First day at Maison Pozzoli

Today was my first day at Maison Pozzoli. I woke up 1:50am and then had a nice 25min walk down to the bakery, there were hardly any people around but it was still pretty light and safe, not once since I’ve been here have I felt unsafe though.

I got started on shaping the brioche first, making brioche loaves with 8 pieces, like mosbolletjies, une tresse aux pralines which was first shaped into a loaf, then cut in half and then braided so the cut side is up when it bakes giving it a very cool visual appeal. I also made brioche a tete, which is the brioche with the little piece on top.

I then helped shape some of the baguette de tradition. The dough is made the day before and then put in the chambre de fermentation overnight. The dough is very wet and soft, with most bread having a hydration ration of about 65% which is high. The dough is difficult to preshape but I got the hang of it and I think in about a week I should have it down....its first preshaped into an oval then put onto these sleeves on a rotisserie like machine that rotates the dough, basically facilitating having all your dough preshaped on a board. After they are preshaped they are put through a machine that shapes them into baguettes...remember they do about 450 baguettes, just counting the pain de tradition...the dough is around 90kg...

While Alex was doing that (there are 2 Alexandre’s, but I’ll refer to the young one as Alex and Alex Pozzoli as Alexandre) Alexandre showed me how to shape “charonte” which is about a 60cm long piece of tradition dough shaped into a long ciabatta shape. I did flutes as well, which are kinda like short, fat baguettes no more than 55cm long...

I shaped some pain viennoise into burger buns, navettes and long “navettes”, and some pain viennoise had choc chips and orange peel.

We also did some sort of bread dough with white chocolate inside... I saw they made “pain sandwich” which is a name for the shape which is about a 15x6cm long flat bread, in a turmeric, paprika and cuttlefish ink flavours (cuttlefish ink bread was black...so cool).

The flour in kept in a cellar (cave a francaise) and only comes in 25kg or 50kg bags. In a month the bakery goes through 3 TONNES of flour....that’s THREE TONNES. F*** me...

They also have 2 cats that live in the bakery to literally catch mice...I saw one when I was changing in the morning and one during the day. The cats kinda just hang around and are curious but I guess they are really good as Alexandre told me they used to have hundreds of mice.

Like most of Lyon, especially central Lyon, it’s really old. And the building is no exception.

Mr Pozzoli did the lamenation of the croissant dough when he came in and then he and Alexandre started rolling the croissants and pain au chocolat and Alex and I helped as well. We also made a roulade with crème patissiere and praline...

I will add more tomorrow as am sure I’ve forgotten some as well.

I finished at 12pm and then had to head to OFII (office France de l’Immigration et L’Intergration, basically foreign affairs) in Perrache but I got there early so I had to wait for about 1 hour and then after the medical exam and when I was being processed I realised I had forgotten a page and I also needed to make copies of something so I had to go back to Croix, walking the last bit as I wanted to see if the internet cafe was open, which it wasn’t so I managed to find a stationary shop where I got it done and then headed back and made it with 1 hour before OFII closed. Afterwards I took the tram to the metro but then something happened and the tram and metro wasn’t working or running but they took so long to inform people, most of us were waiting as the tram sign said it was still coming.

I ended up having to walk from Perrache all the way to Croix Rousse as the whole A line was f***ed and because of the delays my ticket wasn’t valid anymore (the basic tickets are valid for 1 hour and can be used as many times as you like in that one hour). Not cool...am exhausted. And the tonic I bought which was the Carrefour brand, is half the price of Schweppes but I found out it as acesulfamine-K, one of my most hated additives along with aspartame...they both leave a shitty artificial aftertaste so now I can’t even enjoy my G&T for a while...when it rains, it snows. Eh Cape Town?