Gosselin's Pain a'Lancienne

[SethG]

Let me be the latest to thank you for participating in this Q&A! Your books taught me to bake bread; I'm forever in your debt.

In the Bread Baker's Apprentice, you tell the exciting tale of your victory in the Beard competition and your subsequent journey to France to visit with several different bakers. You credit Mr. Gosselin of Paris with the pain a'lancienne that you feature in your book, and you trumpet the bread as a product of a new technique you call delayed fermentation: the dough is mixed cold and allowed to sit in the fridge overnight before it rises, giving the flavor-producing bacteria a head start on the yeast. (Forgive me if I've recounted this incorrectly-- I'm going by memory.)

Some have angrily denounced your pain a'lancienne as being completely different than what Gosselin actually makes. For my part, I've always thought that it would be very strange for you falsely to give credit to someone else for such a fantastic, easy bread!

What's the real story? Who deserves credit, Gosselin or Reinhart?

[Peter Reinhart]

Let me be the latest to thank you for participating in this Q&A!  Your books taught me to bake bread; I'm forever in your debt.

In the Bread Baker's Apprentice, you tell the exciting tale of your victory in the Beard competition and your subsequent journey to France to visit with several different bakers.  You credit Mr. Gosselin of Paris with the pain a'lancienne that you feature in your book, and you trumpet the bread as a product of a new technique you call delayed fermentation:  the dough is mixed cold and allowed to sit in the fridge overnight before it rises, giving the flavor-producing bacteria a head start on the yeast.  (Forgive me if I've recounted this incorrectly-- I'm going by memory.)

Some have angrily denounced your pain a'lancienne as being completely different than what Gosselin actually makes.  For my part, I've always thought that it would be very strange for you falsely to give credit to someone else for such a fantastic, easy bread!

What's the real story?  Who deserves credit, Gosselin or Reinhart?

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Hi Seth,

Thanks for asking that! My version is based on Gosselin's but is modified for the home and small batch baker (I noted that in the book, so do tell those who were tweaked to please go back and read the text). The ongoing theme of the book was the idea that we need to master the rules, the so-called letter of the law, in order to be free to break or tweak them, to bake by the "spirit" of the rules. In this case, the key is understanding why Gosseline's cold fermentation works at all. What he does is mix water and flour but no yeast or salt, and then chills it overnight. In big batches it would be risky to add the yeast because it takes hours for the dough to cool down and the dough might overferment. This won't happen in small batches which can cool quickly in the fridge (plus using cold water during mixing), so I add the salt and yeast right up front and then chill it. This saves hours of production time the next day as the dough is basically ready to use when you retrieve if from the fridge. Gosselin, on the other hand, remixes on the second day and adds yeast and salt, then waits six hours for the dough to gradually awaken and ferment. This is a good example of two ways up the mountain that both get to the peak. More importantly, though, is grasping why the technique works so. The cold fermentation (or in Gosselin's case, the cold "blank" dough) allows the amylase enzymes that exist in the flour to break apart the starches and free up many of the various sugars trapped in those complex molecules. It is not the bacteria or yeast that does this, but the enzymes (which is why, in the intro, I called understanding enzymes the next frontier of bread baking). In the end, it is always about the balancing act between time, temperature, and ingredients. The Gosselin method achieves a flavor release beyond even what preferments (which are working towards the same goal) can do, which is why I think it has great, but still underappreciated, implications for American bakers. My variation achieves the same end goal and, especially for home bakers, eliminates a step that big batch bakers need to use, but not small batch bakers.

So yes, I give Gosselin credit for opening my mind to the concept and for perfecting a brilliant method for implementing it, but not for inventing this method, which certainly other bakers have also stumbled upon and use. I doubt if Gosselin has the slightest idea why, scientifically, his method works so well--it took me a year of peeling back layers of the onion (so to speak) to get past the conventional wisdom (that it's about the yeast or bacteria) and finally realize that it's more about the enzymatic action. This kind of detective work is part of the joy and "aha!" of baking, and why it never seems to get old.