Bruno and Dominique knew how to bake when they opened their restaurant, but that didn t make the work any easier. Being a professional bread baker is arduous. They heave 50-pound bags of flour. They haul out by hand 300 pounds of dough that come together in the mixer. We go home after 10 hours, sometimes more, and come back to do it again the next day.
Some bread is made with a homemade starter.
The starter is a wild yeast, not a commercial variety. Yeast is actually in the flour, and you can make it rise without adding commercial yeast, Dominique says, but you feed the starter on a schedule. We always have two starters, which we call mothers because they give life to all the breads. Keeping the mothers just right is important. Dominique keeps two at all times just in case there s an accident.