perfidy

This installment of my ongoing bread-blogging is about mediocrity. Although I sometimes forget it, it is entirely possible for a highly reputed artisan bakery to be nothing more mediocre.

I don't mean to say bad. Bad bread is another thing entirely, and usually comes as a gummy sliced loaf touted as "whole grain" but packed full of lethicin and additives to make the texture over as something akin to Wonder Bread. A loaf of oversweetened spongy whole wheat bread studded with toothbreaking seeds is as appetizing as cat vomit, especially for $4 a loaf for the Pepperidge Farm and Cape Cod offerings at my local Stop & Shop. No, my object today is mediocre bread.

This morning I took my weekly summer jaunt into the yuppie haven of Marblehead to hit the weekly farmers' market. While stocking up on six different kinds of greens, locally made cheeses and the first beets of the season, I picked up what looked like a beautiful baguette with which to enjoy the aforementioned cheese. I specifically chose this baguette because another vendor at the market recommended them as the "best bread in Boston."

I now know that this statement is not only a lie but also a calumny and an act of treachery.

A baguette is among the very simplest of doughs: nothing but water, flour, yeast, and salt gently kneaded together to form a fairly soft mass without a great deal of strength. True baguette dough is always made one of two ways: with a pate fermentee, which is basically yesterday's dough left overnight and incorporated into today's bake; or a poolish, which is a mix of equal weights flour and water with a tiny amount of commercial (or wild) yeast added and left to stand overnight to ripen. Either method results in a slow-rising dough that contains a surprising depth of flavor. Pate fermentee generally contributes a slightly sour note to the loaf, where poolish is slightly more sweet and wheaty tasting. Either way, you end up with a very flavorful loaf.

Like the best French recipes, making a baguette is simple but not easy. There is a highly refined set of techniques for rising, shaping, slashing, and baking that helps achieve desired result.

And what is that desired result? You want a caramel-brown and very crisp crust with well-defined flaps rising from where you slashed the loaf, a proper ratio of crust to crumb (the baguette must be neither to fat nor too skinny), and a crumb that is creamy yellow in color and rather springy and interspersed randomly with a lattice of holes ranging from smaller than your pinky tip to the size of a large marble. No holes or larger holes means you need to work on your shaping technique and possibly on your dough formula.

These simple ingredients, when handled according to the best techniques, add up to one of the culinary wonders of the world. I have bought French baguettes in Paris that rank among the very best things I have ever tasted, and despite the fact that baguettes made here in the USA can never quite replicate the fleeting and transcendent flavors of their French counterparts, they can come awfully close to equalling this perfection.

So what of the highly touted and expensive baguette I bought today? Well, eww. Up close, the crust proved to be a tawny gold color several shades short of brown and devoid of any of the crispness or delicious browned flavors that baguette crust promises; the loaf as a whole was nearly floppy. The thing had been made much too fat and a bit too short so there was far too much crumb for the amount of poor crust. The crumb itself was pillowy and nearly snowy white and the hole structure was more like that of Italian scala bread with its fine network of tiny holes than a true baguette. The flavor was insipid and lacked any of the depth and complexity that comes from pre-fermenting. It tasted more like a straight dough whipped up start to finish in about five hours. In short, everything that could possibly have gone wrong did, except for the slashing. The slashes on top were perfect, with the desired trademark "ears" that ideally allow one to pick up a baguette by one of these flaps. At least that was done right.

I can (and have) do better than this in my own kitchen, and I am not a master baker by any means, merely a dedicated amateur. The Bread & Butter Bakery in Jamaica Plain, Boston, MA should be ashamed to offer such half-assed product for sale anywhere, especially for better than $3 per loaf. If they cut the amount of dough per baguette by an ounce or so, increased the bake temperature and oven steam, and paid more attention to flavor, they could not only get a fair $3 for their baguette but would cut production costs as well. I can only hope that this was just an unlucky day for the baguettes; I dimly rememember being fairly happy though not impressed with their breads last year, including their epi, which are made with baguette dough.

People keep telling me I should open a bakery; if this is my competition, maybe I should think more seriously about it.