Ordering for Christmas, New Year and Pongal
Our festive bakes, the dates to order by, and how to keep a babka or fruit loaf for a week of visitors.
A night at the bakery, from 2 am to the first rack
What happens in the five hours before the shutter goes up on Rue Romain Rolland.
The alarm goes at 1.30. By 2 am Selvam has switched on the three-deck oven, which needs ninety minutes to reach 250 °C and soak the heat into its stone floors. The street outside is silent apart from the sea.
The doughs were mixed the previous afternoon and shaped the night before; they have spent the night in baskets in the cold room, slowly souring. At 3.30 the first baskets come out. Each loaf is turned onto a peel, scored with a razor in one quick stroke and slid onto the stone, and a cup of water goes onto hot chains to fill the oven with steam. The steam is what lets the loaf open and the crust blister.
While the loaves bake for 45 minutes, Revathi is at the bench with the croissant dough laminated the day before, cutting triangles and rolling them. They proof in a warm cabinet until they wobble. In the monsoon the bakery is so humid that proofing is faster, and she has to watch them more closely than in the dry months.
By 6 am the first loaves are cooling on the rack and crackling as they shrink. Baguettes go in, then croissants. Orders are packed by name into paper bags, and the delivery riders leave at 7. The shutter goes up at the same time, and the first customers are usually the morning walkers from the beach.
