PASTRY PARADISE: Finding the best pain au chocolat in Paris

By ELIZABETH RYAN
Associated Press Writer

PARIS (AP) _ It's a ordinary little thing, really. Just a squarish golden pastry with a buttery crust, wrapped around two morsels of dark chocolate that melt on your tongue.

But in our globalized world, where it seems you can get almost anything anywhere at anytime, a true pain au chocolat is something that can be found only in France.

Literally translated as "bread with chocolate," the pain au chocolat is a typical French breakfast food, perfect with a steaming bowl of cafe au lait or as an after-school snack for hungry children. For visitors to France, the memory of its taste may stay with you after you leave, triggering cravings on chilly mornings and unmasking the inferior impostors sold in chic coffee shops back home.

How do they do it? What exactly makes the French pain au chocolat so much better than the so-called chocolate croissant?
Apollonia Poilane, a third-generation baker and the CEO of Poilane bakeries, says the magic ingredient is the butter.

The butter, she said, gives the pain au chocolat its unique texture: crispy and soft, with airy layers inside and buttery flakes on the surface to stick to your lips and sprinkle your lap with every bite.

According to baking mythology, the pain au chocolat, which shares its roots with the croissant, was born by accident, when a baker's apprentice forgot to put the butter into the dough. The novice's attempt to fix his mistake by "turning" the dough, or rolling butter in between layers of dough until it absorbed, unexpectedly creating the pastry's unique flakiness.

But not all butter is the same.

"In France we caress our cows, because if they're not well-treated, they don't give milk," said Dominique Tarit, a master baker who looks the part, with a well-trimmed mustache, flour-covered hands and dark curls peeking from beneath his white cap. "It's important for them to be totally stress-free."

The best-loved cows, he said, live in Normandy, where they graze on grassy hillsides in the open air and never eat corn or grain the way their American cousins do.

It is the butter made from the milk of these cows that Tarit uses to teach his students at the French Institute for Professional Studies to make pastries by hand, the way his family has for four generations. In Tarit's kitchen, each piece of dough receives three "turns" before it is cut, rolled with chocolate and left to rise, a process that takes four hours from start to finish.

This process is slowly changing, however. While French law strictly prohibits accredited "boulangeries," or bakeries, from selling bread made from frozen dough, the same standards do not apply to "viennoiseries," the name of the group of pastries that include croissants, brioches and pain au chocolats. Bakers these days are increasingly relying on factory-made frozen pastries or making their viennoiseries in advance.

Frozen pastries include all the same ingredients as fresh ones, but the difference in the texture is clear: Frozen pastries lack both the fluffy inside or the crusty outside of their homemade counterparts.How can you tell the difference? Tarit says the freezing process compresses the layers inside and softens the outside crust. A fresh pastry should look fluffy, with a layer of crisp, flaky crust.

There are still plenty of fresh options to choose from, with more than 1,000 different varieties in Paris alone _ as many different versions as there are bakeries in the French capital, according to the Professional Chamber of Artisinal Bakers of Paris.
Try the tiny ones at Poilane, cooked in a traditional wood-fired oven to an uneven brown and displayed in the plate glass window alongside little croissants and round country-style breads.

While Poilane exports its famous bread loaves to about 40 countries around the world, pain au chocolat is too delicate to ship, and must be served fresh. To try one of the 2,000 Poilane pain au chocolats produced a week, pastry-lovers have to stop by one of two Paris shops or a Poilane bakery in London. (Poilane's Paris addresses: 8 rue Cherche Midi, in the 6th arrondissement, or district, of Paris, and 49 boulevard de Grenelle, in the 15th.)

The sticky glazed pain au chocolat at Demoulin, whose pastries have little bits of chocolate tucked into the nooks between the sweet, chewy layers, is also worth a taste. (Address: 6 boulevard Voltaire, in the 11th district.)
Then there are the thick pain au chocolat filled with pistachio paste from Laduree on the Champs Elysees, served amid gilded surroundings by waitresses in black and white polka-dot aprons. (Address: 75, avenue des Champs Elysees, in the 8th arrondissement.)

No matter what bakery you visit, finding the best pain au chocolat ultimately depends on you.
"My criteria for a good croissant or good pain au chocolat, is simply how much pleasure does it give you when you're eating it," Poilane said.

And if the pleasure of a pain au chocolat seems hard to replicate outside of France, it may indeed be because taste is a
multisensory experience composed of the smells, the sounds and the way you feel when you eat a food, according to Patrick MacLeod, an expert in the neurophysiology of taste.

When you nibble on a pain au chocolat in Paris, then, you are taking in more than just bread with chocolate. You are absorbing the sound of a French "Bonjour," the smell of warm butter and the sight of that flaky pastry made from the butter of happy cows from a hand-made process perfected over generations. And most of all, you are synthesizing the experience of this moment, in this place, through this little every day pastry that suddenly, doesn't feel so ordinary, after all.

http://www.salisburypost.com/lifestyle/26182898734663.php