Montreal is such a great city. Over the last year I have been able to travel there on three occasions and with each trip I like the city more and more. On my most recent trip I got to spend a day with my friend James MacGuire, baker and proprietor/chef of the now closed Le Passe-Partout. Alas, I never got to eat there or enjoy the bread from his ovens but I have heard such great things. But I have eaten James’ bread, baked in his home oven and then taken to a restaurant where we had a meal together. The little loaves that we brought we light, with a thin crust, and smelled and tasted wonderfully of wheat. I couldn’t believe they came from a home oven.




If you enter Montreal from the east at night one of the first things you pass is a huge sign that sits atop the ADM mill and, in red neon, announces the famous flour brand “Five Roses.” I just love that sign. I am told that, ironically, ADM has sold that brand to a competing milling company. After the sale, they, naturally enough, turned off the sign - no need to advertise for the competition. However, there was such a stink raised by the people of Montreal that they turned it back on to quiet everyone down. So, if you want to see it you had better head to Montreal soon, no telling how long it will stay lit.



In the shadow of that enormous ADM mill is a very small mill, by today’s modern standards, owned by Cereal Foods Canada. It is run by great guys but, more importantly, they mill an incredible bag of flour. Perhaps the secret lies in their long temper time: upwards of 24 hours. In the US the temper times can be as short as 6 hours but mostly average around 8. Tempering is the stage in the milling operation in which the cleaned wheat has water added to it. This raises the moisture content, for sure, but has the beneficial affect of accentuating the differences between the three components of the kernel: the bran, endosperm, and germ. For the baker this means that there is far less bran contamination yielding a lighter flour with a much more yellowish color than the tan color more often associated with flour milled from wheat with shorter temper times.It is a beautiful flour and goes by their brand name “Oak”. If you can find this flour you want to be sure and specify that you want their All Purpose (a lower protein version of their Bread flour) and you want to make sure it is un-treated. They have plenty of industrial flours with all sorts of junk in them. Those loaves of James’ that I mentioned above where made with this flour and we speculate that the wonderful, light wheaty aroma and taste are a direct result of using this great bag of flour.




So, on my recent trip James and I set out and drove north to Boucherville on the South Shore and paid a visit to l’Amour du Pain. This is a remarkable bakery in that they import their flour from France. Apparently they have the exclusive rights in North America to import the “Retrodor” flour from its mill in Chartre, France. I saw this flour a while ago at EuroPain in Paris and it is a beautiful flour. Again, as with the Oak flour mentioned above, it is light and creamy in color and quite soft, as is the case with most French flours. l’Amour does the flour justice and bakes a beautiful baguette from it. A baguette with a beautiful golden but thin crust, with few fermentation blisters (indicating a lack of long fermentation) and a very yellow interior crumb riddled with irregular holes along its length. In all fairness, I have seen baguettes of this quality produced using flour produced closer to home but perhaps going to these lengths to obtain their flour forces them to pay more attention to baking of their bread resulting in a nice loaf.




The neighborhood and the shop (from the outside) may be unremarkable but inside they are friendly and their display cases contain any number of Quebec produced cheeses, pastries, and take away food. The bread display at the far end is equally nice but I would suggest that their baguette is the real star.



Unfortunately the bread quality went down after this first stop. But maybe that is a good way to explore bread: start at the top and work your way down making that first stop all the sweeter in your memory.
We visited Premiere Moison at the Marche Jean-Talon. This was a beautiful store (it is a store - the bread is made off-site). The bread looked nice and tasted nice but not all that memorable. If I understand correctly they use a flour blend unique to them and they make a considerable effort to have it milled from wheat produced in Quebec. They have bags of the whole wheat flour for sale and it is was a nice looking: the flour was mostly grayish-brown with large flakes of brown. I tend to like whole wheat flour with smaller bran flakes and an overall color tending towards brown, but this looked nice. Here, too their display was filled with cheese and pate and other great looking food.



On the other side of the market was Au Pain Dore. From the looks, the bread was unremarkable I am sad to say. What caught my eye though where two different styles of baguettes in the window: one was fairly pale and plain, the other a richer tan color but just riddled with fermentation blisters. I asked about it thinking it must be a sourdough baguette. It was not. Apparently bakeries used to be forced to close on Sunday so the baker could go to church. This meant no bread on Monday. I guess this worked for everyone except for one customer that had to have bread on Monday. So Saturday they mixed up the baguette dough for this customer and held it over in the cooler until Monday giving birth to the aptly named: “36-hour baguette.”



Aside from all the stalls of great produce and other food related shops around the Marche Jean-Talon there is a new location for Camellia Sinensis - tea purveyors with locations in Montreal and Quebec City. We got there on their opening day and spoke with the owners, bought some tea and tasted some as well. I believe there are three owners each with his tea region specialty. They import directly from the tea producers themselves and in small enough quantities that they usually run out before the next harvest. So freshness is assured. I must confess that I am coffee drinker but I do drink of a cup of Japanese sencha every day. I have had Darjeeling tea bought their in the past and it was wonderful: bright, light in the cup and the mouth with a richness that comes from fermented tea - but I prefer the freshness of green tea.



If you like food and are interested in ingredients and bread you have to find an excuse to go to Montreal. I like it there more every time I visit.