Frédéric Helmstetter, Baker

Frédéric Helmstetter has his name proudly emblazoned on his floury white baker’s tunic. The youngest in a long line of Helmstetters who’ve been baking in Alsace since 1776, he’s a man who believes in himself. And in his bread.

Every day except Sunday, he and his team start arriving at the bakery in Colmar from 1 o’clock in the morning, ready to knead, shape and bake today’s bread.

Why, I wondered aloud to Fred on a recent visit, would anyone, however passionate, get up in the middle of the night just so that I (and other lucky folk within reach of the Helmstetter bakery) can breakfast on baguettes, bread rolls, kugelhopfs and croissants so fresh you can still hear the crusts singing? ‘Come and find out!’ he challenged. ‘Besides, I’m short-staffed, my chief baker is in hospital with kidney stones. You can give me a hand!’

My alarm goes off at 1.45 a.m. I stifle its piercing shriek, crawl out of bed, drag on some clothes. Making my way through the hushed streets of Colmar’s Little Venice, past steeply roofed half-timbered medieval houses and the soaring Gothic church of St Martin, I marvel at the number of people out and about at this (for me) unearthly hour. As the clock on the church of the Dominicans strikes two, I find myself beneath the bakery’s celebrated wrought iron sign, with its burnished golden pretzel framed by ears of wheat.

The dough for the white bread, made from high-protein, unbleached Type 55 flour, salt, minimal yeast and water, has been fermenting gently since the previous evening. Fred presses it tenderly with an enquiring finger, grunts his approval and declares it fit for purpose. ‘We’re one of the few bakers left who still work through the night,’ he observes. ‘You have to stay close to the dough as it develops, touch it, feel it, keep an eye on it. We let it rise slowly at its own pace, with respect and love and without hustling it.’

This long, slow, overnight rise brings particular advantages, according to Fred. ‘Because we allow plenty of time for the yeast to do its work, we need less of it. We can also be sparing with the salt, because left to its own devices, the dough develops more flavour and so needs less seasoning. It’s like our white wines here in Alsace’, he adds, ‘long, slow fermentation at cool temperatures gives the best wines - and the best bread.’

We get to work, coaxing the soft dough into shape: slim, medium-length ropes for slender baguettes, fatter, slightly longer ones for the stouter pains. One by one they’re laid gently on floury canvas bands, with a neat pleat pinched up between each one to brace the soft dough and keep it separate from its neighbour.

Next come the pains spéciaux or speciality breads. In most of France, white bread – baguettes, pains and company - is the default. In Alsace there’s a rich bread tradition that goes way beyond baguettes and which evokes the region’s Germanic culture and heritage. Poppy, caraway and sesame seeds abound, wholewheat and rye flours are extensively used. Some doughs are raised with beer, others use a leaven or starter reserved from a previous batch, which gives them extra keeping qualities. Helmstetter is famous for the variety and quality of its breads – at least 30 kinds are baked, rectangular, long, round or triangular, baked free-form or in tins, plus crusty bread rolls shaped and finished half a dozen different ways.

    
For the various loaves, we shape the dough into fat bolsters, dunk them in a seed mixture and pack them into blackened, beaten-up old tins. ‘Some of those go back to my great-grandfather’s time,’ beams Fred with evident pleasure. ‘He opened the bakery here in Colmar in 1906.’

Another obvious source of pleasure and pride for this craftsman baker is the thought that in every batch of dough made up today, there’s a tiny element whose roots go right back to the beginning: ever since the Helmstetters started baking, a proportion of the dough from each batch has been kept back and used as a leaven for the next time, and so on in an unbroken chain of yeasty continuity.
    
At 3.30 a.m. the pace slackens a bit and we adjourn to the bakery kitchen to drink sharp strong coffee. Between drags on his cigarette, Fred tells me about the French baking scene and how he sees the future. The real problem, he acknowledges, is getting qualified bakers – and having found them, in getting them to stay. ‘We can find apprentices [Fred is currently ‘forming’ four of them] and young people, but once they get married and have kids, they don’t want to be up in the night baking bread!’ He agrees that they could organise their work differently - by preparing, shaping and chilling the various doughs in the evening, say, and leaving them overnight, as most bakers do nowadays. ‘But it would mean a drop in quality - and that’s not what we’re about,’ he concludes with conviction.  
    
At 4 a.m. the pastry chef appears and it’s time to kick-start the croissants. We roll up little triangles of yeasty puff pastry, tucking the tails under, curving the ends round to make the correct crescent shape and laying them on capacious black baking trays to be daubed with egg.

Over the next hour or two the baguettes, special breads and rolls begin to emerge in successive waves, plucked from the jaws of the massive, multi-tiered oven by Philippe the assistant baker, who reaches in with his long wooden paddle and shunts them deftly into waiting crates.

At 7 o’clock the four apprentices file in, shake hands all round and go to their workstations. The salesgirl from the shop reports for duty, kisses the patron on both cheeks and disappears out front to stack the shelves with the burnished breads, still warm from their labours.

Finally, at 8, it’s the turn of Fred’s son Hugo, who looks in on his way to school, hair smartly spiked with gel, satchel on his back. ‘The next generation of Helmstetter bakers?’ I ask. ‘Who knows’, smiles Fred. ‘He loves to come in to see what we’re doing, play around with some dough. But I’m not going to push him. If he wants to, it’ll be his choice. We’ll certainly do things differently in the future. The one thing we’ll never compromise on is quality.’

Maison Helmstetter,
11-13 rue des Serruriers,
68000 Colmar
Alsace, France

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