the right word for the pastry we have
Hello from the road! I’m currently in France, doing some research (not an euphemism). I’m writing in a hurry, this essay got away from me, and my travel companions are trying to drag me out to ply me with drink, so I had to cut this story in half. The second part will be along next week.
It’s raining horizontally when we get to Locronan. Diana and I are traveling with our friend Vaughn, who has such a vast and disjointed collection of interests that he has to work as a sociologist. One of the reasons we travel with him is that he can eat and drink truly phenomenal quantities, and does so at every opportunity.
Locronan is a village in Brittany, officially one of the most beautiful villages in France. There is an actual association of them, membership by invitation only. A few kilometres away is Douarnenez, the supposed birthplace of kouign amann. Kouign amann means butter cake in Breizh, and this trip is both a pilgrimage and a quest.
At one point I was making a dozen kouign amann a day. Making kouign amann is one of the most pleasurable things I have done as a baker. The basic process is to take a bread dough, yeasted and long-fermented, and laminate it with butter as you would a croissant. You roll out the dough so you can enclose a flat slab of butter in it, then roll that packet thin and fold it upon itself, like a letter bound for an envelope. As you roll you feel the butter deform and the dough stretch, and the rolling pin seems almost to be sailing. When you pick the dough up or flip it over, which you do frequently, you drape it over the backs of your hands and it becomes a cool, enveloping weight. You repeat this process a few times, and at some point you start rolling sugar into the package. The dough starts to sparkle, and it sounds like you’re biking over coarse sand. After a few more rounds, you place the kouign in molds and then load them into the oven, where they explode from their molds and open like dahlias. The only process that gives the same sense of creating something vital is making bread, and that lacks the tactile poetry.
We have come to Locronan because two of the best kouign amann shops Brittany are found here, on opposite sides of the Place de l’Eglise. They are both closed, one for the day and one for lunch. Nearly everything in Locronan is closed for lunch, except the establishments that are closed for the day. The Place de l’Eglise is full of wet French retirees, and it is getting wetter. Lunch in rural France is 2 hours long. We decide to go to Douarnenez to find some lunch ourselves, and possibly some kouign amann.
In France, kouign amann is actually considered the least important of Brittany’s gastronomic exports. Ahead of it are butter, buckwheat, seafood, and cider. Three of these four come together in the institution of the creperie, which is where you go to get a galette - a buckwheat crepe cooked on a buttered griddle, usually with a bowl of cider. Galettes are much simpler to make than kouign amann. The batter is made of buckwheat flour, eggs, and milk, spread thin and cooked till crisp on one side; then folded around a filling, which usually contains an egg and too much cheese.
In Douarnenez, we wander into the first creperie that’s open and order galettes and cider. The cook is working with a thick batter, dark with bran. The batter is so thick it doesn’t run, and she has to scrub it across the griddle with her wooden scraper. The galettes come off crisp at the edges and the buckwheat tastes of smoke and granite. The variation in their thickness is almost musical, and the husk is rough on the tongue. It is a remarkable representation of the grain. The fillings are anonymous, but the galettes themselves are so compelling that when offered dessert, we ask instead for two more galettes, this time with nothing but Breton butter. It is around midway through this second round that we realize we’re eating something magical.
We leave the creperie and find a bakery just up the street. They have kouign amann. Later, I will discover that this baker is one of the original 17 members of L’Association du Kouign Amann de Douarnenez, which was formed in 1999 to defend the honor and integrity of a pastry. The kouign here are made in the traditional shape, disks with diamonds scored on the upper surface, shiny and dark. Our kouign amann is the size of my palm. The laminations on its sides feather open architecturally. I have been in Brittany for less than 24 hours. I have never had a kouign amann made with Breton butter before. I am so excited I could dance.
We pass it round, taste it, and fall silent, lost for words.
Finally Diana says, “It’s stodgy.”
That is unquestionably the right word for the pastry we have. I am in the homeland of the kouign amann, and I want to cry. Continued here…
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best,
tw
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