The official Meilleure Baguette de Paris competition was held last Thursday, and the 2017 winner of the Best Baguette in Paris award is (drumroll please) Sami Bouattour from Boulangerie Brun, a bakery that’s at 193 rue de Tolbiac in the 13th arrondissement (métro Tolbiac).

The competition is held every year, and it is organized by the Mairie de Paris, the mayor’s office, to spread the word about Paris as a city of fabulous bread — which it no doubt is — and to foster a healthy sense of competition between the boulangers, who strive to improve their craft in the hopes of winning that coveted distinction.

How is the Best Baguette in Paris prize awarded?

The competition is held over a single day. The bakers bring in their baguettes in the morning, and the jury spends the day grading them (anonymously) for appearance, quality of the baking, smell, and flavor. About 200 bakers enter the competition every year.

The 14-person jury is made up of other bakers, chefs, journalists, and also individuals who can put their name in and hope to be selected to participate. (It sounds like fun but it is a lot of bread to taste! Your senses and your brain get fatigued quickly when it’s not your profession. But a once-in-a-lifetime experience for sure.)

At the end of the day, the names of the top baguette makers are announced.

What’s in it for the baker?

For the lucky winner, the prize is threefold:

• First and foremost, it is excellent publicity. The bakery puts a big sign in the window, it is talked about and featured in all the local papers, and bread lovers from around the city (and the world) come in to taste the new Best Baguette in Paris. Once that effect has subsided, locals continue to think of that bakery as the best in the neighborhood, and will favor it over the competition.
• The winner receives a cash prize of 4000€. Not enough to retire (otherwise the city has just lost its best baker) but enough to buy a new piece of equipment, paint the store front, or maybe take the entire staff to a fancy dinner. (That’s what I’d do myself; excellent for karma, excellent for PR.)
• Finally, the winning bakery becomes the official provider of baguettes for the Palais de l’Élysée, the French White House, where the lives and works. This means that the Président de la République eats that baguette daily, but more important, it is the bread served for all the official meals with ambassadors and foreign dignitaries. It is not a very large number of baguettes (about 25 a day I am told) but bread is such a central component of the French food culture that it is a very big deal to be THE baker who makes THE baguette served to some of the most illustrious people in the world.

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Today is a big day for me, and I can feel the excitement coursing from my head to my toes: I am launching a podcast!

I’m full of surprises, so it’s in French, it is called Change ma vie : Outils pour l’esprit, and it is a fresh and modern take on personal development, managing your mind, and feeling amazing.

This is a side project that I will be running in addition to Chocolate & Zucchini, and I’m telling you about it because I suspect that if you follow me here, it’s also for my mindset and my approach to life, so this is an opportunity to continue the conversation on those topics. But if you don’t speak French and/or this stuff is not your jam, not to worry: we will continue to talk about food around here.

If, on the other hand, you’ve been looking to add more French language into your life, what better way than to listen to me speak French, on a weekly basis, about this other passion of mine? Who knows, you may actually change your life in the process.

So head over to iTunes (or your favorite podcasting app) and subscribe to listen to the first three episodes available today. And if you like what you hear, please leave a review! It is the best way to support this project, and I will be most grateful.

You can also visit changemavie.com to sign up for the newsletter — you’ll also get a free sign-on bonus — and share with any French-loving friend wanting to expand their mind and feel better.

Thank you!

• April was spring break for school-aged children, and we took a family vacation to the Perche, a lush and beautiful countryside where we rent the same little house every time. This was over Easter, so we were able to do a proper chocolate egg hunt for the kids in the lovely garden, trying to adjust the level of hiding so the eggs weren’t too obvious for our almost-five-year-old, yet our two-year-old stood a chance. Let’s say it’s not a bad idea to keep a few spare eggs in your pocket that you can drop on the little one’s path as he goes.

• Maxence and I had a wonderful dinner at Ken Kawasaki, a pocket-size gastronomic restaurant with French and Japanese inspirations. You are seated sushi-bar-style around a counter, so you get to see the chef at work on the seven-course, monthly tasting menu, remarkably fresh and elegant. We love it there; it’s where we decided to get engaged, and went back to celebrate our four-month wedding anniversary. (See my wedding post if inexplicably you missed it.)

• I attended my assistant and friend Anne Elder’s thesis defense, which she wrote on the experience of refugee chefs in Paris. Such a rich and important topic, and her research work was exceedingly well received. There is a book to be drawn out of this for sure, and I can’t think of a better person to write it.

Anne used a beautiful poem by Nigerian writer Ijeoma Umebinyuo to open her presentation. It’s called Diaspora Blues:

“So, here you are
too foreign for home
too foreign for here.
never enough for both.”

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Radish season is in full swing, and I have been buying a bunch a week. I very much like radis roses, the pink, elongated ones with a white bottom that look like so many pink mice, but I don’t turn my nose at the red globes, and certainly not at the multicolored bouquets.

(Side note: never sure what’s in season when? My seasonal produce guide is for you, and it’s free to download!)

In fact, it is not so much the color or shape of the bulbs I pay attention to when I shop, but the color and vigor of their leaves*. First, because they are a telltale sign of freshness, and second, because I eat them as radish leaf pesto, a habit I’ve taken up in the spirit of frugality, eco-friendliness, and kitchen craftiness.

Radish leaves have a flavor I would situate somewhere between watercress and nettles, but a few notches milder. The texture of the larger leaves can be a bit rough so they’re not ideal for salads, but they make fine soups and gratins (I add them to my Swiss chard gratin), I like them in pasta, and they work beautifully in pesto, which is what I make with them most often.

When I get back from the market, I separate the leaves from the bulbs. I refrigerate the latter — radishes should be washed moments before eating — while I rinse and dry the leaves like I do herbs, discarding any that are limp or discolored. I then store them in a container in the fridge until I’m ready to use them — but no longer than a day.

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