一种新的酸面团文化在巴黎上升

This past June, there was an absolutely残酷的热浪in France. Temperatures rocketed to almost 110 degrees in Paris, and no matter where you were, it was sweltering and uncomfortable, made worse by France’s ambivalent relationship with air conditioning. The whole country was dripping in sweat, but nowhere more so than in France’s bakeries, where hot ovens could reach into the several hundreds of degrees even on a cold day. At十只钟面包, a popular bakery in Paris’ 11th arrondissement, the heatwave meant checking on dough and turning on ovens sometimes as early as 1:30 a.m.

Bakers have always worked at ungodly hours, but in the summer their schedule was due less to the idiosyncrasies of bakers than to the kind of bread Ten Belles makes: a 100% sourdough with wild yeast that’s as susceptible to changes in environment as humans in a heatwave.

拓荒者—or as it’s called with various degrees of veracity in France,pain au levain—acts according to the environment it’s in. When the temperature is hot and humid, the natural yeast ferments faster. When it’s cold and dry, it is slow to develop and stubborn to rise. It can be extremely challenging to work with sourdough, which is one reason why pain au levain, despite being a staple of the French diet throughout history, had all but disappeared in France until recently. With the arrival of more reliable commercial bakers’ yeast in the early 1900s, unpredictable levain, which required near-constant monitoring, was simply too much work.

In recent years, though, the sourdough landscape in France has suddenly and rapidly changed. Alongside the rekindled interest in sourdough bread in America, bakeries like Ten Belles have popped up all over Paris and France at large, serving bread made only with 100% levain—unpredictability be damned. There are now an enormous range of bakeries selling true 100% sourdough bread in Paris:Le Bricheton,Mamiche,Levain Le Vin,Panifica,风土D'Avenir,阿奇博尔德,Fermentation Generale， 和Circus Bakery, to name a few in the city alone.

“直到我们打开时，我看到人们的反应才意识到我们实际上在做一些真正与谷物相抵触的事情，而不是人们期望的事情。”贝克和十个钟的共同所有人爱丽丝·奎莱特（Alice Quillet）告诉我11月的一个早晨，在面包店。“这不是面包店的通常框架，人们不明白您在这里可以吃什么。人们很生气，因为它有一个英语名称。我们也没有做法式面包。我们没有做任何法国的viennoiseries。我们什么都没做你应该做的事情。而且，我们由妇女组成。”

Cultivating and照顾一个入门者，正如任何涉足Sourdough知道的人都不容易的那样。就像生孩子一样。在1900年代初发明商业酵母菌之前，法国的专业面包师在一天之内将其刷新了四次。好面包回来了， 告诉我。他说：“你必须喂野兽。”“曾经是，如果您做了一个左法，尤其是Levain Dur(or hard levain), that was a sign of your baking virtuosity. It was a sign that you were aprince de la pâte, a prince of the dough. Now, we have a lot of people who are doing bread with liquid levain that is dispensed by a machine, so there's none of this relationship that you [would] have with your mother starter.”

法国长棍面包推广时在法国id-1920s, pain au levain was abandoned in cities almost entirely. “The baguette was invented because middle and upper class people in the cities wanted to eat fresh bread several times a day. They thought that the big loaves, which you'd eat for two or three days, were old-fashioned and corny, that they didn't belong to their epoch,” Kaplan added. During the war, when the availability of commercial yeast was limited, French authorities released leaflets pleading with bakers to return to sourdough, in order to keep bread production up. But by then, so few bakers knew how to properly make pain au levain that, by the end of the war, demand was even higher for bread made with commercial yeast. “All the experts declared that levain was too long, too complicated, too hard, and it had a lousy taste anyway,” Kaplan recounted. “Bread just got worse and worse and worse.”

The only thing that Ten Belles does now that is spiritually similar to every otherBoulangeriein Paris—make and sell bread—ended up being the most confusing for Parisians. That’s because pain au levain, though readily available in name in most boulangeries across France, is often not what it seems. Ina decree痛苦的劳恩（Au Levain）由法国政府于1993年制造，即使混合物包含商业酵母以帮助面包的兴起，也可以接受。面团中使用的欧万也可以先前脱水。面粉可能是一种廉价的现成混合物，含有营养，并通过改良剂和乳化剂增强。只要有一些活跃文化的表情，就可以称为痛苦。这导致许多面包店偷工减料，利用不断增长的趋势，并出售痛苦的au levain，这与健康的手工根源相去甚远。

“When I realized you could buy sourdough off of a catalog, I realized that sourdough didn't mean anything anymore,”ApolloniaPoilâne, author of the recently publishedPoilâne: The Secrets of the World-Famous Bread Bakery兼首席执行官Poilane(可以说most famous sourdough bakery in Paris), told me one morning over a breakfast of buttered toast. “I was in college, reading in my profession's magazines about sourdough this, sourdough that. I was seeing more and more sourdough bakeriesclaiming要酸，”她沮丧地说。“以我们的方式工作真是个混蛋。这是对我们的工艺的一种承诺。”当Poilâne谈论从目录中订购Sourdough时，她指的是像puratos sourdough目录, where you can order three different kinds of sourdough, from varying countries and traditions. To Poilâne, that is a cheap substitute for otherwise hard work: “Sourdough bought off a catalog cannot be the same thing as something we've been nurturing.”

但是，正是这种恢复痛苦的au levain，它给了卡普兰，奎莱特和poilânehope之类的面包爱好者。不仅是因为这意味着通过一种持续几代法国人的面包重返历史传统，而且重新强调了食材，健康和味道。正如记者玛丽·阿斯蒂尔（Marie Astier）写的那样Quel Pain Voulons-Nous?(or我们想要什么面包？), the recent push for organic well-sourced ingredients is slowly but surely spilling over into bread. It wasn’t previously common to ask your布兰格他们使用哪种类型的面粉，但她认为这也在改变。

“法国的工匠面包师是神圣的。您不怀疑他们的任何面包来自何处。“但是我意识到这一点，因为人们试图学习食物的出处，所以花了一段时间才滴入面包。”亚搏电竞Quillet看到她的客户也确定了吃酸面包的其他好处。人们意识到发酵与肠道健康和消化率有关，因此它适合这种趋势。人们也更加意识到浪费。酸面团，您可以在三天的时间内吃饭。”另一方面，平均的法式面包在仅几个小时就变成了比斯科蒂。也不难找到信息：在十只钟声和莱万·勒维恩（Levain Le Vin），可以看到面包师穿过面包店的前窗来塑造面团。对于Levain Le Vin的Christophe Aftillet而言，它或多或少地消除了任何学习曲线：“人们很好奇。 When we work [right in front of the window], it’s almost necessary to explain what we’re doing.”

“If you have an appreciation for what's going on with your bread, you don't eat it in the same way,” Poilâne told me, wistful. “You take the time to chew it, eat it, taste it. That experience will contrast with people saying bread makes you fat, that bread makes you bloated. Of course it will—if you eat bad bread. The more we educate people, the more they can discriminate, and that leads to better choices about what kind of bread they’re willing to eat.”