In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey (30 page)

When I had eaten the toast that morning, I noticed the bread had a remarkable taste that clearly wasn’t the same as white flour. The
levain
influenced the taste, though Feuillas mentioned something else when I brought up the unique flavor: the water. When I had downed a few glasses of tap water after my run, I noticed it had a remarkably clean and bright taste. It came from a deep spring, filtered by those stones I had jogged through in the vineyard, so perhaps the mineral content was coming through. The bread was more refined than what I usually made, but it was also delicious. And because of the flavor, it didn’t need a lot of salt. Feuillas used only fourteen grams of salt per kilo of flour, or 30 percent less than what most recipes call for. When I returned home I began to experiment frequently with these stone ground and bolted flours, which sift out a portion of the bran. One, a bolted French Mediterranean flour from Anson Mills in South Carolina, which specializes in rare heritage grains, was remarkably similar to Feuillas’s in taste. Glenn Roberts, the company founder, told me the variety was passed down from French Huguenots who settled in the Carolinas and Virginia in the eighteenth century, so perhaps it was similar to what Feuillas was growing.

For lunch that day, Feuillas’s elderly mother, Maryse, who was visiting from Provence, made
civet de lapin
(rabbit stew). She had marinated the meat in red wine for twenty-four hours, then simmered it the night before in still more wine. While we’d been talking and sipping coffee that morning, Maryse had continued to braise it on the wood-burning stove, filling the kitchen with an intoxicating aroma.
Civet de lapin
was a specialty of the South, Feuillas told me, and this version dated back to a handwritten family recipe book more than a century old.

That was the way it was every day: lunch was the main meal and the entire family sat down to eat it, polishing off a bottle or two of a local vintage along with a loaf of bread. I told Roland that during these meals, I felt welcomed like a friend—a friend in the global family of bakers. I knew if I had just shown up as a journalist to interview him, I would have missed the entire story.

 • • • 

A
fter lunch that first day, we did bake bread, and I realized that for Feuillas the flour was anything but a blank canvas. It was the essence of flavor and, yes, very much like wine. So many times, when I’d ask him a question about why he did something, he would answer with the simple phrase, “Terre Madre,” Mother Earth. “Do you know what this is? Terre Madre?” he said.

I nodded.

It was the reason for everything he did. Everything went back to the soil and ultimately to God. He was simply a facilitator along the way.

“So Roland, what’s the name of this bread?” I asked one day about a loaf with honey, walnuts, and almonds.

“This is bread with honey, walnut, and almonds,” he replied.

“Yes, I know,” I replied, this time in French. “But what’s the name?”

“Bread with honey, walnut, and almonds,” he said again in English.

I look at him, puzzled.

“I don’t name the bread,” he said, stopping this time, looking at me. “The bread is not mine. This grain is not mine. This flour is not mine. It’s Terre Madre. It’s Jesus Christ—how can I name it?” It was the same when he slashed the loaf, with just a simple diamond pattern.

“I don’t put a special cut into it. I don’t, because it’s not mine.”

I realized that for him, Terre Madre or Jesus Christ was his way of saying that in the totality of bread making, he was part of a larger whole. He was like a pilgrim, this ancient wheat and the bread making his meditation. The Zen master Suzuki Roshi once said, “We should be interested in making bread which looks and tastes good. Actual practice is repeating over and over again until you find out how to become bread. There is no secret in our way. Just to practice Zazen and put ourselves into the oven is our way.” The bread wasn’t his to name because he didn’t own it.

And the bread wasn’t the conclusion of the process. As his customers from the village came into the store, he greeted them by name, shook their hands, and kissed them on each cheek. Bread had been reserved and set aside for his regulars. He chatted to catch up on the news for several minutes. If the customer had a baby, he’d shake the baby’s hand, too, then invite the father around the counter so that the child, held aloft, could see the bread as it came out of the oven.

“Children love
levain
bread,” he said, “because it has lactic acid and if it’s done right it smells like milk—like mother’s milk.”

I’m not as romantic, or maybe just not as French, though I, too, have experienced a posse of kids scurrying into the kitchen, saying, “Sam, do you have any bread?” Maybe it is like milk, maybe it’s just good bread, but it doesn’t matter. It’s what these hungry kids want.

After we finished baking one day, I asked if we could go look at Terre Madre—the fields where he grew his wheat. Although it was only March, I thought we might be able to see the winter wheat poking out of the soil. The almond trees were flowering with little white buds, and new green shoots were emerging from the grape vines, but little else of spring was evident. He had told me that the fields were only sixteen kilometers (ten miles) away, so I figured we would jump in the car and be there in twenty minutes. But once we started driving on the narrow winding roads, I soon grew doubtful. We circled up hills, then went down the other side; we went past farms, through tiny villages and dark forests. A half hour into the journey, my stomach was getting a bit queasy from the twists and turns, and I asked how much longer it would be.

“In total, it will be about one hour,” he said.

“Wait, I thought you said it was sixteen kilometers.”

“Yes, as the bird flies! But we are not birds.”

So we continued on the twisting roads, the once picture-book villages like Cucugnan giving way to smaller and progressively more unkempt places as we ventured farther into the countryside. This region of southern France began to look less like a quaint postcard of stone houses and vineyards than like the scrappy hill country of Appalachia. We passed what looked like nearly abandoned farming villages, with a rusted tractor here and there, a dangling Coca-Cola sign and a few chickens scurrying about, but not much else. The land was too hilly, the fields too small, the farms too scarce to have anything like the critical mass to compete with farms in other regions of France, or with Spain, Turkey, or North Africa, for that matter.

Finally, we reached a clearing and pulled over. The wind was blowing fiercely when we got out, which was quite welcome after the slightly nauseating ride. We walked over to a wire fence surrounding a field and there it was: his ancient wheat. There wasn’t much to look at, for the plants were only a couple of inches high. But Feuillas smiled. This was it—his land, with hardly anything else around. “The closest farmer is twenty kilometers away,” he said. It was perfect, because he didn’t want to be exposed to any agrochemicals that might drift over his wheat. I took a few pictures, then we got back in the car and drove a bit farther down a potted dirt road to another field. “Spelt,” he said, pointing to the field on the right. Again, the land was almost bare. Tiny grass seedlings were poking out of the ground. Feuillas, who was still in his baker’s whites and clogs, braced against the wind as he wrapped his coat around himself.

He looked content, but it was sad, too. The nearby village we had passed through seemed nearly deserted, as if the old stone buildings might collapse under their own weight. The fields just across from his own were filled with underbrush and young trees, with nary a farm animal or cultivated crop in sight. We looked over the landscape, slowly returning to nature. “My farmer friend back in the U.S. calls these ‘dead farms,’” I said. Pennsylvania was filled with them, too small to be productive and too far from any city to attract weekenders or tourist trade. All they had going for them now was oil and gas production from fracking wells.

My first thought looking over this land was, “God, what potential.” It seemed perfect for some young couple who wanted to grow organic produce and maybe sell it on the coast, a couple of hours away. The winter was mild, the sun intense, like northern California. A few greenhouses and the dry summer could keep ambitious young farmers busy for a long time. Yet no one, at least in this vicinity, was trying to do anything remotely close to that except for Feuillas, and he was only growing wheat. When I asked him whether the land was expensive, he just shrugged. “No one wants it,” he said.

Such was the state of Terre Madre.

 • • • 

T
he dough from this ancient wheat was unusual: less glutinous, less elastic, and it appeared to stretch out forever. Feuillas handled the dough very gently, letting the mixer run for only a couple of minutes, then giving the dough a rest. “We say the young children are joining hands and in the middle is the
levain
, the salt, the air, and just the flour and water,” he said. “Then we let the children rest so they can make stronger bonds, and then add more water. If you add all the water at once, the children can never make a strong bond.” He carried out this mixing and resting a few times, taking the hydration level very high, but he was right. Even this extensible, stretchy dough was able to develop strength, which is what you need for the bread to rise in the heat of the oven. He held up a piece of dough to show me, stretching it to a thin window, so that we could see through it—the “window pane” test. It was clear this ancient wheat had the qualities a baker would want.

By the next morning, after an all-night rise in the chilly retarder, we took the dough out to proceed with baking. It looked a bit like soup, with a few bubbles on the top. I was skeptical, wondering how we would manage to turn this gloppy mass into anything resembling a loaf of bread. Feuillas showed me how, and in the process gave me a new bread-making technique.