Bouchon Bakery

Every Morning in Paris When I was twenty-eight, I lived on the top floor of 15, rue de Vouille. On the ground floor was a tiny boulangerie. Every morning I woke to the smell of baking bread. But before I got to Paris, my time in France hadn’t gone well. It took me several years of building up contacts to find a stage there. At last I did, at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Arbois, a small city near the Swiss border. My traveling friends dropped me off at the hotel where I was to work. The gruff matron showed me to my cell-like room, which was barely big enough for the bed. Strangely, the single window was almost completely black. When I was taken to the basement kitchen, I realized why: the kitchen still relied on a coal-burning stove, and my room was right above the chimney.

It wasn’t just the kitchen stove that evoked a past era of cooking—everything was antiquated. I had come from working at The Polo Lounge, where young chefs Patrice Boely and Daniel Boulud were preparing really forward-thinking cooking. I had spent three years searching for a stage only to learn how to cook on a coal-burning stove? In desperation, I called Serge Raoul, a New York restaurateur for whom I’d worked and whom I considered a friend.

He told me to take the next train to Paris, where he had an apartment. I could stay there while I regrouped. Rue de Vouille was in the fifteenth arrondissement, a lovely middle-class neighborhood, with small shops and bars and brasseries. My bedroom window framed the Eiffel Tower. A good sign.

In a short time, I had my first Parisian stage, one of seven. For fifteen months, I immersed myself in the cuisine of France, working at different restaurants, ending at the Michelin three-star Taillevent. It was here that I witnessed the structure and organization, the attention to detail and consistency that made one of the world’s great restaurants what it was.

Open five days a week, Taillevent served lunch and dinner, so I had a great schedule. I arrived in the morning and helped to prepare the mise en place for lunch service. When lunch was done and the kitchen cleaned, by 3:30 or so, we’d have a break when I could hang out with my fellow cooks, walk in a park, or take a French lesson. We had to be back at 5:30 (dinner didn’t begin until 8:00 or so), and one of my afternoon jobs was to make the marquise au chocolat, one of the restaurant’s signature desserts, for the next day. It was a very rich confection, kind of a cross between mousse and ganache. It was sliced and served with a pistachio sauce. I love chocolate, so I loved making it. It became one of the highlights of my day and of my time in France.

I learned so much during those months in France in 1983 and 1984. It was where I first worked with foie gras, and with more obscure cuts we weren’t used to in the United States, like lamb breast. It’s where I had my first macaron, that most extraordinary of cookies. And where I tasted my first real croissant and mille-feuille (I was in heaven when I was eating one of those). Three days a week, a wonderful, noisy food market set up on my street selling fresh chickens, cheeses I’d never heard of, saucissons secs, and jambon cru, then unavailable back home. I was living at the heart of a thoroughly food-centric culture.

But looking back on it now, from an emotional standpoint, my most enduring memory is of waking up every morning to that smell of baking bread. The central staircase of our old building had been renovated to contain a tiny elevator, and I’d take this downstairs, pay a franc fifty for a demi-baguette (I had little money), and head back up. I’d share the bread with my housemate—we cooked at the same restaurant—with butter and jam and coffee.

It had quickly become clear to me how central bread was to life in Paris. The boulangerie in my building was maybe 100 square feet of retail space; the ovens were in the back. I was fascinated by the man who baked the bread. I saw that a man could devote his life to baking bread, and that it was a good life, a worthy profession and one to be revered. That was very powerful for me.

On our way to the metro I’d pass at least three boulangeries, of all different calibers. The one in my building made bread and rustic little apple tarts. A second one sold large, garish meringues. The finest one made the most beautiful mille-feuilles and tarts. I’d never seen apple tarts like theirs, slices of apple, each one perfect, in concentric rings, with a glossy sheen of a glaze. I couldn’t afford them, but they were beautiful to behold, and they taught me about the level of excellence a bakery might strive for.

I also learned that a bakery is an anchor—it draws a community around it. People would sit in the bakeries to eat their croissants; they would gather in the morning, and in the afternoon. People come together at and around bakeries. Baking is a unifying force.

The smell of baking bread is universally adored for a reason: it appeals to us at the core of our humanness. It’s the smell of sustenance and security. To enjoy that aroma even before I was conscious of the new day had a great impact on me—one I didn’t truly realize until, well, now, trying to understand why on earth I have five bakeries. I’m a restaurant chef, a savory cook—what am I doing with five bakeries?

The reason is bread, and croissants, macarons, puff pastry, apple tarts, and mille-feuilles.

Per se and The French Laundry, highly refined restaurants, speak to only a small segment of the population. Even our bistro, Bouchon, and our family-style restaurant, Ad Hoc, have specific, somewhat narrow, audiences. Bread does not. Pastries do not. They are universal. And that is one source of my desire to offer baked goods to as many people as possible, and why I’m so excited to be sharing the craft in this book.

Pecan Sandies for My Mom

My mom, Betty Keller, was a creature of habit. She worked very hard at her job managing restaurants while raising five boys and a daughter as a single mother. She loved to have cookies on hand at the end of the day, and she especially loved the Keebler pecan sandie. It was part of my childhood, and it’s a flavor combination, vanilla and pecan, that I associate with her. It was an adult cookie to me. There was always a bag of them in the cupboard.

Or almost always. We were six kids, and we were voracious. That was a problem when it came to my mother’s cookies. We had our own cookies, Oreos and Nutter Butters, but when we’d dispatched those, there would be that bag of Mom’s pecan sandies, daring us. It was really hard. Those cookies were sacrosanct, but sometimes, guiltily, we ate her cookies, one by one, until they were gone.

Mom had very few things she could call her own. She had no real luxuries. We didn’t have winter family vacations; we didn’t go to a cabin by a lake in the summer. She worked, and she gave us everything we wanted and needed. But we didn’t appreciate it then. How could we know? How could I, youngest of the boys, know?

But I do now. Day after day, year after year, Mom set an extraordinary example for me. An example of hard work, attention to detail, and an all-consuming love for our family that I still have today.

Food is a powerful connecter of who we are to who we were, to our past, to our memories, and, for me, to a different and simpler time. Even the smallest thing—a cookie—can help us understand what we feel now while reminding us of what we once felt and who we’ve become versus who we were then. So much of who I am today is tied to who my mom was, the choices she made, the way she worked, and how she lived her life. What success I have today, I owe to her.

All of which is why the pecan sandie is so important to me.

Position the racks in the upper and lower thirds of the oven and preheat the oven to 325°F (convection) or 350°F (standard). Line two sheet pans with Silpats or parchment paper.

Toss the flour and pecans together in a medium bowl.

Place the butter in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment and mix on medium-low speed until smooth. Add the 90 grams/¾ cup plus 1¾ teaspoons powdered sugar and mix for about 2 minutes, until fluffy. Scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl. Add the flour mixture and mix on low speed for about 30 seconds, until just combined. Scrape the bottom of the bowl to incorporate any dry ingredients that have settled there.

Divide the dough into 30-gram/1½-tablespoon portions, roll into balls, and arrange on the sheet pans, leaving about 1½ inches between them. Press the cookies into 2-inch disks.

Bake until pale golden brown, 15 to 18 minutes if using a convection oven, 22 to 25 minutes if using a standard oven, reversing the positions of the pans halfway through. (Sandies baked in a convection oven will not spread as much as those baked in a standard oven and will have a more even color.)

Set the pans on a cooling rack and cool for 5 to 10 minutes. Using a metal spatula, transfer the cookies to the rack to cool completely.

If desired, dust with powdered sugar.

The cookies can be stored in a covered container for up to 3 days.

makes 1½ dozen cookies

The Road to Bouchon Bakery I try to get better each day, to do my job just a little better every day. Not a lot, but a little. Every day. That’s what we try to do at Bouchon Bakery and at all our restaurants. When I opened The French Laundry in 1994, our bread was brought over from Petaluma by Kathleen Weber, a former nurse who had started a small bakery with her husband, Ed, and their children. Their bakery, Della Fattoria, continues to grow and thrive, and we love the Webers’ bread, but when you run a restaurant and are always striving to improve, you ask yourself, How can we give our guests a better experience? Once we got the essentials right and The French Laundry had a number of years under its belt, we decided that one of the ways we could make the restaurant a better experience would be to bake our own bread. We wanted specific sizes and shapes, bread very precisely tailored to the food we were serving, types of bread that weren’t feasible for Della Fattoria—or any of the great artisanal bakeries that were opening in increasing numbers in Northern California—to create on our scale.

We needed our own bakery. We’d opened Bouchon, a bistro, in 1998, so our own bakery could not only make bread for The French Laundry, it could also provide baguettes and épis to serve at the bistro.

Once again, we were lucky. Bouchon Bakery is in the space where I used to get my hair cut: it was a salon. But the owners wanted to take some time off and travel, so I bought their lease.

Once the bakery got under way, and we had that space right next to the bistro, we wondered if we might do more. Couldn’t we also open a small boulangerie in front, a little retail shop like the kind I’d loved so much in Paris? We could offer croissants and pains aux raisins in the morning, cookies and macarons in the afternoon, and sell baguettes and pains de campagne right next to Bouchon, with a European-style courtyard out front that might become a kind of community center.

Bouchon Bakery opened in July 2003, making items in three categories: bread for The French Laundry, French-style breads for the bistro, and retail bakery products. But while the bread we made was excellent, it’s very difficult to make money baking bread, and the bakery struggled. It was really frustrating. A number of times I came close to shutting it down and opening a sushi restaurant on the site. Honestly.

Then Matthew McDonald arrived, and that was the turning point. The bakery was getting there—we were learning, chipping away at the obstacles. But Matthew, who had trained at one of the most prominent baking programs in the country, and with some of the world’s best bakers, and who had run his own bakery on the East Coast, brought an understanding of wholesale baking, the organization and production schedules required to make it work. And he brought a deep love and knowledge of bread itself.

Being a baker requires uncommon commitment and work. As with any kitchen job, it’s physically grueling and requires long hours. But they are odd hours. A baker who is expected to have fresh bread in the morning has to begin baking in the middle of the night.

And the product is incredibly fragile: it has no shelf life. You’ve got to sell it right away or it’s no good—and you’ve got to have more on the way for when you do sell it all.

Also, it’s such an inexpensive product, you’ve got to sell an awful lot of it just to make a little bit of money.

After Matthew arrived, all our previous efforts came together with a click. He was able to teach the pastry chef of Bouchon Bakery about production schedules for pastry, so that we wouldn’t run out of macarons in two hours but have twenty éclairs left at the end of the day. Matthew made sure there was always product in the case, and he came up with ways to use anything that was left over.

Today the bakery is not just a success, it outpaces all the restaurants in terms of number of guests served. We may serve three hundred at Bouchon, but Bouchon Bakery will serve up to a thousand people on a good day—more than all our Yountville restaurants combined.

Sebastien Rouxel was executive pastry chef at The French Laundry for four years before we opened the bakery. He worked with Matthew to bring consistency to the pastry end of the business—the laminated doughs used for croissants and puff pastry, and the confections.

It was almost accidental, though, that Sebastien, the man who leads the five Bouchon Bakeries today, was even there, as he hadn’t wanted to be a part of my restaurant in the first place. He hadn’t even applied for the pastry chef job. He was living and working in New York City, but his wife wanted the sun and dry air of California. So when she read an ad I’d placed for a pastry chef for the restaurant, she secretly sent me Sebastien’s résumé.

I am very lucky he accepted the tryout. Sebastien is one of the leading pastry chefs in America. He has embraced every challenge I’ve put before him, and he has proven to be an extraordinary teacher as well as chef, making an impact throughout the industry as his disciples spread out to restaurants around the country.

When per se opened in 2004, Sebastien got his wish to return to New York, becoming its pastry chef. As the New York Bouchon Bakery grew and we discussed expanding in Yountville, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles, I asked Sebastien to oversee the entire program.

The operation has now found its fullest realization as a stand-alone bakery at Rockefeller Center. I took extraordinary pleasure in being able to build a proper bakery for Sebastien and the team, a place to display the results of their remarkable efforts.

I’m honored to work with Sebastien and Matthew. Sebastien has amassed a huge body of knowledge and experience over almost two decades as a pastry chef at some of the finest restaurants in France and America, though he’s not yet forty. Matthew is one of the best and most knowledgeable bread bakers in the country.

And now we have put all this knowledge and experience between covers, in Bouchon Bakery.

Enter Sebastien by michael ruhlman “I don’t think I can teach pâtisserie to anyone who hasn’t first learned to work clean,” Sebastien Rouxel says. Andrea, Sebastien’s wife, is seated beside him on the couch. “Drives me crazy,” she says. Andrea is a pastry chef as well. In fact, she learned much of what she knows from Sebastien, for whom she worked at L’Orangerie after graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in 1996.

“I have my own way of working,” she explains. She nods to the small open kitchen of their house in Garrison, New York, where she does all her baking. “When I know I’m going to be using something again, I’ll leave it out,” she continues. “So I’ll be making a cake, and I’ll go back to use the stand mixer, and he’ll have already cleaned it and put it back in the cupboard!”

Sebastien chuckles in acknowledgment. “I can’t help it,” he says. “I’m maybe set in my ways.”

“Maybe?!” Andrea echoes.

She should know. For her eighteen months at L’Orangerie in Los Angeles, a Relais & Châteaux, he was relentlessly difficult, stubborn, and demanding, a perfectionist who knew only one way—his way—and who spoke little English. He was twenty-two.

Sebastien had been trained in the traditional apprentice fashion, and by the time he left France, he was one of the youngest, if not the youngest, executive pastry chefs of a Michelin-starred restaurant. He had also run the pastry team within the Elysée Palace in Paris, the seat of the Republic of France and the official residence of the French president.

But when his friend Ludo Lefebvre took a job as the chef of L’Orangerie, he called Sebastien, then at the two-star Le Grand Véfour, and offered him the position of executive pastry chef. Sebastien, eager to see America, accepted. There he met Andrea, and while he was a tough boss, he couldn’t deny his attraction to her. Nor could she deny hers to him.

“What made him irritating as a boss,” she said, looking first at him, then at me, “I found endearing in a friend. He was so passionate and focused and talented. He knew how to do everything. And he could fix anything.”

“What did you see in him?” I asked.

She paused, thinking. “His care.”

I knew what she meant. I’d been working with Sebastien for more than a year, and his care was evident everywhere. In the way he made sure I had what I wanted when we sat to talk about this book. He was quick to smile and to laugh. I saw it in the way he dressed, his chef coat always crisp and white. He was casual and at ease, but elegant in his movements. I saw it in the commitment to the product his team presents. A few days after I sat with him and Andrea in their house, he was off to Los Angeles to make sure the product at the newest bakery was exactly as it was in New York (he spent his first eighteen hours there tweaking a dozen preparations).

“He’s one of the best pastry chefs in America,” said Thomas Keller, who hired him in 1998 as head pastry chef of The French Laundry. Stand with Keller at one of the bakery’s cases, and you’ll see this four-star chef marvel: “Look at those éclairs! See how perfect they are? Look at that glaze—so often at bakeries the glaze will be rough or dull or cracked. But look at that!” He becomes as giddy as a boy. Keller is no pastry chef; he knows exactly how good Sebastien makes him look. It’s why he’s so grateful to have Sebastien run the bakeries, and why he wanted to do this book.

Finally, you see Sebastien’s care in his relationships with his staff. After a long day at the bakery at Rockefeller Center, Sebastien and I were heading out. It was after six, and he was eager to catch the train home to Andrea and their daughters, Ava and Grace. But one of his newer staff members stopped him on the way out to ask a question. His puff pastry just wasn’t working. Sebastien asked him what the problem was. The new chef said he wasn’t sure because he hadn’t really made puff pastry before.

Sebastien said, “So we’ll make some now. I’ll show you.” He removed his overcoat, put his chef coat back on, and went to work.

From the Loire Valley to Napa Valley by sebastien rouxel In 1997, I got a voice mail from Thomas Keller, saying he’d received my résumé and would like to meet with me. This was surprising, because I hadn’t sent him a résumé. When I told my wife, Andrea, she confessed that she’d sent it without telling me. Soon I was trying out at The French Laundry, which had just been described as the most exciting restaurant in America by The New York Times. And I’ve been with Thomas happily ever since. But my path to The French Laundry began decades before, during the Wednesdays of my childhood. In France, kids don’t go to school on Wednesdays. And while I loved not having to go to school, the best part was the morning, when my brothers and sister and I would open the kitchen shutters to find beside the flowerpots wonderful viennoiserie, fresh from the bakery, waiting for us to devour with a cup of hot chocolate. Every Wednesday, my grandmother walked to the bakery and then all the way to our house (she didn’t drive) to leave the pastries on the window ledge while we were still in bed. It was a long walk, but we adored viennoiserie and she knew it, and so I forever associate them with childhood delight and my grandmother’s love.

Then in the afternoon, my mother often dropped us off at my grandmother’s house for the rest of the day. My grandmother’s sister ran a small restaurant, Café des Tonnelles, which served lunch on weekdays and dinner on weekends, one menu. Workers from the town would come there for lunch or a drink or to play pétanque out back. The café served platters of food family-style. A typical meal would begin with céleri rémoulade, followed by blanquette de veau or bavette de bœuf with haricots verts, and, for dessert, clafoutis or floating islands—traditional French dishes. I began working there on Wednesdays at a young age, and as I got older, I helped clear tables, wash dishes, and tend bar. Eventually I was buying, prepping, and serving food. I was very happy there.

When I was fifteen, my father took us all to the best restaurant in our area, the Michelin-starred Les Jardins de la Forge. I’d never had service or food like this; I didn’t know such elegance and refinement existed. I immediately wanted to work there.

My father spoke with the chef-owner, Paul Pauvert, and there I began my apprenticeship. I was a cook; I worked the line. I loved working in a restaurant—the camaraderie, the discipline required to be ready on time, and the service itself. One day the chef asked me to help the pastry department. He was opening a retail pastry shop and a salon de thé, and the pastry chef needed assistance. Chef Pauvert had brought down a consulting chef from Gaston Lenôtre in Paris, considered the finest pâtisserie in the country, to help create the pastries.

I found the complex world of pastry and baking far more interesting than the world of savory cooking, with its hours of cleaning shellfish and peeling vegetables and the like. Pastry intertwined science, craftsmanship, and precision in ways that made savory cooking seem almost primitive by comparison.

So I took the next step and went to work at the pâtisserie Le Péché Mignon under Daniel Durand, one of the best pâtissiers in the country. It was under his wing that I became a true pastry chef. The work was hard and often tedious. Lining hundreds of tart shells, laminating doughs, or filling and glazing thousands of cream puffs for croquembouche was not something that engaged the imagination, but it taught me that consistency, repetition, finesse, and organization are key in becoming a great pastry chef.

My two years at Le Péché Mignon were the hardest of my life. But just when I thought I couldn’t continue, Chef Durand sent me to a class given by Pierre Hermé, who was revitalizing and modernizing French pâtisserie, and I was mesmerized and rejuvenated. I went on to work at the Elysée Palace in Paris and then at Le Grand Véfour, the two-star landmark restaurant across from the Louvre. And then, as Michael describes on, to Los Angeles as executive pastry chef at L’Orangerie. But I longed for New York City, so my wife and I found work there. We stayed until that call came from Thomas. After I spent several years as executive pastry chef of The French Laundry and working with the burgeoning bakery in Yountville, my situation changed. Thomas’s business was continuing to expand, and he asked me to return to New York. I got my dream, a permanent post in the most remarkable restaurant city in the world.

A Bread Baker’s Journey: From doughnuts and fry oil to brioche and baguettes by matthew mcdonald