A conversation with Jean-Michel, one of our head bakers
By the time Jean-Michel gets his hands on the dough, it has already been alive for more than a day.
Florian's sourdough starter has done its work through the night. The dough has fermented slowly in the cold, developed its flavor and structure, and rested into something that is almost, but not quite, ready. What comes next is where Jean-Michel and the team live: the physical work of turning fermented dough into bread.
If you haven't read our posts on ingredients and fermentation yet, it's worth going back to those first — they explain the choices that make this final stage possible. What we're covering here is what happens in the last stretch: kneading, shaping, baking, and the journey that brings the bread from our oven to yours.
Kneading: building the structure
Everything starts with the mix. Flour, water, salt, and sourdough starter — the complete list. Jean-Michel and the team combine them and begin kneading, a process that takes between ten and twenty minutes depending on the batch.
What kneading does, at a technical level, is develop the gluten network — a matrix of proteins called gliadins and glutenins that form when flour is hydrated and worked. That network is what gives bread its structure. It's elastic and extensible, capable of trapping the carbon dioxide produced by fermentation and holding it in place so the bread rises rather than collapses. Without a well-developed gluten network, no amount of good starter or careful fermentation produces a good loaf.
But Jean-Michel doesn't think about it in those terms while he's working. He thinks about feel. The dough tells you when it's ready — when it has the right elasticity, when it pulls back under your hands the way it should, when the surface is smooth and the texture is consistent. "The technical explanation and the intuitive experience point to the same result," he says. "You learn to read the dough."
Our bread is made with a minimum of 70% hydration — for every 100 grams of flour, at least 70 grams of water. High hydration is both a mark of quality and a significant challenge to work with. A wetter dough is stickier, harder to shape, and more demanding on the baker. But it produces a more open crumb, a better crust, and bread that stays fresh longer. The water, held within the structure of the loaf, is what keeps it from going stale quickly.
Shaping by hand
After the cold fermentation and a first resting period that allows the starter to reactivate, the dough is divided into 800-gram portions — one per loaf. Jean-Michel shapes each one by hand, moving from a rough ball to a tighter, more structured form that will hold its shape through the final proof and the oven.
Hand-shaping matters because it allows the baker to feel what the dough needs in that specific moment — how much tension to build on the surface, how gently or firmly to work it. The goal is a loaf with enough surface tension to hold its shape but not so much that it can't expand in the oven. It's a balance that can't be programmed. "You develop a feel for it over time," Jean-Michel says, "and you pass that feel on to the people working alongside you."
The shaped loaves rest again — at least three to four hours at 24 degrees Celsius. During this final proof, the bread continues to develop flavor and volume. The team checks them periodically, looking for specific signs: the way the dough responds when pressed, the volume it has reached, the surface texture. Sometimes you go by feel. That's not imprecision — that's craft, accumulated and shared.
Scoring and the oven
Before the loaves go in, Jean-Michel scores them — a blade drawn across the surface in a deliberate pattern. This is called laming or scarification, and it controls where the bread opens as it expands in the heat, directing the spring so the loaf develops the right shape and crust.
Our ovens are oil-fired, which is uncommon and significant. Oil-fired ovens have a very high thermal mass — they absorb and retain heat differently than gas or electric ovens, distributing it more evenly through a network of oil-heated pipes rather than direct flame. The result is a more consistent baking environment, where heat wraps around the loaf rather than hitting it from a single direction.
Baguettes bake hotter and faster. Loaves take longer at a slightly lower temperature, because the heat needs to penetrate all the way to the center without burning the crust. Jean-Michel manages both simultaneously, moving between the two as they reach their respective moments of readiness. A well-baked loaf, he'll tell you, has more flavor and keeps better. Getting the bake right is not just aesthetics — it's preservation.
Ressuage and blast-freezing
When the bread comes out of the oven, it isn't finished. It needs to breathe.
For the first hour after baking, the loaves rest on racks in a process called ressuage — a resting period during which steam trapped inside the bread escapes through the crust. Skip this step and seal the bread too early, and that steam condenses and softens the crust from within. The ressuage is what gives a well-baked loaf its characteristic crackling crust — dry, resonant, with a sound when you tap it that tells you everything you need to know about what's inside.
After ressuage, the bread goes into a blast freezer, where it is brought to -40 degrees Celsius very rapidly. This is the step that allows us to ship our bread across the country without compromising its quality. The speed of the freeze is what matters: by dropping the temperature so quickly, we lock the water molecules inside the bread's structure before they have time to form large ice crystals, which would damage the crumb. The bread freezes at its peak and stays there until it reaches you.
When you bake it at home, you are completing the final step of a process that began at least 48 hours earlier. The oven in your kitchen is the last oven our bread sees — but it's doing the same job ours did: applying heat to something that is already, fundamentally, ready.
The variables no one talks about
There is one more thing Jean-Michel wants to say, and it's perhaps the most honest part of this whole account.
Everything described above — the temperatures, the timings, the hydration ratios, the oven settings — is true. But it is not the whole truth. Because bread doesn't behave the same way every day.
The flour changes across the year. When wheat is harvested it's full of water; as the months pass, it dries out. The flour in January is a different material than the flour in September, and the team has to account for that — adjusting hydration, adjusting timing, adjusting feel. The humidity in the air affects the dough. The temperature of the room affects the starter. Even the temperature of the flour itself matters; in boulangerie, there are base temperatures that govern the relationship between flour, ambient air, and water, and they're specific to each type of bread.
Jean-Michel and the team know all of this. And sometimes, despite all of it, they go by feel.
"Dans nos pains, on met souvent ce que l'on aime," he says. In our breads, we often put what we love. He smiles when he says it — not because it's a slogan, but because it's true. It's a description of how serious bakers actually work, together, every day. Knowledge, precision, and passion are not alternatives to one another. At this level, they are the same thing.
Our bread ships frozen, baked fresh, ready for your oven. If you want to understand the ingredients that go into it or the fermentation that gives it its character, those stories are waiting for you in the first two posts of this series.