Monsieur Baguette

Photo: Brad Paris

On a brisk Friday evening a week or so ago, the vaunted reputations of some of New York’s best-known bakeries were savagely laid waste, and we know exactly how it happened.

It was the professor, in the conference room, with the LamsonSharp Batard knife with a folding wood handle.

Not that we didn’t see it coming. Some, in fact, would say we orchestrated it. You don’t invite Steven L. Kaplan, Goldwin Smith Professor of European History at Cornell University and the world’s preeminent French-bread scholar, to a blind tasting and not expect the crumbs to fly—which they did, all over the wall-to-wall carpeting. “Jesus!” exclaimed the professor, having barely crossed the threshold. “Some of these breads are ugly.” It is that brazen frankness, that instinctively critical faculty, that has improbably won this Brooklyn-born bon vivant legions of fans in France, where he lives part of the year, and where the government, in its chastened gratitude for his missionary baguette zeal, has twice dubbed him Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. To test his mettle—and our town’s best baguette efforts—we assembled a baker’s dozen, all of approximate freshness, and subjected them to Kaplan’s rigorous system of evaluation.

From No. 1 to No. 13, Kaplan studied each specimen with the appalled enthusiasm of a CSI pathologist examining a particularly gruesome corpse. He assessed each baguette’s appearance, looking for the decorative incisions called grignes, and evaluating color and line. “Is it seductive? It has to seduce my eyes.” He considered the crusts, tapping each sample’s bottom for resonance and squeezing it to hear its song. Then he brandished his weapon, made a surgical slice straight down the middle of each baguette, and, with a practiced air of theatricality, ripped the thing open and buried his nose deep within its crumb to capture the aroma. This is critical, he noted—as critical as the taste, in fact, and thus given the same weight on his 21-point grading scale. Multiple sniffs ensued, plus some bellows-like manipulation of the bread to extract even more aroma. A thorough examination of the crumb, he explained, would ideally reveal an off-white color and good alvéolage, or “distribution of cavities that are the testament to the fermentation process”—the more wildly inscribed, with a multiplicity of uneven holes, the better. All this before Kaplan ingested even a single morsel of bread, and then proceeded to isolate the mouthfeel (“a global sense of the first moment of penetration”), the crust (a good caramelization is key), and, finally, the taste, which the professor defined as “the marriage of crust and crumb.”

Many things can go wrong in the baking of a baguette, and on this day, alas, many had. We learned that when breads are packed too tightly in an oven and they’ve “had intercourse,” as Kaplan puts it, the sides don’t cook sufficiently—a condition technically referred to as being baisé, or “fucked.” When the oven is dirty, the bottom develops croûtage, a piling-up of little pieces of crust. Even more baffling to Kaplan was the grill-marked underbelly of one especially sad sample—a sign, he speculated, that it had been cooked by convection heat, rather than on a refractory floor, the only acceptable method. “Feh, as my grandma used to say.”

On the whole, Kaplan wasn’t hugely impressed. (For a more enthusiastic take, look for his forthcoming Good Bread Is Back, out next February from Duke University Press.) Among his more interesting findings: Baguettes from Balthazar Bakery and Almondine, the Dumbo dark horse, were the best-looking. Almondine also won for crust and crumb. Amy’s smelled the best, but Sullivan St. Bakery had the best mouthfeel. Kaplan is a tough but fair grader, and only the top two baguettes overall (Almondine and Pain d’Avignon) merited his Michelin-style wheat-sheaves designation; their Kaplan scores—and the next “best” four, to use the term loosely—are revealed on the opposite page.

On the whole, although the results weren’t great, the bakers in question shouldn’t take it personally. What Kaplan does, he does for love. “In France, I crusade against the indifference or bread-ignorance of chefs and/or owners,” says the professor, who often brings his own bread with him to dinner, stashed in his briefcase. “If the bread served is abominable, I pull out my own—demonstratively. Shaming is the only effective technique to deal with bread dereliction.”

1.Almondine
85 Water St., nr. Dock St., Dumbo, Brooklyn; 718-797-5026
“Mmmm, yeah,” said the professor. The Almondine baguette has a nice look, nice resonance, and a nice song, he said. It has a little bit of fruit, a peachy, buttery quality in its nose, he noted. It achieves a good marriage of crust and crumb, and although “it would not be among the best breads in Paris, it would hold its own clearly in a neighborhood bakery—but then there are 1,275 neighborhood bakeries in Paris.”
SCORE: 14.65

2.Pain d’Avignon
Available at Corrado Bread & Pastry at Grand Central Market; 212-599-4321
If not for a bad case of acne, this Long Island City wholesaler might have taken home another golden sheaf of wheat. “It looks like it has eczema, psoriasis, or leprosy,” said the professor. “These are pustules,” he said, examining the pimpled crust. “Probably bread that’s in deferred fermentation.” And that’s too bad, because otherwise the professor liked the tactility of its crust, the articulation of its crumb, and its elegant shape: “If this were a model, you could see it coming down the runway in Balenciaga or Dior.”
SCORE: 12.80

3.Amy’s Bread
672 Ninth Ave., nr. 47th St.; 212-977-2670; and other Manhattan locations
Amy’s is the best-smelling baguette in town, according to the professor, reminding us that what Baudelaire said about wine (“If it had a soul, it would be found in its aromatic constitution”) applies equally to bread. And what Amy’s lacks in looks (“inelegant,” “underbaked,” and “sickly in color,” according to the professor) it makes up for not just in aroma, but also mouthfeel (“solicitous, inviting, with an early precocious sense of the taste of it”) and a relatively “tasteful crustiness,” even though it is a “pale crustiness without soul because there is no caramelization to speak of.”
SCORE: 11.15

4.Balthazar Bakery
80 Spring St., at Crosby St.; 212-965-1785
The “very seductive” Parisian look of the Balthazar baguette elicited pangs of nostalgia in the professor for Paris, and, with its “golden-orange top” and “browner orange sides,” ended up in a first-place tie with Almondine in the appearance category. Taste was another story: “It’s insipid. It lacks sapidity. The taste is flat, disappointing, starchy.”
SCORE: 10.95

5.Le Pain Quotidien
Locations citywide
The Belgian chain’s downfall was a Grand Canyon–esque fissure in the bottom of its baguette, the product, perhaps, of insufficient fermentation, insufficient kneading, or both, resulting in a flunking score for appearance: “When you have a sense of self about baking, you don’t let this out of the bakery,” said the professor. “This is an abomination.”
SCORE: 8.80

6.Sullivan St. Bakery
533 W. 47th St., nr. Tenth Ave;. 212-265-5580
This Italian bakery makes a stirato, not a baguette. But the beauty of the professor’s template is that it allows for “many different perspectives, which enable everyone to address the same fundamental issues of organoleptic (sensorial) quality.” That said, Sullivan ranked high in many organoleptic ways, including first in mouthfeel and third for both the crumb and taste. An acute lack of crustiness did it in, or, as the professor put it, “It’s as if the female crumb has completely reduced the male crust to helpless impotence.”
SCORE: 8.60


THE PROFESSOR’S 6 FAVORITE BAGUETTES

Monsieur Baguette