Inside the early-morning shift in a busy French bakery kitchen.
Get the recipe for Beaujolais Chorizo Bread. All photos by Joann Pai.
One morning, I found myself sitting in a neon-lit bus shelter at 3:30 a.m. The sidewalks of Paris were black and shiny after a hard rain on a winter's night. I passed the time waiting for the bus, half reading a magazine and eavesdropping on a pretty African woman with intricate black-cherry-soda-colored braids who was chatting in a beautiful, lilting creole with a friend in faraway Mayotte, a French island near Madagascar.
After she ended her phone call, I could feel the lady staring at me. When I looked up, she smiled and asked, "Why are you here?"
"My job," I answered brightly. "I'm going to work as a baker."
She chuckled and arched her eyebrows. "Now that is some good honest work," she said.
As we churned along in the night, it struck me that I'd begun a new cycle of earnestness in my life. After years as a food writer in Paris for many illustrious publications and hundreds of meals in the most exalted restaurants of France, what I really wanted was good, simple, honest food. You see, the most important thing I've probably learned about French cooking is that its guiding reflex is an infallible preference for simplicity. Which is why I was headed for my first shift at a bakery on a quiet street in the city's silk-stocking 16th arrondissement. This working kitchen is one of several in Paris that belong to Frédéric Lalos, the baker who in 1997 was the youngest ever to win an M.O.F. (Meilleur Ouvrier de France), a supreme distinction of talent awarded to the country's best artisans.
I knew and loved Lalos' bread, because it's found on many of the best tables in Paris, including those at Guy Savoy, Taillevent, and Jean-François Piège's Le Grand Restaurant, and at seven neighborhood bakeries around the city. After an initially quizzical reaction, the baker had graciously agreed to let me join the team on the rue des Belles Feuilles for several shifts. Monsieur Lalos couldn't imagine why I'd want to get up in the middle of the night and trudge across town to do hard labor when my real job was, as he elegantly described it, "to give words to taste." But as I began my 30th year in the country, I realized that my relationship with French tastes had changed. I no longer wanted to be seated and waited on; I wanted to be standing and doing something generous and essential. Something like baking bread. For me, this was the most sincere homage I could possibly pay to the country that had adopted me.
I was not born to love pain. As a kid in suburban Connecticut I was unfamiliar with anything more exotic than an English muffin or foil-wrapped supermarket "Italian" loaves sprayed with something oily and yellow that turned them into "garlic bread" when toasted. Bread was as devoid of interest to me as tap water until my grade-school friend Peter Hoenig introduced me to the rock-salt-speckled pretzel bread that his Viennese mother baked herself and draped with a slice of smoky ham.
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When I moved to France in 1986, I found that urgent uncontrollable desires could be learned—for oysters, for example, but also for 365 different cheeses, for Côte-Rôtie, and most of all, for bread. It started, of course, with baguettes. I'd finish one on my own in a day: half for breakfast, sliced horizontally and toasted, a process that filled my small kitchen with a savagely provocative scent of grilled grain and distant notes of yeast; the other half, an amply buttered canvas for a simple sandwich of ham and cornichons.
