Bake Week 1 - baguettes, lamination, and new friends
February 8 - February 15, 2026
One full week of baking!
I’ll start with this - it’s been a long time since I’ve been this bodily exhausted! In the best way, though. My mind is overflowing with information, my body is sore in random places from repeatedly doing things I haven’t done before (ie: rolling very cold croissant dough), and my heart is full from the fun adventure of making new friends. My classmates have heard me snort for the first time as a few of us fell apart into the type of delirious giggles that only happen when you’re totally exhausted. And I have somehow learned more in one week about bread than I think I may have learned in an entire year of attempting to self-learn the art of bread making.
The course is “boulangerie and viennoiserie.” What the french is that?! - you might ask. Boulangerie - bread making. Viennoiserie - croissant and flaky pastry making. Ish. There’s a little more to it than that, like buttery doughs like brioche and some other sweet treats, but to be honest I’m not wholly sure yet what all it entails. This week, I’ve made at least three different types of baguettes, pain suisse, pain au raisin, buttery-chocolately-chippy breads, breads shaped like little animals, apple turnovers, hamburger buns, sandwich bread, palmiers, pastry cream, and more. I’ve learned how to say Canada, Australia, Thailand, Korea, The United States of America, Hawaii, Singapore, China, Colombia, and England in French, since lesson 1 in French class was introducing everyone in the class by name and where they come from. Pretty sweet list for a class of 12 people!
Every morning, class starts at 7am, which means being changed into uniform, with your table and tools needed for the day sanitized, ovens on, dishwashwer running, chef hat and hairnet on, and coffee maker brewing. For the first time in my life (I think), I was up at 5am every day for a week. I drop Anya off with her dog sitter at 6:15 at a metro station near school, and I’m ready for the lab (our school term for the kitchen) to be unlocked at 6:30. My morning commute is something of a dream. I bundle Anya up, and with my coffee in hand, she walks to school with me (or, on the particularly cold and rainy mornings, is carried like the princess she is in a little bag). Paris is dark and quiet at that time. The only people awake are the food delivery drivers, leaving piles of potatoes and fresh veggies at the doorsteps of the local restaurants. Street lamps dance softly in the rain, and the street glitters underneath them. Everything is quiet, and most mornings I see a restaurant owner unlocking the door to his restaurant to receive his daily shipment of goods. When it isn’t too rainy, Anya is happy to scamper alongside me off-leash, one of the only times here I feel like she can be.
When the clock hits 7, class starts, and everything speeds up. Things sped up gradually day-over-day throughout the week, and even on our slowest days it’s amazing how much we cover. We’re in the lab from 7am to 1pm, then a classroom from 2-4. Some days entail 6 hours of prep; mixing dough, rolling butter into puff pastry, or slicing apples to make compote for apple turnovers. Other days, it’s been shaping and proving up to 5 different things to cycle through the ovens. The smell is other-worldly. Rum soaked raisins wrapped in sheets of butter and dough and pastry cream, chocolate chips folded into buttery bread inside 15 deck ovens… and of course, in the name of learning, we must “sample the product.” (Twist my arm!) What we don’t eat or take home for friends, we might trade with our neighboring pastry class. In turn, I’ve had the honor of sampling choux pastry, chocolate eclairs, religieuse (something about looking like a priest), and freshly whipped cream piled into some other type of pastry. Not the worst mid-day snack, I’ll tell ya that! Then, because there’s still even more left over, we wrap it up for the freezer, to be collected and donated to food charities once or twice per week.
My first baguettes!
I may have practiced baguettes at home half a dozen times, but all it took was one lesson from a French Chef to completely change the outcome.
Bread is a crazy thing. The 12 of us have many questions, but many of the answers are “you will learn from the dough.” It’s not a science where A+B=C, it’s a living, breathing food that depends on fermentation. And just like us humans, living things don’t always follow a precise clock or schedule or abide by the rules we so desperately try to manufacture for the world. So instead, we learn what tension in a ball of dough looks like and feels like. What elasticity feels like, and how to hold stretched dough up to the light to see if the gluten network is forming. I think this is what appeals to me so much about breadmaking. In engineering, I’m surrounded by people who are accustomed to a formula, a schedule, and a black or white answer. I tend to thrive when things get a little grey; when the path hasn’t been paved yet, and a bit of of intuition, patience, or sense is needed. So bread is all of it. There is science; heat doesn’t form gluten networks, but work does, and if you overwork the dough you can’t necessarily save it. But there’s this give-and-take relationship with the bread dough, where you’ve got to learn to tune into what the dough needs, too. You’re not the boss in this kitchen, the fermentation is. And you’re just the trusty servant to the fermentation, hoping to help it along to something crunchy, or soft, or chewy, or sour, or creamy, or whatever you may hope for. Crazy that you pretty much always start with flour, salt, water, and yeast. But coming out of the oven are a thousand variations of creations begging to be smothered in butter or cheese or jam or just ripped and eaten while they’re hot, just exactly as they are.
Other than bread, this experience is one of the coolest demonstrations of diversity I’ve ever experienced. I spend every single day with a total of 13 people (when you count my Chef). There’s a 31 year age spread (18 years old to 49), and representation from 10 different countries. A couple of people came to class without so much as maybe ever mixing flour and water before, let alone making bread, and some people have been working in bakeries for years. And yet, we’re all learning, and working together. Some of us have things to teach others, and all of us have things to learn from everyone else. It’s a pretty fabulous microcosm of the world. There’s one guy who knows French fluently, and is an amazing sport about translating things for the rest of us when our Chef gets stuck on a word or turn of phrase. And, just like bread, there are some people who didn’t know yet how to say “my name is” in French. I do tend to get lucky in life, I think. What are the odds you could have all these people, from all these places (geographically, and in life), and yet there is literally not one single person I don’t like. They’re all genuinely good people, and we hang out outside of class and crack jokes with one another.
Each person I’ve met is so brave for being here, in their own way. Like I said, some don’t know any French, but knew the French would be able to offer them the best education in the world when it comes to Bread, so they came anyways. Some of them have never left home before, and now they’re in a new city, with a new language, in a new country, so that they can improve themselves. Some people have never baked, and yet they’re asking questions, and watching their classmates, and going to the library outside of class to try to keep up. There’s a handful of people like me, who weren’t confident about their career trajectories, so they’ve dropped everything to take a break and do something completely out of their comfort zone. There are people from the baking world, but we’re also accountants, cyber security and software engineers, construction managers, or teenagers out in the world getting started on their very first career. How stinking cool is that?
Now, it’s past 10pm and wayyyy past my bedtime. I had a weekend of some exploration, journaling, walks, and dessert sampling with new friends. I’m refreshed and ready to get back to baking.
May this week bring you butter and hot bread, and a moment to try something new.
À la prochaine (Until next time),
Jesi & Anya
