We Get Our Daily Bread in Sablet, France

From the day we began our search for a house in the South of France, our top priority was for the house to be located within walking distance of village business' including a boulangerie (bakery).

As readers know, we ended up buying a house in the middle of Sablet, a small village (pop. 1,264 by last count) that sits on a hill at the foot of the Dentelles de Montmirail (small chain of mountains in photograph below).

Main Sablet industries are wine making and tourism so there is always life in the village in comparison to other villages where tourism is the primary business so there is little activity or life in the off-season.

Within a short walk from the house, there is: "Chez Mimi et Alain" (a well-stocked mini mart), "Chez Thierry" (a butcher shop), florist, pharmacy, tabac/presse, two hair salons, bibliothèque (library), medical offices, a bank with ATM, and post office. At "Maison des Vins et du Tourism", they offer complimentary tastings of Sablet wines and information about the area.

There is also the Café des Sports, Bistrot des Copains and La Come di Pizzeria and two boulangeries, one so close, "Le Pain Médiéval", we can sometimes smell the aroma of freshly baked bread on our terrace in the morning and the second, "Boulangerie Patisserie Pradier" is in the center of the village.

Sablet sits at the foot of the Dentelles de Montmirail

We knew that buying pain (bread) would become an essential part of our daily lives with a home in France. You can’t walk down the street in France without spotting at least one person with a freshly baked baguette stuck under their arm. Everyone has probably seen a picture of a stereotypical Frenchman, wearing a beret and striped shirt and carrying a baguette under his arm.

One evidence of the importance of boulangeries to the French, is the amount of data that is collected by the French government. The New York Times recently reported that according to a 2017 government report, half of the French population lives within 2.2 kilometers of a bakery as the crow flies. In cities, 73 percent of the population lives within 2,000 feet.

According to the French National Bakery and Confectionary Association, there are 35,000 boulangeries in France, one for every 1800 people in France. The New York Times reports that the average trip to a bakery takes 7.4 minutes on foot, by car, or with another mode of transportation. Specifically, it's 5 minutes in the city and 9.4 minutes in the countryside.

I should mention that according to the French government, only bakers who use proper flour and knead their own dough can call themselves boulangers (bakers) and to be called a boulangerie, a French bakery must bake bread on the premises. Outlets that sell bread baked elsewhere are called a "depot de pain".

French bread comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. The following are a few of the more common types:

The baguette Ordinaire is made with quick-rising yeast and white flour and cost less than one euro.

The baguette Traditionnelle must be made according to the "Décret Pain de 1993". According to this decree, this baguette must be made with just flour, yeast, salt, and water. It’s usually hand-formed, as evident by the pointy ends and bumps in the loaves. This baguette usually costs a few cents more than a baguette ordinaire.

The Pain de Campagne is a thick-crusted loaf made with both wheat and white flour, usually oval in shape.

Pain Complet is a whole-grain loaf

Pain aux Céréales is a small rustic loaf with seeds and whole grains

Shirley entering our house in Sablet

Pain Médiéval is our favorite Sablet bakery and thankfully, it's conveniently located just a few steps from our front door behind big trees between the fountain at Place Yvan Audouard and "Chez Mimi et Alain" mini mart.

The Pain Médiéval Boulangerie is open every day of the week except on Monday and Tuesday. The two boulangeries trade days off, Boulangerie Patisserie Pradier is closed on Wednesday and Thursday, and they coordinate their vacations so one of the boulangeries is always open in Sablet.

Pain Médiéval Boulangerie in Sablet

Pain Médiéval is owned by Jeannine Moulin and her son, Julien who does the baking. When the bakery is open, there is often a line out the door and cars double-parked in front with motors running while the owner dashes into the bakery to get a freshly baked baguette or some other baked treat.

Each time another person joins the line of people waiting to buy bread, the newcomer greets those already in line with "bonjour madame, bonjour monsieur" and will be responded to in a similar fashion. When it's your turn, Madame Moulin will ask what cuisson (baking), you prefer, "bien cuite" (well cooked and crusty) or "pas trop cuite" (less well baked and softer crust)?

Interior of Pain Médiéval Boulangerie in Sablet

In addition to buying our daily bread, I usually can not leave Pain Médiéval Boulangerie without one of the pastry's below for our "petit déjeuner" (breakfast) which we eat out on the terrace, weather permitting which is almost every day.

Croissants, flaky, layered, crescent-shaped piece of heaven.

Pain au Chocolat, sometimes called a chocolate croissant, is a sweet roll consisting of a rectangular-shaped piece of yeast-leavened laminated dough, similar in texture to a puff pastry, with one or two pieces of chocolate in the center.

Palmiers are a crunchy, buttery, sweet “cookie” made from puff pastry and sugar. These are my favorite and Madame Moulin, knows that, so she puts them on the list for Julien to bake when we are in town.

On the weekends, Pain Medieval Boulangerie has Chouquettes, bite-sized puff pastries topped with large sugar crystals which my grandchildren love and I love. To me, they are the French equivalent of donut holes.

From time to time when we have guests in Sablet, we ask Madame Moulin to bake us one of the large brioche aux raisins in the photograph below. They are delicious, but too much for Shirley and I to eat before becoming stale, so we save these to enjoy with guests.

One of Madame Moulin's made to order Brioche

French boulangeries such as Pain Médiéval Boulangerie offer up many different varieties of breads and other baked goodies, so be aware, the items I have listed is nowhere near exhaustive.

Julien et sa maman Jeannine of Pain Médiéval Boulangerie in Sablet

I would be remiss to not share a couple more observations about eating and buying bread in France. These include:

Except in upscale restaurants where you will get a bread plate and butter, French people set bread directly on the table, never on their plate. In France, bread is meant to accompany a meal and sop up sauce, it’s not a separate course, so butter isn’t usually served with bread in France.

Most Americans are germaphobes and you will notice that in boulangeries in France, the vendeuse (the person who sells you the bread) never handles bread with anything but their bare hands. If you are going to enjoy your visit to France, you can't get weird about other people handling the bread you are going to eat.

Good bread is a necessity for any meal in France. Grab it, and tear it apart, and enjoy the aroma, when it opens. Bon Appetit.

Pain Médiéval Boulangerie
6 Place Verdun
84110 Sablet
France
Tel: 04 90 46 91 54

If you are thinking about a trip to the South of France including spending time in Provence, we invite you to visit our website. Our house is available for rent by the week or more. You can reach us for further information by sending an email to chcmichel@aol.com.

Pain Medieval Boulangerie, a wonderful bakery in Sablet

As regular readers of this blog know, our house in Provence is in the heart of Sablet, a small wine-making village dating from the middle ages that sits in the foothills of the Dentelles de Montmirail between the villages of Séguret and Gigondas. The oldest part of the village is made up of narrow streets that rise in a circular fashion around a beehive shaped hill up to the twelfth century church of St. Nazaire.



Sablet

Although a small village, there are only 1200 residents, the shopkeepers in Sablet can provide for the daily needs of the residents and surrounding wineries. There is a butcher, a Vival mini mart, a bank, florist, tabac where you can buy newspapers, magazines and souvenirs, a pharmacy, post office, hair salon, doctor's office, a café, pizzeria, several restaurants and two boulangeries (bakeries).



Fountain at Place Yvan Audouard

Pain Medieval is our favorite Sablet bakery and thankfully it's conveniently located just a few steps from our house behind the big trees between the fountain at Place Yvan Audouard and the Vival mini mart. The Pain Medieval Boulangerie is open every day of the week except for Monday and Tuesday.



Pain Medieval Boulangerie

Pain Medieval is owned by Jeannine Moulin and her son, Julien Moulin, who does the baking. When the bakery is open, there is often a line out the door and cars double-parked in front with motors running while the owner dashes into the bakery to get a freshly baked baguette or some other baked treats.



Julien and mom Jeannine Moulin

Each time another person joins the line of people waiting to buy a freshly baked baguette, the newcomer greets those already in line with "bonjour madame, bonjour monsieur" and will be responded to in a similar fashion. When it's your turn, Madame Moulin will ask what cuisson (baking), you prefer, meaning how golden brown do you want your baguette or croissant to be?



Julien Moulin

According to Jeannine Moulin, there is a family tradition of working as bakers. She said that at an early age, Julien would ask her father who was also a baker if he could come and watch him work in the bakery. Madame Moulin said she has another son who is a baker in another village.



Julien Moulin preparing dough for baking

This past weekend I was reading new posts by favorite bloggers including Camille's post about éclairs on her blog Croque-Camille Food Adventures in Paris. Camille is a pastry chef by trade and in this post she recounted the history of éclairs and what are important characteristics of a good éclair.

Eclairs are made of pâte à choux, a light pastry dough used to make profiteroles, croquembouches, éclairs, cream puffs, gougères and chouquettes among other things. Choux pastry contains only water, butter, flour, and eggs. Instead of a raising agent it employs high moisture content to create steam during baking to puff the pastry.

As I read Camille's post this past Sunday, I was transported to Sablet and Pain Medieval Boulangerie as I pictured the big basket of freshly baked chouquettes that appear every Sunday at the bakery. The chouquettes are feather light, golden brown and topped with pearl sugar; they are sold by weight.

Since it was Sunday, I thought I would make a batch of pâte à choux and bake chouquettes for our grand kids who would be coming over later in the day with their parents to watch the Super Bowl. The recipe by Eric Kayser in Food and Wine magazine is easy and the chouquettes turned out great. They were big hits with the grand kids and parents. Unfortunately, I didn't get a photograph of them with sugar on their face.

Pâte à Choux
Makes about 3 dozen choux puffs

Ingredients

1½ cups water
1 stick plus 1 tablespoon unsalted butter, cut into cubes
1 teaspoon sugar
½ teaspoon salt
200 grams all-purpose flour (about 1½ cups)
8 large eggs

Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Line two large baking sheets with parchment paper.

2. In a large sauce pan, combine the water, butter, sugar, and salt and bring to boil. Reduce the heat to moderate. Add the flour all at once and stir vigorously with a wooden spoon until a tight dough forms and pulls away from the side of the pan, 2 minutes. Remove pan from heat.

3. In a bowl, beat the eggs and add to dough in four batches, stirring vigorously between additions until the eggs are completely incorporated and the pastry is smooth. The dough should be glossy and very slowly hang, stretch and fall from the spoon in thick ribbons.

4. Transfer the dough to a pastry bag fitted with a ½-inch plain tip. Pipe 1½-inch mounds onto the baking sheets, leaving 1 inch between the mounds. I found that putting dough into the pastry bag is messy. I drew circles on the parchment paper to guide me as I piped the mounds onto the baking sheet.

Mounds of choux ready to go into oven

For the next step, follow the directions for whichever choux you want to make:

Chouquettes Sprinkle each mound with ½ teaspoon pearl sugar (decorating sugar). Bake for 30 minutes, until browned and puffed.

Gougères Divide 1 cup shredded Gruyère cheese equally over the mounds. Bake for 30 minutes, until browned and puffed.

Cream Puffs Bake the choux for 30 minutes, until browned and puffed. Let cool completely. Cut each mound in half horizontally with a serrated knife. Fill each one with 2 tablespoons chocolate pastry cream. Replace tops and dust with powdered sugar.

Baked chouquettes just out of the oven

Serve your choux the same day you bake them, they won't be nearly as good the next day.

Chouquettes ready to be served.

As you can see above, choux pastry is very versatile and can be used for multiple preparations, even in the same meal. For example use half the choux pastry to make gougères for apéritif and the other half for cream puffs or profiteroles.

Pain Médiéval
6 Place Verdun
84110 Sablet
04 90 46 91 54

Bonne journée mes amis et à bientôt.

Pain Medieval Boulangerie, Sablet

As I have said in previous post, we have two boulangeries in Sablet. We are fortunate because while neighboring Gigondas and Seguret might be more charming, Seguret is classified as a Plus Beaux Village de France, and better known, Gigondas is renown for their red wine, they don't have boulangeries.

One of our criteria for villages when we were looking about for a house was that the village had to have some commercial services open year around like cafés and boulangeries. We wanted to be able to walk to a boulangerie every morning.

The fact we have two boulangeries assures that the villagers of Sablet have freshly baked baguettes every day as the boulangeries coordinate their days of fermeture - closing and congés annuels -vacation closing, so that one of the boulangeries is always open.

This is the boulangerie that is located closest to our house. Their days of weekly closing are Monday and Tuesday. On the days madame is open, it seems there is always a line out the door and cars are parked with motors running while their drivers dash into the boulangerie to get their daily bread.



As each new person joins the line waiting to be served by madame, you hear the newcomer say "bonjour madame, bonjour monsieur" and responded to accordingly. When you get to the front of the line, upon hearing what you want, madame will generally asked about the cuisson - baking, you desire, meaning how brown do you want the baguette or croissant, more or less?

Between orders, madame calls out to her son who is the baker for the boulangerie about the status of baguettes baking in the big oven.

Upon arriving back in Sablet a few weeks ago, upon entering into the boulangerie, we immediately noticed that they had renovated the boulangerie to better accommodate the line of customers who gather through out the day.

As you know, I am a co-owner of a small French bistro called Bistro Des Copains. At the Bistro, we have two large wood burning ovens, one of which was specially designed and built for baking bread.

I assumed that the boulangerie in Sablet would have a similar old fashion oven. With the renovations, they opened up the boulangerie so you can see the actual baking area. With the baking area now visible, my fantasy about how the baguettes were baked was jolted as the baker can be seen mixing dough or adding bread to a big modern oven.



Despite my shattered fantasy, rest assured that the boulangerie bakes wonderful baguettes and croissants. Several mornings each week, in addition to the plain croissants and chocolate croissants, there are almond croissants which my wife loves.