#local baker

Are you team baguette or team miche? We would never really present two delicious things as an either/or option but the styles of these two very French breads make them different enough that you may have a definite preference. If a richly crusted bread with a flavorful, chewy interior doesn't appeal to you at all... wait, what? That's such an unbelievable scenario that we don't have a good response except to say that we are grateful to artisan bakers, who have stayed true to the craft and returned high quality, high character bread to the food mainstream in recent years. The bakeries we work with offer so many good options, there is no doubt you will find a loaf you love.

The miche is eye-catching because of its size. A full loaf is often as big as a throw pillow, a characteristic that harkens back to the days when communities would share an oven, giving each household a limited amount of time to get their baking done each week. One very large loaf would be enough bread to hold a family over from one baking day to the next, and would stay fresher than many small loaves. The bread's thick outer crust also helps keep the interior moist for days. Now foodies get starry-eyed over the miche's chewy crust and big flavor but everything wonderful about the bread speaks to its humble past. The traditional leavener for miche, "wild yeast," a/k/a sourdough, was the only game in town until Louis Pasteur first described how yeast works in the mid-1800s, spawning an industry of selecting and packaging standardized yeast strains for commercial baking. Likewise, grind stones offered the only technology available for bulk-producing flour, resulting in a course flour that, even when sifted, retained some of the bran and germ. The dark tint of the loaf comes from a blend of flours that can include white, whole wheat and rye. Today a baker might tweak the blend to create a signature flavor profile in their loaf. But centuries ago the blend would have been determined simply by what was available and affordable and what blend was harvested from fields where wheat and rye intermixed.

Miche falls into the larger category of "country bread," which already gives an idea of how the very many styles of artisan bread began branching off. If country folk were eating large, dark loaves, then city folk wanted the opposite, whatever that might be. How about a refined white bread with a crackly crust, elastic interior and absurd dimensions? Everything about the baguette is a statement: about class, about bureaucracy and regulation (both French words!), about the march of progress. The pure white flour of a traditional baguette was once a luxury, as was paying for a skinny loaf that would go stale in just a day or two. The French government carefully regulated the price of bread (failed grain crops and famine being one spark of the French Revolution), but exempted pains de fantaisie, fanciful loaves that fell outside the norms of baking and were seen as too difficult to regulate. Bakers took this exemption to great lengths (literally), sending customers home with baguettes as long as six feet. During the 1800s advances in technology moved baking into a new era. Commercial yeast introduced standardization and a neutral flavor starting point. Austria developed milling machines that could produce a highly refined white flour at scale, using Hungarian wheat, and also introduced bread ovens that injected steam during the baking process, essential to the baguette's distinctive crust and glazed finish. Despite this Eurozone approach to developing the baguette, the French claimed it as all their own in their special way, by regulating its size, length, weight and sale price in a 1920 law.