Leavening Tradition

They are three of France’s most celebrated bakers, on the cutting edge not because they preach the use of modern technology but because they want to take bread-making back to a simpler time.

“I use what my father taught me. I don’t have a miracle recipe; I just take the best of tradition and improve it,” says Bernard Ganachaud, 70. “All I add is originality.”

Like his two fellow bakers, Lionel Poila^ne and Jean-Luc Poujauran, Ganachaud was pulled into the trade by a baker-father eager to pass on his savoir-faire to his progeny. “Once my father managed to dissuade me from being a lawyer and to follow in his footsteps, I thought I should at least be a good baker,” Ganachaud says.

And he has been, becoming the first baker granted the Meilleur Ouvrier de France (Best Worker of France) award for excellence in his profession. The originality of the native of a farm near the mouth of the Loire River was to succeed in baking bread that tastes like French bread did before World War II.

Now Ganachaud has licensed his style of hand-fashioned baguette, called the flute gana, to 116 French and 19 Japanese bakeries. “I receive candidacies from bakers who want to subscribe to my technique, and [I] select them according to their readiness to follow my rules of preparation,” he says.

As his father did, he has passed along his craft. Two of Ganachaud’s three daughters have graduated from France’s Institut National de la Boulangerie Patisserie (National Institute of Baking and Pastry-making) and have earned the coveted title of maitre-boulanger, or master baker, a rare distinction among women.

The family owns two shops, the first near Pere-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris and the second near the Castle of Vincennes in the eastern suburbs. Both serve crisp ganas straight from the oven that customers can see through a window behind the sales counter.

“We bake small batches in order to sell the freshest product that can be,” Ganachaud says.

Watching his father work as a baker in the southwest of France convinced Jean-Luc Poujauran to do something else in life.

“My father was already a baker, and witnessing how he worked like a slave, I didn’t want to do his job,” Poujauran, 43, says. “So at 14 I started with pastry.”

Five years later, after finishing his training, Poujauran returned to his father’s bakery to help him and assimilate his knowledge. To his astonishment, he found he didn’t want to live on pastry-making alone.

The pink and gold bakery he opened 23 years ago on the Left Bank has an 1890s’ Belle Epoque decor, and Poujauran advocates using quality ingredients such as stone-ground flour and peaches from a family orchard to make his tarts. At a time Europeans are increasingly worried about chemicals in what they eat, Poujauran wants to reassure his clientele.

“My leitmotif is to work on the ability to trace the origin of my ingredients. I use filtered water, sea salt and stone-ground flour,” he says. Believing the taste of the contemporary baguette to be “lifeless,” Poujauran has created flavored breads and back-to-the-roots coarse country loaves, which he delivers daily to many fine restaurants.

If there is a superstar among Parisian bakers, it is Lionel Poila^ne, 54. Each week, via Federal Express, Poila^ne delivers freshly baked boules, cooked over a wood fire, to 1,000 privileged households on the other side of the Atlantic, including those of Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg and Robert De Niro.

Yet it was a difficult path that led Poila^ne to his oven on the Rue du Cherche-Midi near Paris’ Latin Quarter.

After dropping out of school at 14, he reluctantly joined his father’s bakery in the late 1950s. “I hated this job because it was imposed on me,” Poila^ne says. “Many times I was so depressed, I cried. I couldn’t see how I was going to escape from a profession that cut me from the outside world. My horizon was blocked by an oven.”

Instead of quitting, Poila^ne made the decision to “escape by the inside”--to dig deep inside himself and find the resources to succeed. His main concern was to preserve his father’s traditional baking methods.

At Poila^ne, artisans work much as they did before the Industrial Age, using the same type of oven and ingredients. The only apparent concession to modernity is a machine to knead dough. The cramped, warm shop has a heady fragrance of yeast, toasted bread crusts and butter cookies, another of Poila^ne’s products.

“I take the best traditions and the best from progress to make the best product, which still tastes the same as in the last century,” Poila^ne says. He makes fun of people who consider him an artist. In bread-making, he notes, it is the yeast that performs the most important task of all--making dough rise.

“The baker’s savoir-faire is not art,” Poila^ne says. “Making bread is nothing more than breeding microscopic animals.”