A Baguette From # 78 Or Pizza Bianca From # 22
On our first trip to Paris, Sally and I stayed in the 6th Arrondissement close to the Rue du Cherche-Midi and Boulangerie Poilâne at # 8. At the time, Poilâne was the most famous and respected bread maker in Paris, in France and perhaps the world.
A block from our apartment, walking north on the Rue du Cherche-Midi heading towards Poilâne sits Le Nimrod, which is a cafe / bistro. We spent a lot of time in Le Nimrod at all hours of the day on that first trip. Le Nimrod served Poilâne's bread exclusively. They also served Berthillon Ice Cream exclusively. Berthillon at the time was the most famous and respected ice cream maker in Paris, in France and perhaps the world. Although the Italians will give them a run for their money with Gelato. Gelato is not quite the same thing and that discussion is for another day.
Poilâne is renowned for its signature sourdough miche which is a large, round loaf made from stone-ground wheat flour, water, Guérande sea salt, and natural leaven. This bread is baked in wood-fired ovens and is known for its thick crust and dense, tangy crumb. The miche weighs just over 4 pounds and can keep for several days, up to a week.
Poilâne sells other breads and pastries but not baguettes. They consider baguettes and similar light white breads non-traditional. They are correct. The large size is intentional, reflecting traditional French baking practices where large loaves were made to last several days. The miche's thick crust and dense crumb help preserve its freshness over time.
On this first trip, we bought the Poilâne miche a couple of times because we had a kitchen and took advantage of the morning markets where we got cheese, meats, vegetables and fruits. It is difficult to be a cook and not take advantage of the best markets in the world. We bought the half loaf each time. They sell the whole loaf, a half loaf, a quarter loaf and even just slices. Parisians love this bread and they come in and buy a slice to consume on a walk or a couple of slices to make a sandwich later. In restaurants we would be served baguettes and other forms of the light white bread i.e. boule, batard and Epi. Well, except for Le Nimrod where we always got Poilâne. Poilâne originally baked their bread in a wood fired oven in the basement of the shop at # 8. They still do today although for their other locations and mail order they bake offsite but still in wood fired ovens.
I grew up in the mid 20th century American love affair with sliced, ultra modern, squishy, tasteless Wonder Bread that "helps build strong bodies 12 ways". In 1928, the Chillicothe Baking Company in Missouri was the first to sell sliced bread to the American public, using a bread slicer invented by Iowan Otto Rohwedder. Two years later, Wonder Bread became America’s first nationally distributed sliced bread.
Julia Child asked, "How can a nation be great if its bread tastes like Kleenex?", which kind of tells you what she thought about Wonder Bread. At my house, we had squishy sliced bread toasted for breakfast, in sandwiches for lunch, and towered on a plate for dinner.
My mother and father were from Mississippi. Their families were poor and lived on farms. They didn't use store bought bread. They baked their bread. Of course, being in the South the grain of choice wasn't wheat. It was corn. This cornbread wasn't sweet. It didn't have any sugar in it. That's Yankee cornbread. They utilized the ingredients they had available. They had chickens so they used eggs. They had dairy cows so they used milk or buttermilk. They had corn so they used cornmeal. The only items that were "store bought" were salt and baking soda. Of course the oil used was bacon grease. Everyone had a can of that sitting on the back of the stove. The cooking vessel of choice was a cast iron skillet.
There was a constant debate at our house whether my dad's mom or my mom made the best cornbread. It was never resolved. I never saw my dad not eat mom's cornbread. In fact, I saw him on numerous occasions, at different times of the day, sit down with a glass of milk and crumble a slice of her cornbread into it. He then ate it with a spoon and a smile on his face. I have later found out that this is an old custom in the South.
In traditional Southern cornbread, all the ingredients are mixed together and then poured into a preheated cast iron skillet that has an ample amount of bacon grease in it. It is then shoved into a woodfired stove oven and cooked until golden brown. At our house it was shoved into an electric stove oven. When it comes out it has a dense and crumbly texture and a savory, salty, corn and smoky pork flavor. We got that smoky flavor because we used bacon grease not because we used a woodfired stove.
We also had biscuits at our house. They were served mostly at breakfast but on occasion we would have them served with a slice of country ham in them. They were made from scratch or from Pillsbury. Like cornbread they are considered a quick bread because there is no yeast and they don't need rising time.
When I went away to college and got involved in the restaurant business, I found a lot of different kinds of bread but nothing like what exists today. They were all variations on the soft squishy bread.
The timeline for bread in the United States starts with the Native Americans and their corn based breads cooked on a rock or in the ashes of a fire. When the colonists arrived in the 1600's, they brought sourdough and basic wheat breads. The 1800's brought industrial milling of wheat and other grains and the development of commercial yeasts. The early 1900's brought the factory breads and the sliced white bread boom. It wasn't until the 1970's - 1990's that Artisanal Bread rebirth started to become a reality with sourdough, whole grains, and breads that were crusty on the outside and soft and flavorful on the inside. This Artisanal Bread Revolution required American bakers to go to Europe and train with their best bakers. Quite a few of them went.
When I opened my first restaurant in 1977, the Iron Gate House in Virginia Beach, there were no Artisanal bakeries in town or even close by. The only choices available were to bake from scratch, buy frozen dough, or buy par-baked frozen loaves, baguettes being one of the choices.
At the time, I knew nothing about baking and chose the frozen dough route from a company named Bridgeford. At the end of the night after cleaning up, I would grease my loaf pans, slip a frozen pre-formed block of dough into each pan, and place them on the top shelf of the cooling stove. Overnight they would thaw, proof and rise to fill the pan. In the morning, after they reached the right height, I would bake them off. We served the bread with unsalted butter. It wasn't outstanding bread but it worked for a while.
After we sold the Iron Gate House and moved to Captiva in 1983, the artisan bread movement had started in this country. First in California and New York. Then it started to spread all over the country. You could get really good bread if you were willing to look for it.
I got lucky in Captiva when we opened the Greenhouse in 1984, the guy I was buying fish from turned me on to Marcel "The French Baker". Marcel was from Mougins, France which is a small commune on the French Riviera a bit north of Cannes. Roger Vergé had his 3 star Michelin Guide restaurant, Moulin de Mougins in the same town.
Marcel's family had a small bakery there for generations. He had a large family, all involved in the bakery. Marcel determined he needed to go to America and seek his fortune. He came to Fort Meyers and started baking his bread. He made the perfect baguette. He made what the French call a baguette traditional. He started his baking late at night, like all French bakers.
He finished up in the morning and would actually deliver the bread himself. I was always at the Greenhouse in the morning checking in deliveries and cleaning. I had an espresso machine so Marcel and I would take a break and have a caffe. I would like to think that he delivered the bread himself because he liked talking to me but I know it was because he liked fishing. He always brought his fishing gear.
A year later, a Swedish gentleman, Bengt
Nygren, was building a French restaurant on Captiva. It was called La Vendée and according to local gossip, he hired a famous French chef and was spending about $2 million to build a restaurant around this chef and his talents. The La Vendée crew came into the Greenhouse for dinner several times. The chef was Jean Grondin and he gave me a tour of the restaurant during the construction. I suggested Marcel go by and see if they were interested in buying his bread. The day after he went, we were having our morning caffe and I asked him what he thought. He said they had a pastry chef who was going to bake their bread.
He said it looked like it was going to be a very nice restaurant. They had given him the nickel tour. He did have Roger Vergé's Moulin de Mougins to compare it with. Then he said, "Do you know what I would do if I had $2 Million?" I said, "No, what?" "I would put it in the bank and go fishing." That tells you all you need to know about his thoughts on restaurants and fishing. I liked Marcel a lot.
When I started taking trips to California, I visited Chez Panisse, Alice Waters restaurant. She helped bump start the artisan bread movement in California by encouraging Steve Sullivan, who was a cook and busboy at Chez Panisse, to start Acme Bread Company. Today, his bread is everywhere in the Bay area, farmers markets, food shops, everywhere. When I would visit, it was my bread of choice. Tartine Bakery started in the early 2000's and they provide stiff competition. They make great bread.
The history of sourdough bread in San Francisco is a long one. It dates back to the gold rush in 1849 with the opening of Boudin Bakery. It centered on Isidore Boudin, a Frenchman and the development of his sourdough starter. The cold, foggy climate of San Francisco was ideal for cultivating a unique strain of wild yeast—Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis (named after the city).
The Boudin Bakery continues to this day producing sourdough bread. It like a lot of bakeries went through a decline during the era of the squishy white sliced bread but it never disappeared. Why didn't Alice and other high end restaurants in the Bay area use it? By the 1970's and 1980's, when New American Cuisine and California Cuisine revolutions were beginning, Boudin had become a large commercial bakery, producing a lower quality product even though they still used the original starter from 1849.
This artisan bread boom started with bakers like Steve Sullivan at Acme, Nancy Silverton at La Brea, Jim Lahey at Sullivan Street, and Eli Zabar at Eli's Bread. They are just a few. There were hundreds of bakers all across the country that jumped on the bandwagon. Of course, Julia Child and James Beard had been advocating for quality crusty loaves made with long fermentations and natural starters for decades. Child had devoted a section of "Mastering The Art Of French Cooking" Volume II on artisan bread making. James Beard had a whole book on bread, "Beard On Bread".
This artisan bread boom developed from a desire for quality and authenticity, inspired by European bread traditions, it was fueled by pioneering bakers, and made mainstream by media exposure and home-baking accessibility. This culinary backlash against industrial bread was fueled by the travels of a lot of American chefs not just bakers, to Europe... Italy and France in particular.
So where did the high-end restaurants in this country get their bread prior to this boom? Like me they had to look around for a quality product. Some of them had in-house bakers who did the job, but this was rare because of the expense for an item that was typically given away. (That has changed. Some restaurants now charge for bread.) Some had small local bakeries bake to their specifications. Some used the bread from large commercial bakeries, but this bread didn't have the quality of true European traditional breads. Some went the frozen dough or the frozen par-baked loaf route. Some focused their bread service on brioche, pan de mie and rolls, which were more in the realm of the pastry chef. There was a restaurant in Virginia Beach that centered their bread service on popovers, that old mini-Yorkshire Pudding concept. They were delicious.
You can understand my joy at finding Marcel. Here was a guy who made the perfect baguette at a very affordable price and delivered daily. He made a baguette that I couldn't even come close to making. Besides the fact that I didn't have the knowledge, I am a night person but my late night activities centered on the hedonistic rather than the culinary. There are only so many hours in a day.
When I was living in Atlanta, I started buying bread at Harry's Farmers Market, which had great bread and fantastic fruits and vegetables. Sometimes it was still warm from the oven.
I was selling wine to restaurants and shops at the time. In my travels around Buckhead, I heard of a guy who was baking bread in the back of Prici, an Italian restaurant. He was baking for all of the Buckhead Life restaurants which at the time was about 8 different restaurants. I went by and talked to him. I think his name was Al but I'm not sure. That was a long time ago and names have never been my strong suit. He liked wine. I had a large wine sample account. He was willing to trade bread for wine. Sally really liked his cherry chocolate sourdough boule. I was partial to the baguette and his plain sourdough boule.
When we moved to North Carolina, I traveled the whole state selling wine. We lived in Cary which was very close to Chapel Hill and a gourmet food store called Southern Season. They had outstanding bread, baguettes and sourdough boules. That's the thing about good bread, it's always there you just have to look for it.
My attention focused on French style breads like the baguette and sourdough boule until I went to Italy and found ciabatta and pizza bianca. Pizza bianca, meaning "white pizza," is a beloved Roman specialty that differs from the American cheese laden concept of pizzas. At Forno Campo de' Fiori in Rome, where I first tasted it, it's pure bread heaven.
This flatbread is made from a simple yeast dough, stretched into long, rectangular slabs. Before baking, it's brushed generously with high-quality extra virgin olive oil and sprinkled with coarse sea salt. The result is a golden, crispy crust with a chewy interior, often enjoyed warm and fresh from the oven. Forno Campo de' Fiori is renowned for its pizza bianca. When Sally and I were in Rome, we had it every day for lunch, along with some fruit, prosciutto, and cheese that we acquired from the morning market in the piazza that housed the forno.

There was always a crowd in the morning but getting the pizza bianca was an easy procedure. You walk in, indicate that you want the pizza bianca, show with your hands how much you want and they slice it off with a big knife. It is great. Forno Campo de' Fiori makes and sell a lot of different breads and pastries. We went only in the mornings and a good 80% of the customers were there for the pizza bianca. The other breads looked good but why mess with perfection.
Adjacent to the shop entrance was a window where you could watch the bakers make the 6-8 foot long pizzas. They made flavored kinds too. The Rossa, with a simple tomato sauce and the Zucchini, with thin sliced zucchini in season, are examples of the popular variations. Pizza Bianca was always the big seller.
On our trip to Paris in 2009, we stayed on the Île Saint-Louis. It was a very nice apartment. Sally likes pain au chocolat. In our travels around the island we found the Boulangerie Saint Louis at # 78 Rue Saint-Louis en l’Île. He makes an excellent sourdough baguette de tradition. In fact it is one of the best I have ever tasted.
Sally likes
pain au chocolat with her morning coffee. Not the pain au chocolat from the first
boulangerie I came to or even the second. No. It must be from the third, this one at # 78. The baker, Hedi Habhab, uses two pieces of Valrhona chocolate and he uses Bordier
butter. She considers it the best. So every morning on this trip I would walk down to # 78, past the other 2, and purchase 2 pain au chocolat and a baguette de tradition. Sometimes I would get 2 baguettes, being a food addict after all.
On our trip in 2015, we stayed in the 5th arrondissement in a very nice apartment on the Rue Monge in what is called the Latin Quarter. It was within a block from two Eric Kayser Boulangeries, one at # 8 and the other at # 14. The first morning in the apartment I decided to try Eric Kayser out. The fact that the one # 14 was half a block from the apartment and had an espresso machine helped with the decision.
I was curious why there are 2 stores within a block of each other, so I asked. The boulangerie at # 8 was Mr. Kayser's first bakery opened in 1996 and is called Maison Kayser. In 1998, he wanted to expand and offer different items. At # 14 he focused on organic and gluten-free offerings but still carried the core Maison Kayser breads and pastries. He also offered espresso drinks and a few tables for customers. The bakery at # 8 was basically take-out. Now he has boulangeries all over Paris and the world, including New York City.
All the Eric Kayser bakeries offer Baguette Monge. It is a short sourdough baguette de tradition with two pointed ends, so it offers a greater crust to crumb ratio. This is appreciated by crust enthusiast like myself. It also benefits from the long fermentation and quality flour which gives it a crackly golden crust and a creamy crumb. It is real close to the quality of the baguette de tradition at # 78.
Kayser also uses 2 pieces of Valrhona chocolate and uses Bordier butter for his pain au chocolat. Sally was very happy with it. It also saved me a 30 - 40 minute trip to # 78. Paris has a lot of really good boulangeries. The one at # 78 is still my all time favorite for baguette de tradition.
When we opened the Crazy Conch Cafe on Tierra Verde, I didn't have to look around for good bread. I had found Mazzaro's Italian Market while working for Winebow when I first moved to Tierra Verde three years earlier. They make outstanding bread but with a definite Italian slant, i.e. ciabatta, focaccia, and semolina. They also make a sourdough baguette that I love.
When we first opened there was a guy who would go by Mazzaro's every morning and get our bread. After a couple years, he disappeared which happens a lot in the food business in Florida. So, I would get up early every morning and drive the 20 minutes to Mazzaro's and the 20 minutes back to get the bread. It was that good. Did I mention that they have a espresso bar next to the breads and they roast their own beans? They also have all kinds of pastries next to the breads including "to die for" cannolis? All the things they offer is another story for another day. With my food addiction, Mazzaro's is a dangerous place for me.
When we sold the restaurant, we moved over the Skyway Bridge to Bradenton. I always buy bread at Mazzaro's if I'm over that way but to make a special trip is a bit much. I have since found the breads at my local Costco are a livable substitute. Their baguette is very good and their seasonal cranberry walnut sourdough boule is a favorite of Sally's.
So to answer the question of which is better the baguette from # 78 or the pizza bianca from # 22, my answer is "when in Rome do as the Romans do".
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