Paris’s
ubiquitous corner boulangeries have long been temples to gluten, with
their baguettes, croissants and decadent patisseries. And yet, of all
food trends, it is gluten-free that is taking hold. In Paris, you can
now find bakeries selling breads and sweet creations made, as the French
say, “sans gluten.” Specialized cafes offer gluten-free sandwiches, and
gluten-free goods have taken over their own aisle at the supermarket.
The city’s gluten-free pioneer is the pastry chef Marie Tagliaferro, who along with her husband, François, opened Helmut Newcake (helmutnewcake.com),
a pastry shop less than a 10-minute walk from the Galeries Lafayette in
the Ninth Arrondissement. Ms. Tagliaferro was given a diagnosis of
celiac disease while attending pastry school and wanted to offer
gluten-free alternatives of French classics to people like her who can’t
eat wheat. She now makes delicate fruit tarts and éclairs and even the
cream-filled double-decker religieuses typical of the traditional
boulangerie. Lauded for taste and texture that is indistinguishable from
their gluten-dependent cousins, her take on the classics have brought
tears of joy, literally, to gluten-averse customers.
“In
the world of pastry, gluten-free is coming into its own,” said Ms.
Tagliaferro, who also supplies cakes and pastries to hotels and
restaurants in the city. She and her husband used to run a cafe in the
11th Arrondissement known for its gluten-free brunches; it closed in
December, something planned before the November terrorist attacks that
occurred nearby.
Not
far from Helmut Newcake, near the Louvre, the famed French baker Eric
Kayser, too, has gluten-free offerings on the Rue de l’Échelle. It took
18 months of fiddling with different flours to develop his line of bread
(as well as some sweets). “For a bakery it’s disturbing to make
gluten-free bread,” said Élodie de Montbron of La Maison Kayser (maison-kayser.com/en).
“It’s more like a cake dough than a bread dough.” Yet she said they
were motivated to bake this way because customers were begging them to
do so.
You can also find artisanal leavened breads made with flours like rice and buckwheat at Chambelland (chambelland.com).
It opened in the spring of 2014 in the 11th Arrondissement, in an area
known for being a hub for food businesses. Nearby there’s a fishmonger,
four butchers, four bakeries, a specialty food shop and a cheese
merchant. The French call these businesses “commerce de bouche,”
literally “business of the mouth.”
It
was the culinary possibilities of baking with grains other than wheat
that inspired the owners Nathaniel Doboin and Thomas Teffri-Chambelland.
“With other grains you can offer another experience,” Mr. Doboin said.
“It’s another aroma, another texture, another shape.”
Mr.
Teffri-Chambelland, a well-known baker, had won accolades for wheat
loaves, and gluten-free was a new challenge. “This attracts the
curious,” said Mr. Doboin, who left an advertising career. They even
have started their own gluten-free flour mill in the south of France.
At Chambelland, as at La Maison Kayser and Helmut Newcake, they don’t
use the food-grade gums, starches and preservatives that are the norm in
North American gluten-free products. Chambelland’s reputation for
quality has drawn the attention of one of France’s most renowned chefs
today. Alain Ducasse serves Chambelland’s pain aux cinq grains (the five
grains being buckwheat, sunflower, gold and brown flax, poppy seed and
sesame) with salted butter in two of his Parisian restaurants.
Maybe
it’s the quality of these gluten-free products that helps them appeal
to those who aren’t forced to eat this way. But there’s also a
perception that to cut wheat from your diet is healthier. “We are the
generation of bad food,” said Charlotte Rouah whose first Juice It cafe (juice-it.fr)
serves gluten-free sandwiches near the Louvre. She said people of her
generation — France’s millennials — were raised on trips to McDonald’s.
Now their desire is for good, healthy food. So she sells fresh-pressed
juice and her specialty sandwiches made with seasonal ingredients. It’s
so popular that she’s recently opened a couple of lunch counters in two
yoga studios.
“It’s
a wave, I think coming from the U.S.,” said David Lebovitz, an expat
American food blogger and cookbook author most recently of “My Paris
Kitchen” (davidlebovitz.com).
And yet with their typically French éclairs and leavened breads made
with good ingredients, Parisians have made gluten-free their own. “A lot
of people say ‘I want to see the real Paris,’” he said. “Well, here’s a
part of Paris that is a little different.”
However,
at least for now, there is one pastry that remains elusive to even the
most talented of gluten-free bakers. The light, flaky croissant whose
crispy crust and soft, almost chewy insides are too utterly dependent on
gluten to replicate — that is, without adding gums, starches and
preservatives that these bakers won’t use. As Ms. de Montbron put it:
“You can’t try to copy everything.”
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