Teamwork

Teamwork !

Nice day today...sick push in the morning with everyone hands on, Benjamin and I doing the pate blanche, Yann doing bio, Alex doing the viennoiserie, seigle Auvergne, ciabatta, Sarasin, autolyse etc...And Alexandre on the oven. I ended up spending the morning with Alexandre, taking notes about small details when scoring different ways. He told me he knows 30 different ways to score a boule, different shapes just by changing small details, even if it’s still the same amount of scores. And the difference between a baker and someone just chucking some dough in the oven is the finesse and the attention to visual detail. Making sure your scores are all parallel, corners all in line etc...It’s all noticed on a subconscious level.

It made me kind of sad to think about coming home...I don’t want to stop learning. But I’ll have to put more effort into upping my game and trying things out myself. I definitely want to visit Maison Pozzoli again in a few years... or maybe even have chef and Alexandre come visit Cape Town for a bit...I already want to try to organise to get a case of wine to them...

I ended up loading most of the bread today...it went ok, except for a few very borderline bakes...and I let the Sarasin over prove which sucks. It’s a really dense bread and not really responsive...one minute I check it and it feels dense and under proved, 5 min later and I see the surface starting to separate like when dough is over proving and I knew it was a mess. And it bakes pretty long as well...

We had some baking students come in and visit today... like I mentioned before most areas have a baking school but these kids looked young. When I asked chef about it he said most were 15/16 and already studying to enter the service/kitchen/baking area. That’s hectic!! They all looked very smart in formal suits though.

After baking was done I helped the others line crap loads of tins with pate feulletage for the quiches...everyone was involved, even chef and Jean-Luc (the guy who calls me compote) after that we prepped a huge batch of monsieur. Here they put the cheese on top and gratinate it.

Came home and chilled. Yesterday the curtain fell down when I tried to open it (the walls are very old and powdery and the curtain was too heavy. So now I just put them around my bed so I have a curtain to keep light out and heat in since I sleep on the couch anyway. Fatiha and I were joking that it’s like those bed forts you make when you’re a kid J

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?

Meeting Fam Pozzoli

Today I met with chef Berthemier at Maison Pozzoli and was introduced to Monsieur and Madame Pozzoli as well as their son, Alexander. Chef Berthemier and Monsieur Pozzoli are really good friends, both of them being MOF Boulangers as well. I got shown around the boulangerie and saw loads of machines that I’ve never even seen before, like machines that shape baguettes once the dough is divided as in terms of quantity alone, they produce 450 (quatre san cinquante) pain de tradition baguettes. They also produce a wide variety of small breads (I saw a fig and honey one) and various other loaves.

There is a separate section in the back where the patisserie is produced and there are also loads of proving boxes (chambre de fermentation) where the doughs are fermented overnight. They also have a machine that produces the levain that is used in almost all of their breads. It has a capacity for 45kg of levain....45kg. Each day they add more flour and water and the machine mixes it and regulates the temperature and humidity. I tasted some of the levain and it had a really smooth acidic flavour and a slightly sweet undertone.

The shop is in a really old building; it has these huge stone blocks in the wall and just feels old. There is even a wood fired oven but unfortunately they don’t use it as I think people complained about the smoke. They have a 5 deck oven for the breads and I watched Mr Pozzoli for a while as he loaded and scored the baguettes. That guy is insanely fast. He comes from a family of 4 generations of chefs with himself and Alexander being 2 generations of bakers.

I start at 3am on Monday, so I will need to wake up before 2am as there is no public transport that runs at that time...back to the good old days.

Maison Pozzoli

Around lunchtime I helped Fatiha put up some curtains, about 3m up, with only a 2m ladder...because of the rod and the fitting as well as the amount of space between the walls, I had to put one ring up, put the rod through and then thread the 2 curtains on and then put the other curtain ring in. The manual was in French so I just had to figure out how to put the bit in as it wasn’t like the one my dad has. Fatiha also had no spirit level so I had to use her judgement to line the rods up. All in all I was pretty chuffed with myself, considering the circumstances I was working under. It looked good and Fatiha was happy so I gave myself a pat on the back. I literally did give myself a pat on the back.

I met up with Marlene around 2pm and we went to Starbucks. It was my first time, and we both had white chocolate mochas which were nice, but very sweet “tres sucre” and we had a doughnut each and Marlene had a cinnamon roll too which tasted good too but was super sweet. She has a big sweet tooth so it was fine for her but I almost had a sugar coma. She also gave me some beer made from myrtilles (blueberries) which she bought for me at la fete myrtilles outside of St Etienne.

We then walked around and I went past Maison Pozzoli.....It’s a baker’s wet dream.

Maison Pozzoli, Lyon, France

The bread looks so SICK!!!! I am super stoked to get in there and start baking. Marlene insisted on buying me an assortment of some of her favourite viennoiserie including a framboisier, tarte citron, charlotte and something else... we then went to do some “leche vitrine” (lit. “lick windows”, it’s French for window shopping, because you are usually so close to what it is you want to buy that you can lick it).

only the good stuff !

So many people were out that I again asked “when the f*** do people work here?” It was probably around 4pm and there were hoards of people walking around and doing shopping.

Marlene had to leave to go to work around 5pm so we said goodbye and I walked back to Croix Rousse and on the way got a haircut. Like most things in France, you have to wait. So I waited for about 1 hour and just read in the salon. The guy did a really good job and it was a really good price compared to others that I saw (16Euros) and I spoke French with him and we told me about living in France and so it was cool to find out what people living in the city think about it.

As soon as I got home I had to leave for the couch surfing meeting so I managed to eat a kebab Jand then I headed down to meet Marion at the opera house in hotel de Ville. She had some friends from Italy and St. Etienne with her (Kristiana, Elisa, Julia, Fabio and Clement), Clement could very easily be the French doppelganger of François Roux [a high school friend]...I almost thought it was him and he even has similar mannerisms and movements. We took the metro to Saxe Gambetta and then met the other couch surfers at cafe de la Madeleine. I almost downed a pint of penache coz that is so delicious (a shandy pretty much, but the use a lemonade, not sprite).

the Italians...

We played some petanque (boules) and I got my ass handed to me hard-core...my team lost 14-2. The Italians had to leave around 10pm as some were leaving for Italy that night and the others had to go back to St. Etienne so I left soon afterwards. They were all from Florence, but studied in Bologna. I gave them some shit for not really being able to cook and I was like “what kind of Italian girl can’t cook?” but I was just joking so we laughed about it and discussed some specialities of Italy and I taught them some Xhosa too.