A sticky problem
Raffi Melkonian at 08:39 PM
One of my friends in Paris has just finished his training as a boulanger - that is, a bread (rather than pastry) baker. For some really good reasons, he needs to get out of France, and we've been chatting about opportunities for him in the United States and in China.

But he's got a problem. As far as we can tell, no one has been able to duplicate the best Parisian bread baking abroad, despite herculean efforts. The most enthusiastic, like the excellent Bread Line of Washington D.C, have even tried importing their ingredients and ovens from France to close the gap - and yet, they still fall short.

Neither of us have any real idea why this is so. The best guess we've come up with is something about the water, which obviously can't be shipped from the motherland. But just yesterday, in the midst of some other research in the extraordinary culinary history collection at Harvard's Schlesinger Library, I ran into this excerpt from a late 19th century report on the bread of Vienna.

“The uniformity of the product demonstrates that the problem of making good bread has been solved. One wonders why such bread cannot be elsewhere obtained. It is know that efforts have been made to introduce the production of the Vienna bread to the public of other countries, but with indifferent success. The trained journey-man bakers of Vienna are sought for and obtained to serve in other capitals; but the bread they produce is inferior. Why have these efforts failed? Why cannot so apparently simple a process be communicated to others in such terms as to be followed?”

Same problem, different country. I wonder if I ought to be encouraged, since the French were apparently able to fix their deficiencies.