Meet a Maître Artisan Boulanger

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I had crowned Dominique Duclos a maître artisan boulanger long before the Chambre de Métiers de Seine-Maritime did.  Every time we go through the town of Yvetôt on our way to the country house in Normandie, we stop at the Duclos boulangerie on Friday afternoon to stock up on the best bread for the weekend.  Usually as we approach, we’ll discuss what we should select.  That’s because there’s so much to choose from,(see below).  We go in and make our purchases from the always- smiling Duclos couple, usually walking out with more loaves than we had intended.  Then, as soon as we get in the car and get our mouths stuffed with ragged hunks of thick, chewy crust, I can usually be counted on to declare to Denis, “Lui, il est vraiment un maître boulanger.  Si je pourrais juste trouver du tel pain à Paris.” (What a master baker.  If only I could find such bread in Paris.)  Last Saturday, when Denis bought his copy of the local newspaper (le Courrier Cauchois, the reading of which is de rigueur for his Saturday morning), he waved it under my nose.  On the front page was our baker, Dominique Duclos.  He had been declared (officially) a maître artisan boulanger, meaning he had achieved one of the highest rankings for his craft (and heaven knows, the competition is stiff.)  “About time,” I sniffed to Denis. Dominique Duclos works almost exclusively in breads made with levain, a natural sourdough starter comprising a mixture of wild yeasts and bacteria fermenting a mixture of flour and water.  He uses yeast in only two or three of his breads that he’s the first to admit are his least interesting.  But, some people demand a simple, familiar, commercial white baguette, and M Duclos makes one to keep them happy.  But the rest of his breads are lovingly concocted with the magical levain, involving a long, slow, gradual fermentation conducted in several stages that takes up to 12 hours. It’s precisely this long fermentation that builds the complex, slightly tangy flavor of good levain breads, and allows for an extremely high degree of hydration (water) in the dough and subsequent bread.  A lot of hours are required for flour to absorb the maximal amount of moisture, Dominique pointed out to me, and they’re hours that most modern bakers don’t want to spend.  The extra moisture makes levain breads both feel more succulent in the mouth and last longer.  And the acidity produced by the bacteria in the dough acts as a natural preservative, inhibiting mold growth and making for the famous “keeping” qualities of good sourdough bread.Now I happen to know my way around a levain pretty well.  About 20 years ago, I started my own using organic cherries from my own orchard as the innoculum of wild yeasts and appropriate bacteria.  This starter was so good that I actually took it with me when I moved to Paris, and it’s still alive and well in my refrigerator.  So M Duclos and I really warmed to our topic, talking levain, and pretty soon we found ourselves behind the counter of the bakery.  I was thrilled when he took me into the inner sanctum of the bakery itself. “This is the secret of my success,” he said, showing me a Rube Goldberg device as tall as I was—a sort of big tank topped with several gauges with the name “Fermento” on it.  This is where M Duclos ferments his necessarily huge amounts of levain with laboratory accuracy, because the Fermento allows him to precisely control the temperature and acidity of fermentation.  He popped the lid, and I got to inhale the wonderfully complex aroma of an active levain.    But we agreed that no amount of lab equipment could substitute for the nose and the hands of the baker, as M Duclos pulled a vat of fermenting flute Normande dough out of his cooler and proudly showed me how elastic it was (see photo).  But that didn’t stop me from telling Denis I definitely needed my very own Fermento.  He just groaned. Dominique Duclos is son; great-grandson; and brother of bakers.  At 14, he was already working full-time with his father in the family bakery.  At 18, M Duclos moved to Paris to complete apprenticeships in several different bakeries and expertises.  At 22, he passed his CAP boulanger exam with flying colors, even though he had never attended a formal academy.  That was June 1977.  One month later, he was set up in his present bakery in Yvetôt, in Haute Normandie, and so to speak, off and baking.  While M Duclos started out with traditional baguettes, pain de campagne, and  pain aux céréales, the purchase of the wonderful Fermento gave him the gargantuan quantities of levain he needed to set his creative juices flowing.  In fact, M Duclos is not only a maître artisan boulanger, but also a créateur.  His first creation was the flute Normande,  borne out of his desire to create a baguette with the soul of levain that was fabricated with immediately local Norman flour.  The flute, ornamented with a signature series of coups de lame on its surface that makes it resemble a beard of wheat, has flattened the competition in many a concours.  M Duclos’ creations are too numerous to list all-inclusively, and they vary with the season.  Here’s a sampling:  cider/apple bread, made with good Norman hard cider and chunks of apples (pair it with Camembert!);  chestnut bread, from organic chestnut flour (Denis’ favorite); Beaujolais bread, to celebrate the arrival of the Beaujolais nouveau; pain d’épautre, made with an ancient rustic wheat, nutty and chewy; pain aux noix et noisettes, packed to bursting with hazelnuts and walnuts (my favorite); bread with seaweed to celebrate the holidays…  All this in addition to rye with sunflower and flaxseed, whole wheats, and waldkornbrot.  There are also three superb companions to the flute Normande, made with all local flours:  le pain Normande, le pave d’Yvetot,and the incomparably rustic…
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