Paris

[Bread Baking Class]

Hi, my name is Clotilde, and I have conquered my fear of yeast.

For years and years, everytime a recipe called for yeast — dry, instant, fresh, whatever — I would write it off with a resigned sigh, like the plain teenaged girl writes off the popular unkempt boy, thinking, “He’s not for me.”

I didn’t know the moves, I didn’t know where to begin, I didn’t know how things worked, I didn’t know what the dough should look and feel like, and it all felt very mysterious and very intimidating. I had bought a blindingly handsome stand mixer to encourage myself, and while the leaf and whisk attachments were frequently taken for a spin, the dough hook remained in the cabinet, sulking what it thought to be a guilt-inducing sulk, and rightly so.

But then one morning I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and said to myself, “You’re twenty-seven now. Shouldn’t you take the bull by the horns and just take a friggin’ bread-baking class?” And with that, I went online and booked myself one.

The class was held on a Saturday afternoon at the back of a bakery in the 20th called Le 140, whose baguette once won the much-coveted Meilleure Baguette de Paris prize. Our teacher was Jean-Michel, a friendly and energetic boulanger who made the class as fun as it was instructive.

When we arrived, everything had been pre-measured* for the frasage, the step that consists in pouring water into the bowl of flour, salt, and yeast, and then blending everything together with your hand until the dough stops sticking to the sides of the bowl and your hand looks like it’s wearing a cement glove.

[Notes and tips: Use only one of your hands for the frasage so you can still use the other one to hold the bowl, and rub your nose when it unavoidably itches. We used the yeast directly, without diluting it first as some recipes instruct you to. The salt and yeast were placed on the flour well apart from one another so they wouldn’t touch, otherwise the power of the yeast would be lessened.]

We turned the dough out on the lightly floured work surface and started kneading, pushing a small part of the dough firmly away from us with one hand and pulling it all the way back over the dough, before giving the dough an eighth of a turn and repeating this step. We kneaded and kneaded until the dough was smooth and slightly warm and we couldn’t feel our shoulders anymore .

We then divided the dough into four pieces, which allowed us to make all sorts of clever jokes about the biblical arithmetics of bread. Each piece was shaped according to the type of loaf it was destined to be. One of them was stuffed with diced comté cheese and chopped walnuts, and for this we folded the dough over the ingredients once and over itself multiple times, so the ingredients would be distributed evenly. All the pieces were covered with cloth for the first rise, a.k.a. le pointage, which lasted 30 minutes.

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Walking through the Oberkampf neighborhood this past Friday on my way from one appointment to the next, I glanced at my watch and gleefully realized I had just enough time to drop by La Bague de Kenza, a luxurious Algerian pastry shop on rue Saint-Maur.

There was a line snaking outside onto the sidewalk — it was still Ramadan then and many of the customers were buying sweets for the nightly fast-breaking feast — but this gave me time to be entertained by the verbal fight that broke out when one lady accused another of trying to cut in front of her (if you hadn’t eaten or drunk anything all day, you would be nippy too), and to admire the colorful multitude of picture-perfect delights filled with almonds, pistachios, walnuts, figs, or dates, and flavored with honey, rose water, orange blossom water, mint, citrus, or vanilla.

It’s okay not to know the names of all (or any) of the little guys: the staff often caters to novices, so you can just smile and point, or ask for an assortment. I myself ordered eight different ones: a pistachio skandriate and a lemon and vanilla cornet aux amandes (pictured above, top and right), a sugar-coated corne de gazelle and a walnut baqlava (pictured here, left and top right), a doigt de Kenza, a rfisse (a mix of semolina, walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts, date, and honey, ground into a marzipan-like, pleasantly grainy paste), and two more that I unfortunately can’t name: a piped round of almond and walnut paste flavored with orange blossom water and topped with an unpeeled almond (pictured above, bottom left) and a meringue round filled with pistachio paste (pictured here, bottom right).

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On rue Garreau in Montmartre — right off the place Emile Goudeau, which I like very much because it has trees, benches, and a Fontaine Wallace — was the tiny workshop of a violin maker. Earlier this summer, I walked past it and did a double-take: the dusty window had been cleaned, and the instruments had been replaced by a miscellany of Japanese trinkets — origami animals, garland lights, purses to keep your change, and tinkling thingies to hang to your cell phone.

I walked in, browsed the displays, and my eyes fell on a flyer that advertised the shop’s sushi classes. The attendant inside was busy paper-folding a horse or a squirrel or a tortoise — it was too early to tell. He told me that he was just filling in for the owner and couldn’t say when the next class would be, but that he would take my contact information. A few days later I received a call from a Japanese woman, who explained that she didn’t give classes during the summer because of the heat, but that I could sign up for September.

And this is how Maxence and I attended a sushi-making class last Saturday. Our teacher was Tomoko, owner of the shop and, incidentally, wife of the violin maker whose workshop it used to be. Teacher and students climbed up to an appartment five flights of stairs above the shop, took off our shoes, admired the view, and sat down at the table.

Since this was a lunchtime class, Tomoko first prepared donburi for us (a category of Japanese dishes in which ingredients are served over a bowl of hot rice), so hypoglycemia would not hinder our ability to listen and learn. Her bols de sashimi spécial consisted in Japanese rice, topped with torn nori and bite-size pieces of raw tuna and salmon, tossed together in a dressing of wasabi, soy sauce, and ground sesame. This was a splendid lunch and I will no doubt try to reproduce it. She also served us chilled mugicha (barley tea), which I’d never tried before and very much enjoyed.

Tomoko stressed that what she was about to teach us were the basics of family-style sushi — it takes Japanese chefs years to master the noble art of sushi-making, and a two-hour class wasn’t going to cut it, obviously. She had trimmed and sliced two kinds of raw fish for the class, ahi tuna and salmon, in long sticks for maki (rolled sushi) and in rectangular pieces for nigiri (oval lumps of rice topped with fish). This was my first time making any kind of sushi so I had everything to learn, but it turned out to be surprisingly easy when you have someone by your side to show you the moves.

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[Tongue Blood Sausage]

Paris is filled to the brim with little stores that sell produits du terroir, artisanal products from different regions of France: condiments and spices, jam and honey, cookies and candy, traditional canned dishes such as cassoulet or duck confit… You push the door and feel like you’ve stepped right into Hansel and Gretel‘s bread house, complete with cake roof and sugar windows.

Having read that fairy tale and learned my lesson, I am usually a little suspicious of such stores: it has been my experience that they often sell products that look really nifty with their handwritten labels and grandma-made-it-just-for-you packaging, but turn out to be nothing worth rolling on the floor with the spoon in your mouth (which is dangerous, I might add) when you get home and try them.

Besides, they usually charge an arm and a leg for them, or at least much more than you would pay if you were to buy them from the source. They rely heavily on the impulse purchase factor, and the fact that the goods are so out of context in the cute boutique, that it might not strike you as unreasonable to pay 10 euros for a box of crackers you might not even like that much.

When I noticed earlier this year that a new store called Les Papilles Gourmandes (papilles meaning tastebuds) had opened on the lower end of the rue des Martyrs, I peeked inside briefly, and dismissed it as belonging to the category described above. The name also sounded very uninspired (there is another shop called “Les Pipalottes Gourmandes” a few blocks away, how happy they must be) and, what can I say, names are important to me.

However, someone tipped me off recently on the fact that said shop sold Jean-Yves Bordier’s excellent hand-made butter from St-Malo, and although I’ve been able to find it at several other places in Paris before (at the restaurant Chez Michel in particular), this is a much more convenient location for me.

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