Our daily kneads

A week ago, I decided to go on a carb-free diet. This is a terrifying prospect for me, but not half as terrifying as it is to anyone French. “But you’re allowed bread, of course?” they ask tenderly, preparing to riot on my behalf outside the gates of Versailles, if not. A life without bread is one not worth living, in France.

Frankly, I agree. Despite the fact that I wasn’t blessed with the Gallic metabolic inheritance of a breadstick-like shape (mine is best described as brioche-like), French bread is, without exaggeration, worth overthrowing governments for. One of the few cultural exports that surpasses its own fame, it never quite tastes the same in any other country. A meal is incomplete without bread here. I have even seen it being served on the side of Thai curry, a carb-carb pairing that would stop Dr Atkins in his bacon-filled tracks.

Everyone in Paris has their favourite bakery, and lunchtime sees long queues at popular ones. And it’s perfectly normal, I was glad to find, to reach into your paper bag minutes after exiting the boulangerie, tear off the quignon, the floury heel of a baguette, and start to eat. I consider myself a pillar of self-discipline if I haven’t eaten half on the way home.

I have my own favourites: olive fougasse, the wood-smoked pain des amis at Du Pain et Des Idées, the fig bread at Eric Kayser, and the soft, plaited challah bread from the Jewish Boulangerie Murciano, and almost any fresh-baked flaky croissant. Rebels like Gontan Cherrier even make curry baguettes and squid-ink breads with nigella seeds.

But everything pales before the simple perfection of a traditional baguette. The best kinds have a sturdy, golden-bronze crust that cracks if you tap it hard, and a pale, holey, chewy interior. I like them bien cuite (well-cooked), but many prefer pas trop cuite, slightly undercooked and blonde.

The right to fresh bread has legal protection in France: the 1,200 odd boulangers of Paris are not permitted to take their summer holidays whenever they want to. Instead, they have to apply to the prefecture, which regulates the summer closures of bakeries in each neighbourhood, so that no Parisian is ever without bread. This is in accordance with a 1790 law, instituted after a hungry crowd, peeved at the lack of bread, strung baker Denis François up from a Paris lamppost; the authorities quite understandably decided that a lack of pain was a dangerous thing. And here I was voluntarily depriving myself. In preparation for the impending knell of breadless doom, I decided I owed myself one last baguette.

I decided to follow the recommendations of this year’s Meilleure Baguette de Paris competition, which was held a fortnight ago. By law, a baguette de tradition can only contain four ingredients: wheat flour, water, yeast or raising agents and salt. (No preservatives, no additives, which is why the bread doesn’t last more than a day.) The winner, chosen from among 137 entries in a blind taste test, was the baguette from Aux Delices de Palais, a small family-run boulangerie in the 14th arrondissement. The winning baker, Anthony Teixeira, is only 24; his father Antonio Teixeira won the same prize in 1998. The bakery will now supply the Palais de l'Élysée — the home of the President of France — with 40 baguettes every day.

Aux Delices de Palais is a modest neighbourhood affair, whose doorway commemorates the 1998 victory in discreet lettering. Inside, a line of people — “Une baguette, s’il vous plaît” — snakes to the back, and two women hurry to fill orders. It looks like any bakery in any Parisian quartier, but the saleswoman says that they’ve sold thousands of baguettes de tradition since the prize.

Teixeira wrote in Le Nouvel Observateur that owing to the sudden skyrocketing demand, he was no longer able to “rest” his dough for as long as he would like. Then, in an example of charming and obsessive French solicitousness about bread, he advised customers to return in a couple of weeks, after the media frenzy has died down.

Teixeira’s bread was airy, toasty, perfectly crusty. But I compared it with my own neighbourhood stalwart, La Petite Marquise, who placed joint-eighth this year, and couldn’t really discern the difference. Almost all the bread here is so uniformly excellent, that all this quibbling about crumb size and aeration and dough is for experts. I’m content to be standing in my boulangerie when they bring out the floury, just-baked baguettes, suffusing the air with the warm golden smell of new bread. As for the bread-free diet, it lasted six days. Someone bought croissants for breakfast on Sunday, and I’m only human, after all.

(Naintara is a food writer based in Paris. Follow her on twitter >@naintaramaya)

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