[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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I grew up in the most anglophile French household I know, where the paperbacks strewn about the coffee table often bore little penguins, where the parents used English as a secret language when they didn’t want their daughters to understand, and where sending them to England every summer sounded like a good idea (that question is still up for debate; in any case, there went the secret language).

Food-wise, it meant that fried eggs frequently came with Worcestershire sauce and bacon (and even bangers if we were lucky), that fromage blanc was liberally doused with Golden Syrup, and that Christmas wouldn’t have been Christmas without my mother’s marzipan-topped Christmas cake, prepared and left to ripen weeks in advance.

It also meant that shopping expeditions to the Boulevard Haussmann department stores always ended with a quick run through Marks & Sparks‘ food section for tea, English muffins, stem ginger biscuits, hot cross buns, mincemeat pies, cole slaw, ready-made Indian dishes, and even bangers if we were lucky. Oh, and shortbread, too, which disappeared at a speed proportional to their butter content.

By the time Marks & Spencer decided to stab us in the heart and close their French stores (over some futile reason like not making any profit) it had become fairly easy to find British goods of all kinds in even the most ordinary of grocery stores in Paris. But when it comes to shortbread, I’d discovered that baking your own was even easier — and much more gratifying, too, in that call-me-Delia sort of way.

The following recipe uses stone-ground cornmeal to produce the supernal crunchy note any self-respecting shortbread should present. It results in an obviously buttery* but not overly sweet shortbread that you may choose to grace with a hint of vanilla or citrus zest. There is no law against piling on the chocolate chips and dried fruits and nuts and bells and whistles, but I am of the mind that simple is best.

* Do use the very best butter you can find; if there is one recipe that will showcase it in all its glory, this is it.

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Soupe de Haricots Verts aux Amandes

None of my friends need to be reminded how I feel about Rose Bakery, their salad plates, their assortment of British goods (including Neal’s Yard cheeses), and their superb sweets that one simply must try and reproduce at home. “Where should we go for lunch in your neighborhood?” they ask. “I like Rose Bakery,” I reply. “And what about breakfast/tea/brunch, what do you recommend?” they ask. “Well, I like Rose Bakery,” I repeat.

Admittedly, Rose Bakery gives off a very distinctive vibe, one that I rarely encounter anywhere else in this city: completely devoid of any eagerness to please, but neither standoffish nor haughty, the staff displays a reserve that one may be tempted to describe as British, supported by a profound confidence in the quality of what they make and sell.

The flavors are bright and clean, the texture a perfect mix of nubby and smooth: this soup is a splendid way to honor this year’s crop of green beans.

I’m sure some people would dislike that, but I find myself drawn to this kind of place, where no one and nothing tries to sway your judgment (or worse, press someone else’s on you), and all that is asked of you is to taste and decide for yourself. No glitzy interior design, no elaborate packaging, no flash in the proverbial pan — just fine, fresh, seasonal food prepared tastefully and presented simply.

And the book that owner Rose Carrarini has just issued, called Breakfast, Lunch, Tea, is entirely true to this spirit: the layout is pared-down and clutter-free, Toby Glanville’s pictures are beautiful but seemingly unstaged (though of cours, we know better), and the recipes are short, simple, and inspiring.

It is a delightful feeling to have the secrets of some of my favorites finally revealed and I have tagged the pages with many a sticky little flag. The green bean and almond soup is the first recipe I’ve tried, and I’m happy to say it lived up to my expectations: the flavors are bright and clean, the texture a perfect mix of nubby and smooth, and this soup is a splendid way to honor the last of this year’s green beans.

Rose Bakery Map it!
46 rue des Martyrs, 75009 Paris
01 42 82 12 80

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[Scones au Gouda Vieux et Poires Séchées]

Before we begin, I would like to address the scone/biscuit question. To Americans, a biscuit is the hand-held version of a quick bread, leavened with baking powder. Usually round and savory, the American biscuit may be served in place of bread to accompany a main course, especially if said main course involves a gravy component. The closest equivalent the British and the French can think of is the scone, thus named in honor of the Scottish Coronation Stone I believe, but most scones I’ve come across are sweet — though subtly so — and served for breakfast or tea with clotted cream and jam (yum). There are scones in America, too, but in my experience they are most often triangular, sweet as a muffin, and meant to be eaten on their own, sans spread.

To the British and the French, who have such a long history of seeing eye to eye on everything, a biscuit (from the Old French bis cuit, twice baked) is a thin, crisp, and usually round confection that Americans would call a cookie, a term that the French themselves use for what they think of as American-style biscuits — round, large, and loaded with chocolate chips.

I am telling you, somebody out there is trying to make the life of the transatlantic food writer more difficult than it really needs to be. In any case, the golden rounds I baked the other day were what I would personally call savory scones, but because I am a very tolerant, live-and-let-live person, I’ll let you decide what name seems the most fitting to you.

The idea for them came as I was leafing through the very refreshing More from ACE Bakery cookbook, which its author, Linda Haynes, sent to me: on page 28 was the picture of a (sweet) oatmeal scone, flavored with dried pears and hazelnuts, sitting side by side with a (savory) cheddar chive biscuit that called for aged white cheddar.

Both sounded very good, but seeing as I had dried pears in a tin box on my counter and a hunk of 36-month-old gouda in my fridge, the two recipes somehow merged in my mind and became aged gouda and dried pear savory scones.

Linda’s biscuit batter recipe produced a sumptuous texture — a crisp shell and a moist, slightly brittle crumb — and the gouda/pear pairing made for a very pleasing balance of flavors, the sweetness of the fruit responding to the discreet pungency of the cheese. We ate some of them with a carrot-cilantro soup while the rest was cut into bite-size pieces to nibble on with a pre-dinner drink the next day, but they would also be perfect for brunch or with a simple salad of greens.

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