Paris is all about bread

OK, first boulangerie is the bakery while boulanger is, well, the baker.

Boulangerie are everywhere in Paris, in fact it seems that there's one on nearly every other corner. Aside from the various sweets offered (the sole reason we are living in Paris and subject of another post), it's the bread that drives traffic to one bakery over the other.

While many boulangers have their own specialty breads, and some boulangeries do pain au lait and one or two different grain or cereal breads, when you talk bread in Paris, you're really talking about the (drum roll here) baguette.

You'll frequently see people walking down the street carrying a baguette like a drum major's baton nibbling at one end. (In fact the word baguette means "stick" and is synonymous with the French word baton). I've even caught myself doing the same thing. You simply can't wait until you get home to start snacking on the thing. A student at Le Cordon Bleu, a young slim Asian woman, confessed to Susan one day that she was addicted to baguettes and would sometimes eat two a day!

Bread is flour, water, yeast and salt. Period. That's it.

Now the way it works here in Paris is that every boulanger uses flour from just one company and its that company that provides the recipe for baguette; it's right on their bags in fact.

There are two basic types of baguette: the long (some really long) thin loaves that are usually sold with a small piece of paper around the middle for carrying purposes, and the tradition, which is usually shorter with narrowed ends and often wrapped in a sleeve marked "artisan" made. The difference up front aside from size is that the "regular" baguette sells for €.85 while the tradition usually sells for €1 or €1.10. Yet the truly remarkable thing is how different (1) the two types of baguettes are from one another and (2) how baguettes differ in taste from one boulanger to another.

Now baguettes, and indeed most bread in general, is made fresh every morning in Paris and really meant to be consumed that day/evening. In fact, nearly every boulangerie makes sandwiches out of their freshly baked baguettes, and the better ones use only fresh ingredients. For example, at Pascal's on rue Monge, he produces sandwiches made with both regular baguette and pain au lait (made with brioche dough), and they make their mayonnaise fresh every day as well!

OK. so why is there such a disparity in bread quality?

I have no idea. I suspect it's the attention to details, the focus on fresh ingredients, the determination to produce a high-quality product at reasonable cost that sets one boulanger apart from another.

I can tell you that in our neighborhood alone there is enormous difference in quality of baguettes. The boulanger on rue Saint Hilaire just a few meters from our apartment produces a medicore, thin and airy baguette (and the tradition isn't much better), while the boulanger a few "blocks" away over on Blvd. l'Hopital, just across from the metro stop Saint Marcel produces an exquisite baguette tradition; the boulanger a block up from our apartment on Saint Marcel is somewhere in the middle.

And Pascal's? His breads are all extremely good as you might expect from an "artisan" boulanger, and his pain au lait is outstanding.

Oh, and we've eaten one already today!