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the games begin

Friday night, finally made it to Paris. Yesterday, Roger and I baked three different baguettes and a load of croissants. Baguettes were amazing! I mixed a poolish baguette, and Roger mixed two baguettes. Both heavy on water, long fermented. All three mixes were really nice. We agreed that the flour has that extra hint of extensibility, that really makes some nice bread. Beautiful open structure. The flour is very forgiving. I had great results with the croissants, as well. Again the extensible nature of the flour really allows for some outrageous oven spring. And the butter, like laminating velvet.

On Thursday, Dara finished her plaques. As the artistic candidate, she had to produce twelve plaques, don’t remember the dimensions. They are about twelve inches by sixteen inches. Twelve at the base. They must be labeled for the twelve months of the year, and display Americanism. She did a great job, on them, countless hours of work. She started them months ago. They are all made from “Pate mort” or dead dough as we know it. Boiled sugar syrup, rye flour and buckwheat flour. Nothing you could ever eat. But they hold up for long periods of time. Dara spent $$$ to get these shipped here, she had to use a “Fine arts” shipper. Pretty impressive the boxes he made for each of them. She had to do some slight repairs on five of the plaques, and then spray them with edible varnish. Today we dropped her and her plaques off at the convention centre. I got an early glimpse at the display stands that were made for each competitor.. They are about four feet in diameter, sixteen inches tall. The top horizontal surface is about three feet in diameter, so these twelve plaques will go all the way around the base and lean in slightly. She will have eight hours to produce a showpiece to set on this surface I’m speaking of. She bakes Tuesday.

Peter, will do his two hour prep on Saturday afternoon, and bake on Sunday. This afternoon, after Roger and I dropped Dara and her plaques off at the convention centre, we went on to return the car to the airport. No need to have a car in Paris, that would be an absolute curse. Plan was for Roger and I to drop off Dara, drop off the car and pick up Peter’s suitcase from British Air, and take the RER train to Gare du Nord and then the metro to our hotel. Turns out, it wasn’t a suitcase. It was a fifty pound crate, no handles! Peter had taped it and strapped it, so we managed, but if you ever ridden the Paris metro, you’d understand. There are times when you get on and off that train whether you want to or not. We wrestled that box back to the hotel, peter opened and voila, it was all there. We were all relieved.

So tomorrow, it’s back to the airport to pick up Patti, bring her to the hotel, and then back out to the convention centre. After the episode with Peter’s treasure chest, I’m looking forward to today’s travels.

A bientot.

still no bag

Yesterday, Roger left for the airport around 10am. Returned to the hotel at 10:30pm. Flight after flight, no sign of peter's missing bag/box. Eight flights from Heatherow to Paris, didn't get on one of 'em. Every phone call found a different person and a different answer. Late night, we got a promise that they would change the luggage tag, and hopefully that would do the trick. This morning we spoke to British Air at Heathrow, they claimed it was on the first flight out. Checked on-line, no luck. Not that it wasn't there, the web site took us nowhere. Roger is searching for a phone number into British Airways baggage service here in the Paris airport. Needless to say, Peter and Dara are getting stressed out. Dara needs the brown rice flour, that Peter added to his box, and Peter needs all the irreplaceable hand tools, even more.

My time in the bakery yesterday, was AWESOME!!! Here by myself, shapin', bakin' baguettes. Baguettes came out nice. French flour is very forgiving. It doesn't have that strong elastic property that North American flour has. The elastic side of the protein is much milder. Very timely, our transplanted British host Nigel just stepped in the office here asking me how "My" bake went yesterday. We started talking about the differences in the wheat from North America to here. He made a good point, "Used to be that wheat fields use to wave in the wind. No more wheat is designed to grow a foot shorter than before with a very sturdy stalk. That way there isn't nearly as much wind damage as there used to be". In the states we have a song that has a line about "Amber waves of grain". So much for boasting about using non genetically modified wheat!

Just overheard Roger say that the phone number he has is the right one, but the office doesn't open until 2pm.

Well, I had so much fun yesterday, I made another baguette dough for today, only this time I planned ahead and made a poolish for the baguette. I also made a good size piece of croissant dough. I'll letcha know how it goes. The dough is laminated with 26.5% Montague butter, 85% butter fat. Butter is created just for lamination.

Can't wait. Baguette is screamin' to be divided.

au revoir, ayez un beau jour

why not? great fun for me

Wednesday morning in Lille. Dara Reimers, the American artistic category competitor, felt ill and headed back to the hotel to get some rest. I think she completed her piece yesterday, to her satisfaction. Last night I headed back into Paris, to pick up Peter Yuen, the American competitor in the viennoiserie category. When I left yesterday, Dara was just beginning to assemble her piece. Height requirements state that the piece must be six feet tall. I dropped her off this morning, at the baking centre. By the time I parked the car and got to the bakeshop, she had bumped the table, and the structure became twelve feet wide. Crashed into quite a mess. So all I saw as pictures.

Peter arrived in Paris around 6pm, last night. British Air lost two of his bags. They said they would be on the next flight. We sourced out something to eat and waited. Peter is traveling with Roger Gural. More about Roger later. The next flight turned up with one of the two bags. Charles de Gaulle airport is about two hours from Lille. By the time Peter got everything sorted out, we left the airport around 9:30pm. It was a bad situation. At that point, they both had been awake for near twenty four hours. Plan was for Roger to return to the airport in the morning. If the airlines delivered it, it would get here Thursday. Peter is only going to get one full run of practice on Thursday, as it is. We returned to our hotel just short of midnight.


Roger has a lot of baking experience here in France. Paris, Toulouse and Nice. He is currently a bread instructor at The French Culinary Institute in New york City. He was the American competitor in the Mondial du Pain, competition in Lyon. It's a different type of competition from the Coupe du Monde. Here in France, I guess worldwide, the Coupe will always be the "Grand Daddy of 'em all", as says ABC's Keith Jackson. Every trade show, in every country has a competition now. The SIPA cup in Italy, the IBA cup in Germany, and at the MOBAC show in Japan, they have one as well. None like the Coupe, not yet anyway. All others will always be compared to the Coupe, the Coupe has set the bar. Roger is also one of the three American bread competitors, preparing for the LeSaffre Cup in Las Vegas.

So Dara is resting, Roger is on his way to Paris, and Peter is busy tormenting the Taiwanese bakers. I'm in a bakeshop, in France, got an oven, a mixer, flour, water, salt and yeast. So, I'm gonna bake some baguettes. On his way out the door, Roger spewed off a formula he'd like me to mix for him, and I'll make one of my own. His is a rather wet dough, sixty eight percent water, only .4 percent yeast. He wants it just brought together, under developed and fermented for four hours, a fold after thirty minutes, one hour, two hours and three hours. I made a straight dough mix for myself, sixty five percent water, .8 percent yeast. I mixed it a little further and plan on one fold after two hours. So we'll see. Tomorrow we will re construct the formulas and see what we get. Maybe a preferment or two for tomorrow. American bakers are very intrigued by French flour. What better opportunity? I can already say, it's slightly drier than our flour, and the ash particles in the flour are more amber than ours, and their seems to be more ash.

Let ya know tomorrow what turns up, once out of the oven. Timers' goin' off. Gotta give the dough a fold.

here in Lille, finally

Boy, been a while, I see that my last post was February 17th. Not surprised, that whole Valentine's day/Fat Tuesday thing was the most whirlwinded situation I've ever been in. Right now, I'm in Lille, France, heading towards Europain 2010, in Paris. I am here representing the Bread Bakers Guild of America, acting as a manager type person for the American bakers practicing for the Maîtres de Boulangerie, Masters of Baking competition. The trip got off to a bad start when my flight could not land in Paris and we got sent to Frankfurt. Strong winds prevented us from landing. I was to meet Dara Riemers at the airport in Paris. She was arriving an hour after myself. That got twisted up, and on top of that, her flight landed. So we were set back a day. Once I found her, we got the car loaded and off to Lille, we went. Lille is about an hour and a half drive north of Paris, very close to Belgium. We are being hosted by the LeSaffre yeast company. We are working in a test kitchen in the LeSaffre baking centre. Incredible place, incredible people. Our host is a very jolly Brit named Nigel Saunders. When I competed in 2005, Nigel was our host then, as well. They take good care of us here, anything we need, they jump to accommodate us. We are complete guests of LeSaffre, so any bakers reading this, you need to be using Red Star/LeSaffre yeast.

Very impressive, the attitude and the attempt that these French folks are making towards the baking industry. We drove by a yeast plant, a mile or so from here, enormous. Nigel was telling me that they have two yeast plants in France, one in Maisons-Alfort and this one in Lille. They also have on just over the Belgium border in Gant. They produce dry yeast in one, compressed in another and cream yeast in the third. Yesterday, they were test baking baguettes, all I know is, there were baskets of baguettes by the door, for anyone to take on their way out. Each baguette was clearly marked 1,2 & 3. I tasted 'em all. Couldn't tell much difference between 'em. They all tasted fine, very industrious. Fine tight crumb, nice, nice crust, not much in the way of fermentation flavour. Beautiful colour, and scoring marks. Not surprised, it appears they were made by Francois, not sure of his last name. He heads up the team of bakers that does the baking in the LeSaffre booth at Europain.

The LeSaffre yeast company sponsors both the Coupe du Monde and the Maîtres de Boulangerie. When I competed in 2005, we rehearsed at the Maisons-Alfort facility. The countries that compete in the Coupe du Monde, go thru a preliminary competition to earn a spot. Those early rounds of competition are referred to as the "Louis LeSaffre Cup". they house, fly & feed, all the competeing teams and their coaches. Quite an undertaking. Later this year there will be a Louis LeSaffre cup competition during the IBIE show in Las Vegas, in September. Something all bakers should be looking forward to.

Hey, for once I gotta run, but not upstairs. I gotta check on Dara, see how she is doing. Had a great croissant at the hotel breakfast this morning, reminded me of home.