Les Bugnes Lyonnaises

During the month of February, and especially during the French Carnival period, you'll find that the bugne Lyonnaise is kind of a fetish in this town. Last week I mentioned to someone that I was thinking about this little fried confection and it was all it took to get him on a roll. This man instantly launched into a rhapsody about his grandmother's bugnes, and how they used to make them at home once a year the day before Lent. Bugnes have been sold in shops in Lyon since as early as the 16th century, with local records describing their crisp delectable texture. Indeed the bugne historically associated with Lyon is flat, rectangular and fried crisp, but both the flat and leavened kinds are common now.



As far as size and shape go, you can find just about any kind of bugne animal, depending on where you like to buy them. The shape of a bugne in anyone's mind is determined by the neighborhood where they grew up, family lore, or even a gastronome's current fave. Bugnes come in all shapes and sizes. Do not be ashamed to taste, feel the crunch or soft billowy sweetness, judge harshly, speak freely, and love your favorite with all of your heart.

In Lyon, this is a treat traditionally served only on Mardi Gras, but like many of the festival foods, the season has extended over time. You start to see them around the end of January and the boulangeries and charcuteries normally stop making them sometime in the middle of March. There is one vendor on the Quai St. Antoine that sells them year 'round! This means you can still enjoy them after today, that is if you don't give up fried pastry treats for Lent. Enjoy your feast today if you're celebrating Mardi Gras!

Cheese Pilgrimage: Cathare

We take road trips down South from time to time when visiting friends who live in the region. More often, I get on the bus to Les Halles on Cours Lafayette and go there on a journey of a more spiritual kind. I was first astounded by the sheer beauty, direct honest flavor and silken texture of this goat cheese when it cost about half of what it does now. A couple of years ago, the Cathare won a gold medal at the Concours Général Agricole du Salon de l'Agriculture in Paris. Since then, the price has increased dramatically in Lyon, but remains at about a third of its big city price if purchased directly from the farm. Even now when we are putting together a good cheese plate, I do what it takes to shell out the cash for one of these babies, because not only is it a beautiful cheese, the flavor makes it worth every penny.

The Cathare is produced at La Ferme de Cabriole in a little hamlet called Robinhole in the Languedoc region near Toulouse, a farm that not only produces cow and goat milk cheeses and yogurt, but also sells farm raised bovine meats and a variety of syrups, fruit pastes and confitures made from plants growing on the farm. The cheese is produced from their herd of about 120 Saanen goats that spend 8-10 months out of the year grazing in the open pastures surrounding the farm, with their diet supplemented by pea shoots and stems, hay, alfalfa, oats, corn, and sunflower seeds in inclement weather. The goats produce milk 10 months out of the year, starting in Autumn. Their daily milkings produce 2.5 to 5 liters of milk per day.

An unpasturized goat cheese, the Cathare is a fragile, soft, almost liquid cheese when at its peak. Delicate handling is required to avoid marring the stenciled top layer made of ashes, a common coating for raw goat milk cheeses. It doesn't travel well, nor is it legal to import into the States, due to it not having been aged the requisite 60 days imposed by US customs. It is best enjoyed during your visit to France.

The name from this cheese comes from a religious movement with its roots in 11th century Occitaine, although the cheese itself is relatively new on our cheese horizon, dating back only to 1995. Its stylized Occitan cross creates a strong visual print, a striking prediction of the distinctive, frank and bold flavor to come. When you see this cheese, do not hesitate to give it a try.

In Lyon, this cheese can be found at
Fromagerie Le Cellerier
102 cours Lafayette
Halles de Lyon
69003 LYON
04.78.62.37.75

Podcast 2: This Stone

This is my second podcast. Still experimenting, of course. A sketch. I used clips from recent recording of jaunts around the 1st and 2nd arrondissement with Cyrus, some sounds from my kitchen, and reading some of my own essays. The music is one of my own compositions, called This Stone. The goal is to master this medium well enough to produce entertaining and informative podcasts on cooking and gastronomy in Lyon. This will come. The third one will be much more focused. This one is just about the possibilities. 2.5 minutes long. Listen to this with headphones if you can!

Click to hear the podcast.

Backstage at Bernachon

In the midst of the frackas of the biennial SIRHA salon hosting the World Pastry Cup and the Bocuse d'Or competition, I managed to slip away one morning to visit the kitchens at Bernachon in the 6eme. I rustled up a group and we met for a little while that morning, really a dream-like oasis nestled in between the two events.



Bernachon is one of the only European chocolatiers that selects and imports raw cocoa beans direct from producers in various countries and roasts each type of bean separately, creating their 62 house chocolate types by mixing the roasted crushed beans in specific ratios.

orangettes in the making

We toured the artisan chocolate maker's facility with a maitre chocolatier named Pascal, who explained to us step by step how the chocolate is produced from cocoa bean to Palet d'Or, the house specialty.

Milk or dark... What is your poison?

Pascal explained each step along the process in rapid-fire progression beginning at the sacks of beans. I did my best to take in the aromas, the information, the concepts introduced one by one as we moved through the workshop to produce this beautiful product, and progressively we sank deeper and deeper into the world of the chocolate maker. The young stagieres were rolling ganache. A rack full of enormous pans of fresh Bernachon chocolate were stacked in a back room, cooling from that morning's production. We happened upon one treasure after the next, each rich with a story.



A peek into a courtyard full of bicycles, and through to the molding facility where they were preparing special chocolates for Valentine's Day.



Something that really struck me was the fact that the beans are roasted first, then stored in bins according to provenance, each bin containing chocolate that smells completely different from one another. One smelled more green than the next, the other more toasty, some had smoky aromas. I never really thought much in the past about how differing provenance of the bean can make the difference in the complexity and flavors of a chocolate. Silly me. All this time I had been thinking about sitting down and pulling on that ribbon from the chocolates box. This visit to the source got me thinking outside of just my own selfish reception of the chocolates, more than their simple decadence or their comfort factor. Before this visit I didn't really have much more of an index in my mind aside from a very short vocabulary of brands and labels but now that is changing.



At the same time, this whole idea of the terroir didn't seem outlandish either, since this kind of transmission of the qualities of land and place is naturally coming through so many things in our food world. We talk about the acorn fed black hams from Spain, we talk about the grapes grown along the river in the Northern Cotes du Rhone, we talk about the cows and their pasture pushing from volcanic soil that makes a Saint Nectaire. Every product, a history, an expertise, a story, a place. Why not chocolate?



On the one hand, there is the terroir, which clearly makes a huge difference when I see Pascal scoop up a handful of one particular provenance and has us compare the aroma with that of another. Then there is the knowledge that the Bernachon family has developed in their mixing of flavors and treatment during torrefaction of beans from 8 separate countries, crushing, heating, mixing, and creation of the different blends meant for the various uses - the ganaches, the fillings, the coatings, the decorative elements and textures each meant to have its own quality, for 62 different types of chocolate altogether.



While I was there, I counted 10 employees, and my informal survey revealed that apart from a couple of lucky stagieres from foreign countries who get 5 weeks, each of the workers had been at Bernachon for many years, some nearly their whole lives. Those who were on the track to maitre chocolatier had been to school and passed their examinations, and had done internships at Bernachon before making the rounds at the top chocolate makers in France, then coming back to stay. Pascal said that the job satisfaction comes from the fact that they touch and know the product completely - from A to Z. The ability to really have an impact not only on the finish of the chocolates but on the very basics of flavor makes it very much worthwhile.

Getting ready for Saint Valentine's Day