Love and levain

I fell in love with this trade quite young, at the age of 10, largely because my father was sales director for a flour brand. I was quickly drawn to that world and, a few years later, I made it my job.

For a good twelve years, I worked for various businesses around Paris. That is where I learned the ropes, earned my CAP and then my brevet professionnel, the French baking qualifications, and learned all the basics of the trade.

But over the years, something changed. I realised I was no longer as passionate as I had been at the start: I sometimes felt I was working mechanically, almost like a robot, with the same movements and the same days.

After twelve years in the trade, I needed to find again what had made me want to become a baker in the first place.

And then I met Thierry Delabre.

Thierry was a true pioneer in the world of sourdough. But above all, he was passionate and curious, someone who tried to understand every detail, every reaction, every little element that could change a loaf.

Meeting him was a real turning point for me. I started to see baking differently. I understood there was still an enormous amount to learn and explore in a trade I thought I knew well.

So I decided to leave the business I was working for at the time, a very fine house in the Paris region.

Unable to sit around doing nothing, I spent two months working in landscaping, long enough to step back and think about the next stage of my career.

I needed to see something else, to discover, to experiment, and above all to find again the passion I had partly lost.

That is when I was lucky enough to meet Paul, the director of Maison Savary, a fine business known in particular for its authentic flans.

Paul offered me something quite exceptional: to build a bakery lab from scratch. We had to imagine the range, set up production and develop the breads with a clear goal: to sell our products to hotels, to restaurants and at markets too.

And that is truly when my passion came back.

I found myself like a little scientist in his laboratory, running hundreds, then thousands of tests on 100% sourdough products.

And at the start, I can tell you: I made a lot of disastrous loaves! Flat breads, too sour, that did not develop the way I wanted… But every failure taught me something.

I started looking into pH, fermentation, bacteria, yeasts, temperatures, hydration… In short, all those small parameters that let you really understand what is happening in a dough.

Little by little, I managed to build a method and to make 100% sourdough products that were both high quality and reproducible.

Meanwhile, the project began to grow. We expanded the lab, built a team of eight bakers and, above all, took on a real challenge: mechanising production and making 100% sourdough bread on a large scale, without losing the quality of the product.

Today, the team makes around 3,000 loaves a day. As for me, I am no longer part of that team day to day, because I have become a full-time trainer.

And in the end, I came to teaching somewhat by chance. One day, my girlfriend set up an Instagram account for me while I was asleep on the train!

I started posting a few things to explain what I was doing: my breads, my trials, pH, fermentation, my discoveries… I was simply sharing what I was learning.

Then one day, a gentleman who was an aeronautical engineer got in touch. He offered me 50 euros to come to his home, bake bread and, above all, explain how I worked. I said yes.

And in the end, I realised that what I loved perhaps as much as making bread was passing on what I had learned.

So I put up a short post on Instagram asking whether anyone would be interested in courses on 100% sourdough. And it went far beyond anything I had imagined.

The requests started coming in, then the first courses, then the businesses… And little by little, teaching became my job in its own right.

Today, I train businesses of every size: large companies as well as small artisan bakeries. I also run group courses, with around fifteen participants, and I work directly inside businesses to support them with their projects.

Training by quote →

And in the end, when I look back at my path, I find it rather amusing. I became a baker because I loved making bread. I nearly lost that passion after several years in the trade. And it was by trying to understand bread differently that I found it again.

Courses at the bakehouse →

Today, what I enjoy most is to keep searching, experimenting, understanding… but above all, to be able to pass all of that on to other bakers.