BAKERS RISING TO NEW HEIGHTS
Innovations in city’s vibrant bread scene
The last time I saw Seth Gabrielse cooking was in 2013, when he was working as chef at the SAT Foodlab. Before that, he was chef de cuisine at restaurant Laloux. Yet today, you’re more likely to see this 38-year-old chef behind a dough sheeter than a stove.
Instead of whipping up sauces and plating smoked scallops, Gabrielse is baking up a storm. Co-owner of the new bakery Automne, on Christophe-Colomb Ave. at Beaubien St. E., Gabrielse has turned his attention to flour, yeast, fermentation and creating the perfect croissant.
“Right now, croissants are my biggest challenge,” he says. “There are so many factors involved in getting them right.”
Judging by the light and flaky texture of not only the croissants at Automne but also the danish, turnovers and chocolatines, it’s obvious Gabrielse is on the right track.
With partner Julien Roy in this new business opened just over a month ago, these two are sure to make Automne a jewel on the already vibrant Montreal baking scene.
Roy, 27, is the former head baker at boulangerie Le Pain dans les Voiles and renowned in baking circles as one of the city’s best.
The two met through a mutual baker friend, Marc-André Cyr, and have been discussing a collaboration for some three years.
A mutual mentor of theirs and consultant on the project is none other than Montreal chef and master baker, James MacGuire, familiar to many Montrealers as the former owner of Le Passe-Partout, where Gabrielse worked for four years.
“James has been in quite a few times to help us with the bread,” Gabrielse says, “especially the 100 per cent rye bread. And the smoked salmon and pâté de foie de volaille are his recipes.
“We even use his old smoker and the table near the cash register here is the one used at Le Passe-Partout to display the cheese.”
The bread scene in Quebec has never been as vibrant, but a new breed of baker epitomized by the likes of Gabrielse and Roy is taking bread into new directions.
Instead of just turning out beautiful baguettes and a plethora of loaves filled with black olives and sun-dried tomatoes, these bakers are rethinking the whole process, including the use of natural starters (leaveners) and longer fermentation times, resulting in breads that are more flavourful, and often more digestible — an important factor at a time when bread is often maligned by the gluten-free crowd.
The choice of flour is also key to these bakers who try to keep ingredients as local as possible and favour organic Quebec flour from Le Moulin des Cèdres, Oak Manor Farms and the Meunerie Milanese.
“We’re interested in the concept of ‘terroir’ in flour,” Roy says, “how different soils and growing methods can effect the taste. We’re noticing that different batches of flour can give different flavours.
“The age of the flour has an effect as well. Freshly milled flour has more wheat flavour, and bread should taste like wheat.”
The combination of chef (Gabrielse) and baker (Roy) makes for an interesting collaboration.
“I take Julien’s simple ingredients, and elaborate on them while incorporating the idea of seasonality,” Gabrilese says. “We’re always adapting to what’s available.”
Instead of the usual suspects you see in bakeries throughout the year, Automne features breads with figs and anise, croissants filled with roasted red pepper and cheddar, danish with a pumpkin pie filling, or sticky buns flavoured with speculoos cookie spices.
And yet traditional baked goods still hold the place of honour.
“As much as we want to mix things up, our biggest seller is the plain croissant,” Gabrielse says. “We sell 20 trays on the weekend.”
And business has been brisk. “We underestimated the buzz,” Gabrielse says. “The first three weeks after opening there were lineups out the door. We’re sometimes working 15 to 16 hour days but we created our ideal work environment with people we want to work with.
“We’ve had bakers from all over come and visit us. We help each other. There’s a nice community in the baking world, which isn’t always the case with restaurants. We’re doing exactly what we want to do.”
Some 60 kilometres north of Automne, in the Laurentians community of Prévost, baker Albert Elbilia is equally obsessed with making great bread.
Alongside his wife and business partner, Johanne Martineau, Elbilia has been experimenting wildly in his open-space café/boulangerie, Merci la Vie.
Enter the bakery and you will see a beehive of workers in the open kitchen making coffees, serving sandwiches, rolling croissants and shaping and baking bread.
Open just over a year, Merci la Vie is so popular that weekend lineups snake right out the door, and good luck nabbing a table.
But it’s worth the wait to enjoy Elbilia’s terrific open-faced sandwiches made on soft grilled bread similar to Indian naan, and topped with delicious garnishes like ovenroasted tomatoes, Quebec cheeses, sprouts, arugula, nuts or simply a few spoonfuls of their delectable caramel spread.
Counters are laden with trays of raspberry brioches, ginger-flecked cinnamon buns, and croissants. There are also pound cakes, financiers and kamut/sourdough cookies flavoured with dark chocolate, orange and pecans.
The star of the show is, of course, the breads — like the rustique loaf flavoured with Anicet honey, the 72hour fermented bread, and the 100 per cent kamut and spelt breads.
There are breads flavoured with white chocolate and anis, roasted garlic and fresh herbs, and even garlic flower and fleur de sel.
Elbilia makes baguettes on occasion, and then there’s my all-time favourite, the potato — or, even better — potato and cheddar bread.
And Elbilia doesn’t stop there as a new bread always seems to appear whenever I visit, the last one being a spiralled bread laden with cheese and prosciutto, or one he’s working on lately, fermented for 160 hours, called “Le Pain Oublié.”
Elbilia’s path to baking bliss isn’t that of the usual baker, as this 40-year-old former photographer and art director has been baking full time only for about a year since his shop/café opened last November.
“I was still finishing up some photo projects the day before the bakery opened,” Elbilia says, “and the first batch of bread I baked in my oven was the first batch of bread we sold.”
Author of Boulange et Boustifaille (Les Éditions de l’Homme, 2014), which features 75 recipes for bread or bread-based dishes, Elbilia also worked on such books as Market Chronicles — Stories and recipes from Montreal’s Marché Jean-Talon (Les Éditions Cardinal, 2011) and Les Touilleurs — Techniques gourmandes (Les Éditions Cardinal, 2012).
But his fascination with baking coupled with Martineau’s enthusiasm and business smarts led to the opening of their bakery, and there’s no looking back.
“I didn’t mind making a change of career into something I knew would take a long time to learn,” Elbilia says. “I’ll probably get back to photography one day, but bread takes so much of yourself and time.”
What’s different about Elbilia’s bread is the fermentation process. Instead of using sourdough starters (or “levain,” in French), he favours using a small amount of fresh yeast and then allows the dough to undergo a very slow fermentation process (between 30 to 72 hours) at low temperatures, which means his bread requires less salt and develops more flavour.
“It’s all chemistry,” Elbilia says, “and once you understand fermentation, you can make bread in three hours or 30 hours, playing around with the different elements like yeast, salt, sugar and temperature to achieve different effects.”
One of the best things about visiting Merci la Vie is watching Elbilia, Martineau and their team at work.
“The open space was always part of our concept,” he says. “It builds trust and shows that we have nothing to hide. We’re an open book. We’ve had clients come back three times a day to buy bread.
“You can’t make bread just for you. People know when you put your heart in it, they’re reacting to what we do, and that feels great.”
Boulangerie Automne, 6500 Christophe-Colomb Ave. www. automneboulangerie.com. Boulangerie Merci la Vie, 2988 Boulevard du Curé-Labelle, Prévost. www.mercilavie.co
We’ve had bakers from all over come and visit us. We help each other. There’s a nice community in the baking world, which isn’t always the case with restaurants. Seth Gabrielse.