Denise Carter | September 17th, 2011
Give us this day our daily bread. And so they do.
Bakers rise each morning before the crackof dawn to prepare our bread, with those who bake from scratch totting up long hours to create their dreams of perfection.
At Le Crouton, a French bakery in Freshwater, 38-year-old Antoine Bigot works with tremendous speed, as if every minute counts, even though the day’s bread has already been produced, graciously wrapped and displayed, and is being served to queues of customers.
Antoine comes from a enterprising family of bakers; his father was a pioneer of French baking in Japan, and Antoine continues that entrepreneurial spirit in Cairns.
“My father is French and my mother is Japanese,” Antoine says.
“My father was one of the first bakers of baguettes in Japan.”
At the age of 20, his father started his own shop, in which Antoine worked, and now his father has 10 shops there.
“When I was young and my family was in the business, I was kind of forced into it,” Antoine says.
“But then I developed a hunger, and once you understand why everything is done a certain way, it becomes enjoyable.”
Antoine is in partnership with Sato Masaru and his wife, who used to make baguettes for Rusty’s Markets. They soon realised how popular French bread was among Far North Queenslanders. and decided to open a bakery.
Sato Masaru travelled to Japan to look for ideas and in Kobe he met Antoine, his future baking and business partner.
The name for the store comes from Antoine.
In Australia, he says, croutons are the hard bits of bread you get in salad or soup but in France, le crouton is the very top of the bread, the baguette’s crusty top, “which is the best part of the baguette”, he says, as he points at it.
“I gave some bread to my grandfather, the middle bit, and he told me this,” he says, smiling.
Antoine makes his bread from the very beginning.
“Everything is handmade,” says Louise Forbes, who is the front-of-house coffee maker, the strawberry-filling maker, sandwich artist, food prepper and chef by trade.
“There is no dough divider and there are no pre-mixes.”
Louise says they work around the clock producing dough for croissants, puff pastries, Danish pastries and brioche.
“And that’s not including the bread,” she says.
“On Saturday we produce so many baguettes, we almost can’t physically make them anymore.”
Louise is the only one seemingly allowed to touch the coffee machine but that’s just the way it works, she says.
“You will find in a small place like this that all the key people are obsessive compulsive; we are all obsessive about food.”
One step back, Antoine is still busy, seemingly doing many things at once, shaking flour on the bread, cutting lines into baguettes, dividing the dough.
“Sometimes you have to do two jobs at once, and the timing has to be right for everything, so it gets really frustrating,” he says.
On weekdays he starts work at 2am, at weekends it’s more like midnight.
“I usually work for about 16 hours,” he says, his hands never still as he deftly takes trays of baguettes from one part of the oven and sends them to another so they are browned and coloured the same on all sides.
“I start with mixing a couple of doughs and putting them in the prover,” Antoine says.
The prover is a cabinet in which the dough sets before it is ready for baking.
“Before I go home, I shape the dough,” Antoine says.
“With the sourdough, we don’t use yeast, so it takes a long time to ferment – it is at 10 degrees for 12-14 hours.”
A baguette, shaped by hand and created to weigh exactly 300g, will be left in a cold room at 3C.
Baguettes with poolish, made with just flour, water and yeast, are light and airy and difficult to make.
They will be laid outside for 10 hours.
“In France it originated from Polish people,” Antoine explains.
Antoine likes to mix his dough with just a little yeast.
“The yeast causes the bread to be sweeter,” he says.
“If you mix too much you lose the taste.”
All the doughs seem to have to be made in a different way.
“Croissant dough is mixed for 45 minutes to ferment, then divided and rounded, put in the freezer for one-and-a-half hours, and then we fold in the butter,” Antoine says.
Yes, those croissant lines are actually layers of butter.
Antoine makes about 200 baguettes every day and is quite the perfectionist, and would never let anyone else help him.
He has to see each process through by himself from beginning to end.
“I think every person that’s in this job should be a perfectionist,” he says.
Sometimes it’s difficult, sometimes it’s frustrating, and often it’s a tiring job, but then there are the joys.
“When good bread that you imagine comes out of the oven, then it’s worth the work I do,” Antoine says with a grin.
Bon appetit.
>> Le Crouton, is at 227 Kamerunga Rd and is part of Freshwater Shopping Village.
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