October 23, 2015
Day 94: Montreal: A tale of three baguettes
Preparing Thanksgiving dinner in Nantes was really fun, but it helped to underline the difficulty of trying to recreate the environment of one country when in another one. Yes, our confit of duck and glass jar of wild cranberries was good, but it was not the giant fresh turkey and fresh cranberries of Cobble Hill. (Note: Dodie wants credit for her lovely candied sweet potatoes, even if that is going to destroy my argument here!)
So now that we are 5,500 km from even the nearest Banette, why this morning was I still trying to find a good baguette? I guess it's just a readjustment phase. Pretty soon I will just drive 15 km on the Trans Canada Highway to the Real Canadian Superstore and spend 4 dollars for an unusable loaf of Orowheat sandwich bread, go home, and make toast. Yeecch. Now I know why I am still going out searching.
Following established tradition (established by Michel in Nantes) I got up before anyone else to launch my search. Josh had mentioned that the local grocery carries baguette from Premiere Moisson (First Harvest). Premiere Moisson is a chain, and not all of its bakery locations produce on site. At the grocery store, for sure, the bread is just trucked in. So already a bread from there would be the dregs by standards of France. But hey, I'm flexible, right?
The grocery turned out not to open until 10, so I diverted to the Polish Bakery. Yeah right. If Montreal is 5500 km from Paris, Warsaw is only 1500 km!. The baguette at Polish Bakery cost $1.75. That's 1.21 euros - the price of a premium baguette. (An ordinary one should be 80 centimes). Anyway, the price range was right. But the baguette? Large, fluffy inside, not crusty outside. It did have a teeny bit of flavour. The kids liked it, anyway.
Rot set in a little further, as we also prepared fried eggs. It was the first fried eggs to be seen in 90 days, and is totally un-European.
Last night Josh had brought home a decent baguette that he had found at a temporary market at the Metro station. It was pretty darn good. "It's not possible for a hippy kid at a temporary market to produce something like this", I asserted. After all, even the "grizzled guy" at Chagny market, in Burgundy had only earned a bare pass with his baguettes.
The temporary market does not start up until noon, so the girls and I went out, back to the grocery store. I may be baguette crazy, but we did not go out only to research that Premiere Moisson option. Rather, we had a shopping list of things for supper. One thing on the list was ice cream. We all prefer Coaticook brand, Coaticook is a nearby town. We chose something so Canadian you probably could not even find it in Ontario: Coaticook Maple Sugar ice cream. This is not to be confused with the often seen "Maple Walnut" variety. No, this one is maple ice cream with maple sugar chunks in it!
The grocery store did have Premiere Moisson, as predicted. The cost this time was $2.99 - truly a premium amount. But the baguette was decent. It could be acceptable on a daily basis, except for the cost and the late opening time of the grocery. The girls ate half the baguette while still in the store - a good sign, maybe.
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Later in the day I snuck out by bike to find and interrogate the baker at the temporary market. It turned out his source was the nearby Arhoma Bakery. Sabrina has earlier played down this one, but admittedly that was based only what some friends had said. So Arhoma remains a live prospect. So does Amondine, another bakery within easy bike reach.
Baguette research carries on. I probably will get final satisfaction just at the time we fly out to Superstore - land!
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