Gontran Cherrier

La basilique du Sacré-Coeur de Montmartre

Yesterday after work, I took a quick trip to Montmartre to visit the main shop of one of the most fȇted bakers in Paris, Gontran Cherrier. Extremely gifted, Cherrier has long been a part of Parisian life, but has recently achieved national fame as one of the judges on the popular TV program La Meilleure Boulangerie en France (The Best Bakery in France). His three shops in Paris have been joined by one in Singapore and one in Tokyo. It doesn't hurt that he looks like a rock-star, either.

It was very quiet when I arrived at the shop in  the Rue Caulaincourt. I took a coffee, a patisserie and a seat by the window, and within minutes the place had filled up parents and children on their way home form school, popping in for le goûter, the French equivalent of afternoon tea.

I tried his tarte aux pistaches et agrumes (pistachio and citrus fruit tart): segments of sweet orange, and sour pink grapefruit, lying on a verdant springy mattress of pistachio and almond, in a walnut-coloured bedstead of pâte sucrée—the most even and delicate I have ever tasted. Chapeau M. Cherrier. I will be back.

Gontran Cherrier, Rue Caulaincourt

Tarte aux pistaches et agrumes

Butter ratings:
Gontran Cherrier, 22 rue Caulaincourt, 75018 Paris, France

Give us this day ...

There are many cliches that come to mind when one thinks of France: stripy jumpers and berets, 'oh la, la!', and people wandering the streets with a baguette under their arm. When I first came to France, I was amazed to see that at least the third of these is no cliche, but a daily sight in Paris, where you are never more than 300 metres from a boulangerie. In fact, there is a boulangerie opposite my apartment, and I have made a daily ritual out of the three-minute trip across the road to buy my baguette. 

My boulangerie is a family-run enterprise and is open six days a week «de l'aube au crépuscule». The offending closing day is actually Saturday, which means that Sunday begins with the smell of fresh bread and viennoiserie wafting up from the street below. A sign in the shop proudly proclaims that all their bread is made from Sel de Guérande, salt produced in a tradition manner in the Loire estuary. 

The baguettes themselves are made by hand in the traditional method, crusty on the outside, soft in the middle, going stale in less than 24 hours, which fortunately means a daily trip to the boulangerie and starting all over again.

 

'pain de la tradition française'

My boulangerie