The rant had started simply, as rants tend to do. It really does not take much to set me off, despite friends’ and loved ones’ assertions to the contrary. I came home from my culinary history class at the New School, thinking ahead to the research I planned to do for the egg project; to the research for a side project my instructor has encouraged me to write for Gastronomica; to an article I’ve been working on for one of my baking magazines about preserves and their use in desserts; to this weekend’s ExpoFestoRama of Baking; to my general correspondence with friends, blogger and non-blogger alike.
All of these thoughts came to a halt when I got home and found the April 2004 Fast Company waiting for me on the ironing board. Fast Company is one of the few business magazines I can read without having an aneurysm. When my dad saw me poring over a copy of it at his house last year, he offered to give me a gift subscription for my birthday, and I took him up on the offer. This month’s cover photo, like the lead story within, is stark: 30 photographs, 30 head shots of 30 different tech professionals, collected under a defiant blue hed: LOOK INTO THEIR EYES: THESE PEOPLE LOST HIGH-TECH JOBS TO LOW-WAGE COUNTRIES. TRY TELLING THEM THAT OFFSHORING IS A GOOD THING IN THE LONG RUN. Inside, 40 stories of people who took conventional business wisdom at its word: You are responsible for your own relevance in a service-based economy. If your skills become obsolete, you have no one to blame but yourself. These are people who invested time and money into their own advanced job training, only to see their jobs vanish in a puff of platitudes about how every business cycle has a few hiccups. I went to bed full of resolve. That’s it, I said to myself. I have to cast all doubt and fear aside and open this damn bakery. If I can’t make enough money writing to stay alive—and based on my conversations with working food writers, it looks like I will not make enough money writing to stay alive—then I have to find something else to support that writing. Knowing of course that there is no such thing as a risk-free venture, and food businesses are particularly vulnerable, I still thought that my own bakery was my last best shot at security. Whatever complaints, issues and price concessions your customers give you, they can’t threaten to buy bread cheaper from China, the way LuthorCorp’s customers do with their packaging. If I’m calling the shots, I can’t write my own job into obsolescence, as many of the Fast Company interviewees were forced to do. And I can hire a staff of people who can come to work knowing that I won’t be asking them to train someone else to do the jobs out of which they will be eventually phased. Get to work, you, I admonished myself as I fell asleep.
So of course it was a blow, and a blow to a particularly tender and vulnerable spot at that, to learn from the most influential newspaper food section in the country that the kind of bakery I want to run is vulnerable to the new business model of supermarket “bakeries,” and that these supermarkets were making a killing on their “artisan” breads. You could make the argument that well, toots, that’s just how capitalism works, but to me this is much more than an “oh, what a shame about the march of progress” story. It is one thing to be a large-scale producer squeezing smaller-scale producers out of business; it is entirely something else to do this while co-opting the language of those small-scale producers, taking the most marketing-friendly components of their ethos and making money from them while simultaneously thumbing one’s nose at the care and craftsmanship and skill that go into a loaf of bread that’s worth eating. Supermarkets that rely on parbaked bread, finished on premises, trade on that baking-bread smell, figuring—correctly?—that that is what drives the sale. You smell it, you feel it, you want to buy it, and if it doesn’t taste like what you bought at that nice French bakery in town, well, it’s good enough for one-stop shopping, right? Besides, as far as the people selling you that bread is concerned, there’s no difference in quality between their bread and the French bakery bread, and if they can tell the difference, they’re betting that *you* can’t.
It kills me that the biggest apologist for parbaking is Nancy Silverton, who sold 80% of La Brea Bakery to an Irish agribusiness conglomerate three years ago. This is a baker who founded La Brea Bakery when she couldn’t find decent bread to serve in her restaurant; who rewrote all her formulas when she bought new ovens that baked the bread differently; who could tell how well or how badly a loaf of bread was made just by looking at the crumb. Now she not only insists that the parbaked La Brea bread is “exactly the same product” as the bread she bakes at her own bakery, but she also plays the card of democratization, saying that the end (getting bread to people) justifies the means (bake & freeze), particularly in communities that don’t have access to bakeries, and implying that those of us who don’t like supermarket parbaked bread are acting like a bunch of snotty elitists who would begrudge the American consumer better bread.
Reading this makes me want to send Nancy Silverton a copy of John and Karen Hess’s The Taste of America, with this passage highlighted in electric yellow:
“There are many restaurants using frozen food, but no one is going to admit it,” Pierre Franey told The New York Times in an interview. Franey, the Howard Johnson’s chef and a partner of [Craig] Claiborne’s, said that virtually all the fancy restaurants now used freezers, if only to tuck away leftovers. “Nobody’s going to admit that,” he said, “but they don’t throw it away , either.” He saw nothing wrong in this. In fact, he said, if he were still cooking at Le Pavillon, which in its heyday was regarded as the best restaurant in the country, he would use the freezer.
“I would make sauces in large batches and freeze them,” he declared. “The technique has improved. There is nothing wrong with this—and there is nothing wrong with frozen dough, frozen brioche dough, for instance. If you have a good freezer and keep it at 10 below zero all the time, it is going to be beautiful.”
It may be doubted that the late Henri Soule would have allowed Franey to do anything of the kind. Soule was a notorious perfectionist, who closed the Pavillon when help and produce became inadequate to maintain his standards...We doubt also that Franey’s frozen brioche dough does quite as well as the fresh. One may forgive a baker who resorts to freezing dough so that he may sleep nights, but he should not pretend that it is just as good.
Fortunately, the print edition of the Times carries a sidebar, in which Eric Asimov does a blind tasting of breads and finds that the apologists protest too much:
Many inventions have been called the greatest thing since sliced bread, but parbaked bread is not in the running.
While an improvement over most supermarket loaves, parbaked bread is just as clearly a compromise between the freshly baked loaves that I can smell in my dreams and the convenience of one-stop shopping.
I tasted two parbaked sourdough loaves, one from Ecce Panis and one from La Brea, along with loaves from three local commercial bakeries: Eli’s, Tom Cat and Amy’s.[Full disclosure time: I apprenticed at Amy’s for six months, where I worked on the shaping, baguette and early bake crews.—Jen] The loaves were delivered in numbered bags so that I could not tell which was which.
Two of the loaves were clearly several notches below the others. These turned out to be the parbaked breads. The Ecce Panis loaf reminded me of a supermarket bread, with a stale day-old aroma and little liveliness or freshness. The crust was not crisp, and while the texture of the interior was pleasingly dense it had almost no flavor. It had neither the pungency of American sourdough nor the lightness of a baguette.
The La Brea loaf was much more appealing. It had a clear, strong West Coast-style sourdough aroma, and the bread had heft and flavor. Yet the crust was soft, barely distinguishable from the interior, and the bread was overly chewy.
Some flaws may have been caused by supermarket handling. That’s a chance you take with parbaking.
The three other loaves were each more subtle. A sourdough ficelle from Eli’s had a lovely dense texture, with a more complex sourdough flavor than the La Brea. The loaves from Tom Cat and Amy’s were the lightest of the five, with the crispest crusts and most delicate textures and flavors.
Your verdict depends on how you feel about bread. If ordinary supermarket bread is your point of reference, parbaked loaves are an improvement. But for a demanding bread lover, the parbaked compromise is not worth it.
Hear, hear.
I must say, the responses I’ve received, both in blog comments and in e-mails, have been extraordinarily cheering, helping me to feel that I am not just some lone crank in the universe on this issue. Thank you, dear friends. I hope that there are more of you out there. If I build it, will you come?
having gone through the y2k boom years, i’m a little less than sympathetic for most unemployed techies, the ones i know, at least. back then there was such a hysterical labor shortage, employers were hiring anything that moved, and even things that just sat there, and everyone was job-hopping like methed-out bunnies, raking in the dough as hourlies doubled and doubled again. i recall once at pricewaterhousecooperslybrandtomatsuboynamedsusu, i needed some money for parking and the secretary gave me a $100 bill because that was all there was in the petty cash box. it was then i knew the boom couldn’t last.