Fashion
A Brioche That Will Make a Believer Out of You
You don’t have to dedicate your life to the ancient practice of baking to yield a stunning loaf. You may just find you want to.
Credit…Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Paige Hicks.
In Angers, France, at a bakery called Boulangerie des Carmes, you can behold (and taste) the most beautiful brioche loaves gracing bakery shelves — I’ll say it — universewide.
They are perfectly and only slightly sweet, complex, with a textured crumb that makes even the most trained baker marvel. This particular brioche is a testament to practice and evolution. To craft a loaf this exquisite takes a dedicated lifetime of bringing things back to basics.
I’ve yet to meet a baker more dedicated to this ideal than Richard Ruan, the owner of Boulangerie des Carmes and a winner of the M.O.F. (Meilleur Ouvrier de France), a prestigious honor for craftspeople. His hands have not only given the world this best, by my estimation, brioche, but he also maintains an Old World standard of quality that is neither stodgy nor outdated.
Recipe: Brioche
His bakery occupies the corner space in a traditional cream-white limestone building, overlooking the Maine River, which flows into the seductive, often low and subtle Loire. There you will find a proper deck oven, a few stand mixers and one planetary mixer. Besides those, though, you will find only tools that require a human hand and body to power them: a hand-cranked sheeter, used to laminate dough, large rolling pins, small scoring tools; French wooden proofing boxes that seem like only pretty antiques but are used to leaven bread as purposefully as they have been for hundreds of years.
