Of Harleys, Champagne & Banana Bread Beer…

Was raining this morning as I headed out. So that already puts a damper on your day (see what i did there?). And when I walked into the bakery, Alexandre had already done all the biological breads, boules and miches and charentais...he started at 1am. And he is a beast. Shit, so hopped on the dividing of the blanche... see, I don’t hit the ground running. Usually I have to make sure I have everything sorted out and know what I’m going to do then I go for it. Which is basically what Alexandre does. Back in the day, when I had all my recipes in my head and knew where everything was I didn’t have to think about things. Shit like this frustrates me but also gets me really amped to get back into being in charge of my own baking space and just dominating it.

Ah also, Gazuese peed in one of the containers...J

I had forgotten what cat piss smells like! I think he was just asserting his male dominance or something but the scarey cat (he literally is one) disappeared for the whole day. We only found him at the end of the day when everyone was worried about him...he was in the roof the whole day, probably sleeping. He’s still ridiculously cute though

Today we heated up the wood fired oven again. The flames were so intense I was able to see all the way to the back...it is insanely deep. Basically once you have it heated up, you start loading your bigger breads at the back and start working to the smaller shapes (>boules, miches, baguettes, petit miches etc...) so everything cooks more or less the same. The only restriction is that there is only a small door to load so you can’t load a lot at a time which makes baking the same amount of breads impossible pretty much. Alexandre said you can pretty much only bake the biological in there. And then he asked me “so if we use this oven in December will you stay?” Swak [weak]...he knows I’d want to see and work with that but I can’t.

It was Williams last day with us so he brought a bottle of Louis Perrier champagne Harley Davidson...he showed me a picture of it. I think the model is a Fatboy. And he has the leather jacket and apparently some tattoo sleeves as well. That made me laugh...I can’t really imagine chef on a Harley.

I'll be baaaack!!!

He also showed me some old mixers from the 1800s and some old bakery posters from the 1920’s...really cool to see what they looked like... back in the day the bakers would just work in pants as it used to be so hot in the bakeries.

which we had with some pizza and quiche at the end of the day. And then were just chatting. I found out that Mr Pozzoli has a

After work I went home and chilled. But not before making a boss dish of steak mince, cooked in pork rillettes, because I didn’t have any oil, red wine, and arrabiata sauce. Topped with pasta and a Roquefort and mace béchamel and cheddar. BOOM!! Not bad for student budget and limited work space ;)

Dossed [ hit the sack / slept ] for a bit then woke up just after 7pm and headed down to meet Alex and William at King Arthur pub which is just down the road from the bakery. It was actually pretty small compared to pubs back home. They had a nice selection of beers, quite a few of them home brewed, but we had the banana bread beer J

as it was just so different. Normally I don’t really like banana flavoured things but it was really good. We grabbed a table and watched NZ give it to France hard in some test rugby. They have nothing on Bok [Springbok Rugby Team / South Africa] supporters though: p second round I had a blonde beer. And we ordered some pies!! YAY finally! At like 5euros each papa... we got a chicken and mushroom, a steak and ale and a pork sausage roll. They served them all together on a slate which I thought was a really cool idea. They all tasted really good. Not like the usually Pieman's [local South African pies bought at filling stations] or Mamas pies [cheap supermarket pies] back home. But I’m not hating, the cheeseburger pie is my best friend at 4am

So after the game we decided to head home and I bought some frites and frikkadels

(in this case they were Belgian sausages, flavoured with mace which was really tasty). The frites were beautiful...crisp exterior, soft moist interior and beautifully seasoned.

While walking back to the parking, William bumped into a friend so he and I ended up walking back to where the pub was and went up to a friend’s apartment and chatted there for a while before they all decided to go out but then I headed home as I was already nodding off.

Working Out...

Starting today, this week I no longer divide the baguette dough in the morning, but divide and shape the biological bread which includes the pain aux 6 cereales, L’Authentic, T80, Epeautre, Campagne, pain complet, seigle Auvergne and pain au lin.

We do various shapes and sizes with the different doughs, ranging from “boules” or round loaves, to “miches” which are a longer, tapered oval shape, shorter than a baguette but much thicker. “Batards” or small ovals, and the large “flutes” as well. Some of the doughs are coated in either seeds or maybe oats or dried maize after shaping. For instance, the pain aux 6 cereales is coated in rolled oats which gives it a really nice almost peanut butter flavour when cooked.

Alexandre showed me some techniques to shape things really quickly and it really is insanely fast at a slight loss of regularity but that’s just because I’m not used to the method and the wetter dough as well. I think within the week I’ll have it down. When you see the movement of the shaping it makes sense in terms of flow and tightness/strength of the shape.

After shaping was done, I did the autolyse for the pate blanche (the base dough for all the baguettes we make)...200kg of dough is no laughing matter...

i lug 4x25kg bags of flour up from the cellar each morning and then have to take all the dough out of the mixer for the autolyse and put back for the final mixing.

Otherwise a pretty normal day. Finished really early so left work at like 10:30...did my weekly grocery shopping and then just chilled.

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.