapes the dough pieces and bakes them in an incessant ballet from the oven to the workbench, from the cold room to the oven, from the kneading trough to the fermentation room. He prepares all the special breads: breads made with large spelt flour, Six Seeds breads, rice breads as well as Méteils (composed mainly of a mixture of wheat and rye flours), dried fruit rolls and, at weekends, brioche and nut breads. The list is long and comprehensive. At 2pm, he refreshes the rye, wheat and rice leavens. Like Aymeric, Mathieu's day is punctuated by the fermentation times of the breads and the incessant buzzing of the oven. Every action is timed. Each gesture is rigorously applied. Where he lacks in technique, Mathieu makes up for in rigour and speed of execution. It is he who says so. Listening to him, I understand that, like Aymeric, Mathieu is already planning for the future. But his plans are not as well-defined as those of his colleague. It's more of a distant desire, a goal among others, that Mathieu shares with me: he would like to open his own bakery later on. It's the proximity that he's looking for, like the possibility of working with a local miller, of setting up in a small village or even of growing his own cereals. But that, he says, is a project "for ten years from now, maybe fifteen".
Anaïs has been a sales assistant at Chez Renard since the beginning of 2020. Every morning from Wednesday to Sunday, she arrives at the bakery at 7.30 am and brings the breads, baskets and the necessary equipment to the stand at Les Halles, a stone's throw from the bakery. I notice that she wears the same large purple jumper on the stand every day. It's to avoid getting dirty with the flour, she confides in me. During the morning I spend with her, I help her take orders from customers. She takes care of the cash register. I soon realise that I lack some important knowledge about bread making, even after two days in the laboratory. Fermentation times, bread compositions, flours and baking... All this Anaïs learned on the job during the first months after she was hired. She also quickly got used to the different crowds depending on the day: in crescendo from Wednesday to the weekend. On Saturdays, Vanina comes to give her a hand, as the queue is long in front of the Halles stand. You have to be efficient and quick. Chez Renard's breads are a success: stacked on top of each other for the big loaves or next to each other on a slate plate for the cake-shaped breads. The croissants, pains aux chocolat, cookies and buns are arranged in large wicker baskets. Some of the breads are offered by the slice, others need to be dusted before being placed in the craft paper bags. Some customers ask for the bread to be sliced. Anaïs then places the loaf in the machine and takes the bread out. The gesture of lifting the bread into pieces and placing it on the ruler above the machine is delicate: you have to be quick and not hesitate. Then the bread must be wrapped in a kraft bag. Finally, you slide the slices along the ruler and close the bag with an elegant twist of the wrist. This is a movement that requires a few tries before proving to be very simple and very satisfying to achieve. Anaïs closes the shop at 2pm, when Les Halles is closed to the public. Every day, she cleans the windows surrounding the stand, sweeps and brushes the counter. Then she takes the baskets and utensils back to the bakery. There, she is already preparing for the next day: on kraft bags, she writes down the details of each order that was sent to her in the morning.
Vanina runs the bakery from 4.30 pm to 7 pm on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. While sales are exclusively at Les Halles in the morning, the bakery takes over in the late afternoon. Since the confinement in 2020, Chez Renard has been equipped with a window opening onto the pavement and a counter next to the glass to display the bread. Customers do not enter the shop and sales are made at the window. When there are no customers, Vanina has the task of cleaning the laboratory. It is a lot of work because it usually takes her three hours or more.
skills
Leaven is a living organism made of flour and water. It is a fermenting agent that needs to be fed in order to continue living. It appears as a more or less liquid paste. In fact, maintaining a leaven means creating an ecosystem of (lactic) bacteria that will act like yeast during the making of bread. The advantage of sourdough over traditional yeast is that it gives a very different texture and nutritional qualities to breads made with it. Depending on the fermentation time, sourdough adds more or less acidity to the dough, which changes its taste. When the leaven is "refreshed", when it is fed, part of the fermented dough is discarded (this is called the stump). To the other part that is kept, an equal amount of flour and water is added. In this way, the fermentation of the bacteria inside is controlled. The rye sourdough used at Chez Renard was given to Sylvain by a baker. It is 25 years old, which means that someone has been looking after it for all these years. Every day at 2pm, Mathieu refreshes it and the wheat and rice leavens (Sylvain does this on Mondays and Tuesdays). They need about 14 hours to reach maturity. From 2pm to 4am the next day: as a result, Aymeric arrives just in time to use them without waiting.
The oven is a separate entity in the laboratory. It heats and cools to the rhythm of the baking, like the heart of the bakery. In the morning, even before Aymeric arrives, the oven switches itself on to reach the right temperature for baking the country-style breads, at around 5am. For the rest of the day, the bakers subtly control the temperatures of each of its four floors. To mimic the process of a wood-fired oven, with descending heat, the baking is divided into several segments. Every twenty minutes or so, Aymeric, Mathieu or Sylvain adjust the thermostat from 220°C to about 180°C. The baking lasts approximately one hour for the vast majority of the breads. They overlap from 5am to 8am and from 2pm to 4pm, when the last rice and spelt loaves are turned out. The operation of loading and unloading the breads is complex and can be broken down into several distinct movements. Perhaps the most important element of the oven is the mat - a large rectangle about the size and width of a human being lying down with his or her arms at his or her side, stored at the very top of the oven when not in use. Driven by a seemingly simple mechanism, it is used to put the loaves in and take them out. To raise or lower it, the baker operates a crank that unlocks its vertical movement mechanism. All he has to do is block it again at the desired level. To move it horizontally, he pushes and pulls on either side. The conveyor belt has a rolling canvas which is used to place the loaves gently in the oven: once the loaves have been placed on it, the oven window is opened by pulling the corresponding handle and the conveyor belt is pushed to the bottom of the oven. When the belt is pulled out of the oven, it makes half a turn and gently deposits the dough pieces in the oven. Once the belt has been removed, the baker must not forget to return the belt to its initial position.
Shaping is one of the last technical gestures that bakers carry out on a daily basis. At least that's what struck me at first. It really surprised me. I thought: "without manual kneading, the physical contact with the dough almost disappears! However, even though the mechanical kneader prevents the baker from getting his hands dirty, he is still physically very close to the dough. This feeling of touch, which no longer passes through him during the processing stage, remains with him as he moves. Taking the dough out of the mixer is a technical gesture that requires precision and skill. To do this, he leans over the vat and plunges his arm under the dough, pushing it in up to his elbow. Before doing so, he carefully wets his entire forearm. While pulling it towards him and using the dough cutter, which has also been moistened, he makes three or four incisions in the dough to separate the mass that his arm is supporting (several kilos at a time) from the rest and place it in a tray. "Giving a turn" is another delicate gesture that the baker performs halfway through the time the dough is fermenting in the large rectangular tubs. Just as he did when he took it out of the mixer, the baker wets his forearms and slides his hands on either side of the dough. In one quick movement, he lifts a part of the dough, which comes off the tray, not without blowing it up with it, and makes a fold by folding its end into the centre of the tray. He does this multiple times, rotating the container a quarter turn each time, for six or seven trays, in the space of five minutes at most. And for each of them, he applies the same precision to exert the exact force needed to lift the dough without tearing it. Finally, before shaping the dough pieces, the last technical gesture whose secrets the baker is careful not to reveal, he must first weigh them on the scales. Using the dough cutter, he takes a piece of dough from the tray, which he estimates to be as close as possible to the desired weight, because the less the dough is sliced and "opened", the better the bread will rise. If the weight is not as desired, the baker removes or adds small pieces of dough. Before starting to shape the bread by hand, the baker performs brain gymnastics.
timeframes
To explain the tasks he performs to me, Aymeric uses a temporal qualitative each time, which in his eyes is the most important thing of all to describe this or that step: giving a turn to the six bins of "direct" (the nickname of the farmhouse bread, as it is the first one that will be sold on the stall at 8 o'clock in the morning), "it takes... 6 times 30 seconds"; washing 9 bins, "come on, it takes... 5 minutes max"; shaping fourteen pieces of farmhouse bread, "it takes... 14 times 30 seconds, in 7 minutes it has to be finished". At the bakery, the minutes follow one another and are all important. None is left to chance. The bakers have a colourful chart that indicates the tasks to be done for each loaf of bread in five-minute increments.
extract from the sequence of events on 11 november 2020
12:35: Mathieu takes the dough out of the room at 25°C. "It was on holiday," he says. He shapes the balls of Méteil and then moulds the spelt bread. Then he prepares (oil) other moulds for the Six Graines bread. There is a lot of oil on the work surface.
12.45pm: Mathieu shapes the Six Graines dough with the dough cutter. He wets the scale, weighs a quantity of dough and, still on the scale, rolls it up several times before rolling it in the seeds. I shape one. It's not easy. I'm good at popping the dough but not so good at rolling it in the seeds. And I forget to keep track of where my key is (the place where you close the dough on itself).
12:50: Before the Six Graines breads (Sechskornbröt) are finished, Mathieu starts baking the rice breads for 25 minutes. The Six Graines loaves are placed in the room at 25°C for 1h10, i.e. until 14h20.
excerpt from the course of events on 12 November 2020
10.10am: The Rustics of the day dry for 20 minutes in the oven.
10.24 am: Aymeric weighs the seeds for tomorrow's country bread (D+1). Mathieu prepares the dough for the rice breads which he then starts to knead.
10:30 am: The rustics of the day come out of the oven. They are placed on the ladders to be proofed for half an hour.
10.43am: I pour the 40kg of flour into the big kneading trough for tomorrow's Rustics.
11am: I take today's Rustics to the market stall.
12.10pm: We take the Méteil dough out of the room where it is resting. The dough pieces are weighed and shaped.
12.25pm: The Petit Épeautre is taken out of the chamber just as the Méteil is put back in. The spelt breads are moulded. 600 grams per dough piece approximately.
12.45pm: Oiling of the moulds.
1.20pm: The sourdoughs are refreshed: wheat sourdough, rye sourdough, rice sourdough. A small quantity of the strain is taken and mixed with flour and water (rye, wheat or rice flour). The rest of the strain is discarded. If the leavens are ready before 2pm, it's perfect because Aymeric will use them at 4am (which is exactly the time needed for his fermentation).
13:33: Mathieu loads the empty dirty mussels into the dishwasher. He starts it. The machine makes a grinding noise. He takes the rice loaves out of the room and puts them in the oven on level 2 at 230°C. On level 3, the breads made with spelt flour are baked for another three minutes at 200°C.
13:42: Mathieu takes care of the leaven that has finished mixing in the mixer. He takes eight kilos of it in a bucket which he reserves for the next day's live baking. Aymeric will use it at 4am tomorrow. The rest will be used for the other pasta.
1:52pm: After the rice breads, both grainy and plain, have been baked, we take the Méteil out of the room at 25°C. The one I made is not very puffy, all dented. Not nice. Mathieu turns the dough pieces over on the carpet. He puts them in the oven and for the first time in a few hours, we stop and watch the loaves rise. It is during the first ten minutes that they swell the most. And yet the Méteil puffs up a little, but not that much. It's normal," says the baker, "the dough was a bit pushed today.
14:01: Mathieu is back at the dishwasher. He takes out the clean moulds.
2.05pm: The Six Graines loaves are ready to be put in the oven. Two times seven moulds. Mathieu moves the Petit Épeautre loaves to floor 2.
14:10: Anaïs has finished selling at the halls. Mathieu dusts the lower floor of the oven's stainless steel workbench.