By Rob Nichols, Weaver Street Market Bread Bakery Manager, and Andrew Griffiths, Former Weaver Street Market Bread Bakery Manager
It’s big, it’s bold. It’s sour, it’s sold… by the whole, half, or quarter loaf. It’s La Miche.
For those of you who haven’t tried it, La Miche is a thick-crusted sourdough bread.
Rob Nichols, founder and current manager of the Weaver Street bakery, is a big fan. Rustic bread has always been his favorite, and you will rarely find his breakfast table lacking a loaf. But he also loves French bread, which presents a bit of a quandary: La Miche or baguette?
If you investigated the genealogy of Weaver Street’s bread bakery, you would find that it leads back to France. We’ve always thought our greatest challenge and triumph was the perfect baguette. And even today, with the many different varieties of breads produced, French baguettes, batards, and rolls are some of our biggest sellers. When our bakers speak of “the French dough,” we mean dough to make baguettes.
La Miche is another style of French bread and is actually the original French Bread, predating the post-World War I baguette (developed in Paris) by several hundred years. La Miche (literally translated, “the round loaf”) has gone by that and by many other names, including pain boulot (“plump bread”), gros pain (“large bread”), or pain de campagne (“country bread”). Some may be familiar with the late Lionel Poilane’s famous bread, which was a two-kilo round of La-Miche-style bread.
In many ways, La Miche is the opposite of the urban and sophisticated baguette. It recalls the days when breads were baked once a week on farms or in small villages–in contrast with the baguette, which was always a professional bread and was baked two or three times a day, to be fresh for every meal. The interesting thing is that both loaves contain only flour, water, salt, and a leavening agent, and the final quality and character of either loaf directly reflects the skill of the baker; there is no camouflaging with fancy ingredients.
The breads’ qualities can be contrasted as follows (adapted from Ed Behr’s The Art of Eating, Winter, 1998):
THE BAGUETTE
- small (about 12 ounces)
- long and narrow shape
- white flour only
- best within 6 hours of baking, stales quickly
- light, open crumb with large holes
- leavened with commercial yeast
- golden brown, thin crust
- light mild flavor goes well with food
LA MICHE
- big (about 4 pounds)
- round shape
- darker, made with some whole wheat and rye
- excellent keeping qualities, up to a week
- denser crumb
- made with sourdough levain
- chocolate brown to very dark, thick crust
- with a deep strong flavor, it is the food
La Miche served as a staple starch, and it served as the foundation for most meals, much as we use pasta today. In contrast, the baguette is a direct descendant of better milling techniques to produce refined flour, commercial yeast production, and mechanical (high-speed) kneading machines. Its popularity coincided with the rise of bourgeois and haute cuisine, as a neutral accompaniment to food, perhaps especially wine and cheese. And in fact, it was only after smaller baguette-style loaves became popular that bread was sold by the piece instead of by the pound. From the 1930s to the 1980s, commercial bakers figured out how to make white bread faster, cheaper, and (incidentally) less flavorful.
So here we are in the post-modern world. We revived the baguette, and now we’ve recovered the country bread of our ancestors. So we have the best of both the pre-modern and modern worlds to choose from. La Miche is big, dark, dense, and a bit unwieldy. The baguette is sleek and modern, but it’s only good for a one-night stand. Which will you choose?
La Miche is an Owners’ Special this week. Buy a quarter, half, or whole loaf at 25% off.