Raised in a bread basket

‘I was told I have to buy my bread here,’ says the customer ahead of me at Poilâne on Elizabeth Street, in London’s Belgravia. I'm in the bakery’s sole outpost beyond French soil to chat with Apollonia Poilâne, the third-generation baker and head of her family’s Paris-based business. ‘Do you have any baguettes,’ the customer asks. Behind the counter, Walid smiles, gently shakes his head and apologises. ‘I thought you were owned by a French family,’ the woman responds.

Heritage

The company was founded in 1932 by Pierre Poilâne, Apollonia’s grand-père, with a bakery on Rue du Cherche-Midi, Saint Germain-des-Prés, in the 6th arrondissement of Paris. Poilane now has five shops in the city, three of which include bakeries that supply the other two outlets, plus the self-sufficient London bakery, outside which we now sit. The wholesale and international business is supplied by their ‘Manufacture’, a unique cartwheel of 24 wood-fired bakeries, on the outskirts of the French capital.

The business was, and still is, built around the hefty pain Poilâne, a close-crumbed, sourdough wheat miche, which measures about 28cm across and weighs in at just under two kilos. In a city then accustomed to the pale, airy, delicately-flavoured baguette, I ask Apollonia whether it took Pierre’s dark, dense, aromatic behemoth a while to find friends. She says: ‘at that time Paris, yes, was having a huge love affair with the baguette.’ This nineteenth century creation, perhaps an import from Austria, ‘was not a traditional French bread. It was classed as a pain de fantaisie, which was a very convenient way for bakers to escape price controls. Ironically, because it very much got controlled in price thereafter.’ However, Pierre ‘basically wanted to distinguish himself from the competition, which was rather fierce.’  At a time when French people ate half a loaf a day on average, he found that there was a market in the neighbourhood, which was filled with artists and craftsmen, who valued his substantial sourdough as their main sustenance.

New flour generation

In 1973, Pierre passed the baton to Lionel, though he hadn’t originally had much of an appetite for baking. ‘My father was thrown into the business when he was 14 years old, at a time he didn't really know what he wanted to do. Most of us don’t.’ His lightbulb moment came as the result of ‘meeting a bunch of perfumers who were very keen on having him talk about the flavours of bread. That's what brought him to realising that we are in a craft that's very dynamic and that people can, you know, connect with. Then he was like: “no, actually, what I'm doing is pretty cool, relevant.”’ After taking the company reins, he started to build the business from one site serving mainly local customers, to a more-widely renowned bakery, which gathered aficionados including Frank Sinatra, Lauren Bacall and Robert de Niro.

In 1983, Lionel and his wife Iréna created a new bakery in the suburb of Bièvres, around half an hour from the centre of Paris. ‘His masterpiece was the Manufacture, and he chose the word to really reflect handmade, craftsmanship, where - through human hands - intelligence is put forward,’ Apollonia says with pride. In this big, round building, ‘instead of having a production line, it's kind of like having 24 bakeries, one next to the other,’ around a central hub. Production petals, I suggest. ‘Exactly, production petals. Yeah, that's actually a really beautiful way to put it. It really it is the same production system as in our stores, where we have a bakery underneath.’ Unlike many commercial bakeries, which are split into sections with a baker (or manager) in charge of each, each of Poilane’s bakeries is under the control of an expert compagnon-boulanger, responsible for the whole process from start to finish. With all 24 bakeries firing on all fours, the manufacture’s bakers can produce up to 5,000 loaves a day.

Born into baking

From her birth in New York in 1984, Apollonia was immersed in the family trade. Her parents even laid her in a large bread basket to sleep, ‘which I think is pretty extraordinary. I still have it. Maybe at some point will be used for another generation,’ she smiles. ‘I grew up in that environment, so for me it really was like the bakery was my playground. Some kids have Play-Doh. I had actual dough to play around with. I would drive the bakers nuts, so they would push me from bakery to pastry and vice versa.’

I ask if her becoming a baker had been inevitable, or if she’d inherited Lionel’s youthful hesitancy about the profession. ‘I was very lucky that I was big enough to understand what my father did, at a time when he knew what he loved about his craft, so he quite naturally shared it with me and my sister.’ The younger sibling, Athena, eventually chose to become a visual artist. Apollonia, however, has always ‘been interested in working in the business, helping out to earn my pocket money as I grew up, then starting to learn my craft when I was 16. My mom was literally telling me: “if you're serious about taking over this business at some point you better learn your craft.”’ Lionel, however, ‘was reluctant, only because he had been thrown into it. So he wanted to be very careful about not pushing me in a direction, and make sure it was something that I felt comfortable with, because it is a tough job. This is something that people vastly underestimate, I feel.’ 

Fate intervenes

Everything changed on 31 October 2002, when the helicopter Lionel and Iréna were in crashed. Apollonia was just 18, but quickly went from student on a gap year, to preparing to become Poilâne’s CEO. ‘In some ways it was very lucky that I was in Paris at the time of my parents’ passing, so that I could slip into my father’s shoes and slowly, with his team, take over the family business.’

The following year, Apollonia headed to Massachusetts to begin a four-year economics degree at Harvard University, while running the business from the other side of the Atlantic. How did that juggle go, I ask. ‘Yeah,’ she chuckles. ‘Time difference? Teleworking? Sounds a little familiar nowadays, but…’ Without Zoom, I interject. ‘Yeah, so I worked with my team and went back on a regular basis, to attend meetings that needed an in-person presence. I really work with a great team, so that helped a million.’

Having read that Apollonia had pain Poilâne FedEx’d to her student digs, I ask if that was true and whether for quality control, or because she couldn’t find Real Bread in the States. ‘Both,’ she replies. ‘There were some great neighbourhood bakeries, but none close to whereI was living. I wanted to start my day with something that really would feed me. Having my own bread, I could tell the difference. Mornings when I had no more of my loaves, it was just miserable.’

Crossing La Manche

Lionel had opened the London bakery in 2000. Given the company is so firmly rooted in Paris, I ask Apollonia what her father’s motivation had been. ‘He wanted to put a step outside of France. and London in the late ‘90s already had the food scene. Paris and London were very close and the Eurostar facilitated that a bunch. London is an international city and it was part of Europe, part of a bigger system. There was that logic.’ 

‘For the past quarter of a century we've been a local neighbourhood bakery here and we do this French style, taking the Poilâne heritage and philosophy. I look at the UK as a place where we can both apply what we've learned from France, but also test things that we want to implement in France, so it's a little bit of a conversation.’

The basics of pain Poilâne in London are more or less the same as in Paris: stoneground T80 wheat flour, water straight from the mains, and sea salt from the Guérande peninsula. The dough (80% hydration) is leavened by a piece (2.8% on flour weight) kept over from the previous batch; a sourdough-driven version of the pâte fermentée, or old dough, system. These ingredients are combined in a mixer, then left to prove, before being divided and shaped for the second proof in linen-lined wicker baskets. Each loaf is scored with the bakery’s signature P, before being loaded into a wood-fired oven to bake. “And then we traditionally say it's over. But it's not, so I'd like to contend that there is a sixth stage, which is letting the bread cool down, a little bit more water, it starts singing...’ Including this final stage, the process takes seven or eight hours.

I wonder how quality and consistency are maintained this far from the mothership. People are key to this: each Poilane baker is trained for nine months in the company’s savoir faire. Are there some batches that are better than others? ‘Absolutely we're human beings. Generations have grown up enjoying our bread and they know exactly what they like: large or small slices, sliced or unsliced, a little less or a little more baked... Each batch has something for everyone and can satisfy every taste. That's the beauty of the craft, but it's also what allows us to create better quality bread than a machine, paradoxically more consistently. The dough produces the same results from one day to the next because we adapt all of our gestures. Like, you know, we'll wait for an extra five minutes for the fermentation because we can feel it needs it.’ By gestures, Apollonia means ‘the knowledge of dough and bread, the expertise of the bakers in understanding their senses more and more through years of experience; of touch, sight, smell, hearing and taste. It’s also about a kind of instinct that allows them to know when to make a particular gesture. It's not an exact science, or at least that's not how we practice it: there's something almost emotional about it.’ 

What about choosing to rely on eau de Thames Water, rather than carefully-controlled 'liquor', as they call H₂O in the brewing industry? ‘First of all, the geological basins of Paris and London are more or less the same. Yes, there are differences between the waters in London and Paris, but they're not drastic enough to make that much of a difference. I would refer to the beautiful work that Nathan Myhrvold and his Modernist Bread team did in composing those beautiful volumes. They started asking questions like: does water make a difference? The answer is no, it doesn't. It's a beautiful story, but it's not one that actually matches the reality. I believe that if there is a drastic difference, like in the level of calcium, for instance, then yes, but not…’ …to the point that people need to go off and buy bottled spring water, I suggest. ‘Quite.’

Farinaceous families

‘The way I like to think about my products is really look at them through the prism of grains and fermentation. I make breads of wheat and, of course, my iconic loaf is the wheat sourdough loaf. We also do breads of 100% rye flour, which have a very distinctive honey flavour. I started a tradition with our 100% corn bread, which ticks the box of being gluten free, but that’s not what I want to put forward. What I want to put forward is: this is the taste of wheat, this is the taste of rye, this is the taste of corn. For each of these families of bread we have the plain, then we add dried nuts or dried fruit, and for some we add spice. That matrix creates a product line, so we have about a dozen different breads.’

‘When I started to sell my corn bread, it took me 10 years to put it on the shelf. If it's going to take me 10 years every time I start a new grain bread, I mean, I'm going to lose some clients. So how do I explain what our craft is about? That's why I developed a range of different cookies that put forward different grains that I've cherry-picked to really represent different world territories of bread, to develop people's understanding of what is the flavour of barley, oats, rice and so forth.’

Laying down the law

While I’m considering my next question, Apollonia volunteers: ‘I thought a lot about what you said last month. I’ve been endlessly meditating on it.’ We’d first met properly a few weeks previously, when Apollonia had been a panellist at The Status of Sourdough, run by Women In The Food Industry and The Cookery School at Little Portland Street, London. People who know me will be unsurprised to learn that, when the host asked if there were any questions from the audience, mine was the first hand that shot up. I asked if the panel thought there should be a legal definition of sourdough, to prevent people being misled by companies making sourfaux and to help protect the livelihood of bakers who make the real thing.

Today, Apollonia starts by echoing what she’d said at the event: ‘Mainly because I come from a country where we legislate on everything, I'm reluctant on legislating anything. I’m like, please don't add another rule, because it'll just breed industrial creativity to circumvent it. I really believe in educating people about what is the right thing and to ask questions.’

Since our previous conversation, her view has shifted, however. ‘Now, the reality is most of us don't take the time to listen or to question. So I do think that there probably is a balance somewhere in between. I'm not entirely comfortable with that, but when you said maybe 95% of breads aren’t what you call real, because they have additives in them, I thought that's terrifying. That means that there probably is a void there.’ I clarify that the intention of this one of our Honest Crust Act proposals is not to stop companies from making products the way they want, but introducing simple requirements for using the word sourdough: leavened only using a live sourdough starter, with no additives or additional raising agents.  ‘I think it's a really interesting suggestion you're making. There really is something there.’

Learning from the past for the future

While doing background reading, two concepts I came across in a number of articles were Lionel’s ‘retro innovation’, and Apollonia’s ‘contemporary by tradition’. I ask the meanings behind these. ‘My father's words really are a philosophy of how we work. Taking the best of past techniques and the best of contemporary techniques. It acknowledges that there are some techniques that have been time-proven and there are some contemporary ones that really help move the process forward. I’m very happy we use a mechanical mixer and that we don't have two people who are….’

‘…sweating away, into the dough?’ I interject.

‘Absolutely! Contemporary by tradition is just translating our baseline. What is our grounding? What are our roots and how do they help build new branches to the tree? We live in our own time and that's been the underscore. We are still the zeitgeist because ours is still the moment’s bread and that's our tradition. In some ways the Real Bread Campaign is also a retro-innovative initiative.’

Not by bread alone

I ask Apollonia what her other passions are, given that bread takes up… ‘about 99% of my time? I’m a cyclist. I'm a city cyclist first and foremost, and I picked up road cycling a couple of years ago. What I’ve appreciated is a sense of community that really reminds me of that of bread, and I didn't really expect that. I thought cycling was very solitary and just a way of having a workout, but I'm realising, no, there's a community there and it's loads of fun. On Thursday, I will message friends around town and say like, ‘who wants to go riding on Sunday’ and we go riding together and that's pretty cool.’

‘I’ve challenged myself to ride 200K in the fall for the past few years, that’s cause I needed to start somewhere. There was 100K at first and once I could push that, someone in the group that was like: you should do this. Yeah, it's been fun.’

Bread rules

I bring up a list of quotes that a 2012 New Yorker article by Lauren Collins called Apollonia’s ‘bread proverbs’ and ask if she stands by them. At the word ‘proverbs’, Apollonia interjects: ‘okay, I will challenge you to try and go about your day without once making reference to an expression that relates to bread. I think it's virtually impossible even beyond our jobs, because, no pun intended, it's so ingrained in our civilisations.’ It’s a challenge that I have to decline due to a pathological inability.

Bread should not steal the quality of the meal
‘Hell yeah! Because nowadays we have much more diverse diets and bread is not the main focus of the meal, then I feel it really should be just sublime. To create a transition, it can’t be done with shit bread. Like, I'm sorry, there's just no point.’

It's terribly wrong to eat bread while it's still cooling
‘Yes! Why would you want to eat something that's still like cooking, essentially!?’

‘Surely every home baker will have the experience of their…’

‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.’

‘…partner or their kids saying: I” want it when it’s warm, with the butter melting on it. Why won’t you let me?”’

‘Let it cool down first. It can be warmish, but don't eat it hot. We bake bread because we need to make it digestible. If we don't wait until it's cooled down, it's not finished cooking. It's as simple as that. It's about respecting that what you know. Eating a loaf of warm bread, I'm not going to judge you for that. Just not hot.’ Apollonia does have one use for hot bread, though. ‘One of my favourite things when I work in the bakery on Saturday mornings in the winter is to take a loaf of bread and put it against my tummy, under my winter coat and it's amazing! It’s my hot water bottle. On the bike it's pretty efficient, I can tell you.’

I don't believe in making bread at home

‘Okay, I'll nuance that: I think everyone should try to make bread at home, because it's an incredible experience. Some people will actually love it and turn into home bakers who will be making the bread for the household and maybe they'll have a cottage bakery.’

‘But there is something to be said about the effect of volume when you're baking in a bakery. That's why I don't enjoy baking bread at home, mainly because I see how much creating a bigger batch of loaves helps improve the quality of all of the batch. Okay, so I realise I’m a very privileged person to be able to say that, because I have the bakehouse downstairs.’

Pet hates

Also from that 2012 New Yorker interview, I read a list of things that Apollonia didn’t like. The first is unnecessary added ingredients. Today she says: ‘so I do not believe in making one bread with hazelnuts, one with almonds, one with cumin, just for the hell of it, right? My expertise is not hazelnuts versus cumin versus raisins. It's the grain, the fermentation and then my baking process, with my role at the crossroads, boosting the flavours and uses of bread, cookies, pastries… If I make the same bread with a different flavour every month, you know it's nice, it's palette pleasing, but what does it really say about my expertise?’ 

‘It says you can chuck in some seeds and nuts,’ I suggest.

‘Yeah. Well, no. But do you see what I mean, Chris? Like what I'm trying to say is, is actually seeing how some of my fellow bakers are thrown into this world of doing every month a different flavour. A little bit like how in fashion you're creating every season, something new, like does it have to be that way? Does it need that? I don't think so. I think that what it does is pushes us into a world that's not ours.’

The list also mentions algae, cheese and meats. ‘So all those three for very specific reasons. Algae was something that was really popular at some point 20 years ago. The problem was most bakers used processed algae, which was kind of shit. So at that point it makes no sense. If it's just about pallet pleasing, okay great, moving on. Cheese, the issue I have with cheese is once it's melted, it becomes, it loses a little bit of its wate, its souplesse. It's not very digestible. It's like would you really want to eat cold pizza? No.’

‘I love cold pizza.’

‘Okay, please! Work with me,’ she deadpans. ‘The cheese has a different texture and flavour than what was originally intended, and my point is that I don't think it's as digestible. Then meats, it's the smell I find actually rather nasty and also sometimes they make the dough soggy in a way that's really unnecessary. I just don't find it very elegant. Why would you go and bake a loaf with pieces of bacon in it, instead of just taking a beautiful slice of the wheat sourdough bread we make and then put some bacon on it?’

Brought to book

‘I published a book five years ago and it was it was a little bit the continuation of the one my father published in the ‘80s, which we republished in 2005 with the sort of working with his texts and my gaze on it. Then the next step for me was really to push forward exactly what I was telling you about. I do my craft at the crossroads between grains and fermentation. I'm not interested in the industrialization of breads, the way my father had to choose a road and picked the artisan way.’

I do believe in the magic of grains and fermentation to create a fabulous, everyday product and that's what I want to be putting forward. So I want to be showing different grain flavours, which I started doing using my cookies as a vector because it's sweet, it's easy. Happy for you to point out that’s contradictory with what I just said. And then just showing all of the wealth of uses of breads in our everyday life.

Music

I ask Apollonia if she thinks what's happened in practically every other food is long overdue in bread, pointing to how people working with olive oil, wine, cocoa and coffee promote the minutiae of specific varietals, then where and how they’re grown.

‘The major difference is that there's a big step in between. Unless you're talking to someone who's growing the grain and producing the flour, and then the bread from it, most of the time the miller, and before that the grain merchants are in between, and so it's always a blend. The comparison falls short a little bit at that point I think.’

I say that the same happens in commodity wine, chocolate and coffee, which is why single variety, complete chain of custody, artisan producers start up in reaction.

‘So, I love the comparison and I certainly can relate to people talking about terroir in chocolate, but I don't think it's exactly the same story. If you make bread with a single variety of grain, great, it will have a very specific taste and will correspond to that day and age. It's then, it's there, and probably will never be the same again. But then if you want to create something that's more harmonious, I view it a little bit like a symphony, where either you want one instrument and it won't play the same way from one day to the next, or you want an orchestra and then you can create harmony. Those are the different grain varieties that you choose in order to create your blend. That doesn't have to be the same every day. You can choose different instruments and have something that feels more harmonious, richer in the profile,  and not a judgement as to the single variety.’

Evolution

I observe that Poilâne doesn't seem to have the same level of NPD (new product development) obsession that bakery trade press portrays much of the rest of the industry as having. I ask ways in which the company has evolved. ‘It's a dynamic thing. People ask me: “well, is your look today the same as it was 20 years ago?” Yes, it is. But it's not because it's a different season of grains and I think it's a more complex question to answer. It's about living in your own time. Over the 22 years I've been in charge of the business, I've developed new breads, new pastries, new cookies, and there's many things that have changed. But the appearance is that nothing has changed, and that's the biggest compliment that you can give.’

‘It’s super hard to try and share a taste of how do we do it, and say: how is still relevant? How do we cast a new look on a thing that’s already there, but you're probably not using in the in the right way? Ideally I work with my clients in a way that they don't ask that question because I feed them with enough things that mean they don’t have to.'

'But we all have this thing of what's new? Not relentlessly coming up with this and that was also part of what I put forward in my book. I was like, okay, so there's those who like the bread ultra fresh, those who like it super dry, toasted or untoasted. Maybe this is me just trying to foster conversation between all parties, get them all to talk to one another, but my idea was sharing with people what to do with bread from day one fresh, until the day it's stale dry. When you know all of the labour and work that goes into this, there's no way you can throw it away. So let me help you make the best of this loaf, from crust to crumb.’

A sippet of savoir-faire

As a last question, I ask Apollonia if she has any tips for hobby bakers, or aspiring professionals. ‘Patience and passion, patience and passion. Patience because it takes time to really master what you're doing, and all the more in a home setting. You have it so much harder than we do. And then passion because and just something my father said to me. [Being a professional baker] is tough, so you need to be pretty damn sure that this is what you want to be doing.’
‘I really see our craft evolving and I really want to push forward people's understanding of grain and fermentation. If there's one thing that I'd like people to be attentive to is when they use the word flour they don’t do it generically, like “wheat flour.” To be more precise and say it's this great flour, or that great flour. Why that is important is because we have such a wide diversity around the world of territories and soils. Boosting the grains will bring together the commonality we have. Instead of breeding the difference, I'm more interested in fostering the conversation.’

@poilane @poilane.uk @apollonia_poilane

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An abridged version of this article was published in True Loaf magazine issue 61, January 2025.

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