People Near Here; 313; Yannig Tanguy: The Bread Man

Come with us away to our remote part of the Adirondacks to meet a fellow who could really big red tongue be the rebel people. Hello and welcome to another edition of people here.

About four miles up the road from Crown Point New York upstate New York in the heart of the Adirondack Mountains. We brought you here to a very interesting fellow a fellow who has a lot of friends. C'mere we want to show you some of those people. It's Saturday night and people have gathered here to celebrate the one thing they have in common. That's right. All these people are here to celebrate bread bread. You see a couple of times I

host a potluck supper in the barn for all of his loyal customers and all kinds of folks from near and far some friends but mostly total strangers sit down and break bread together. And all this begins and is carried on from year to year. Nothing more says with a grin than a little flour and water right here. Nice little hill. And you can see from the air the steam actually rising out of the heart at work making bread so let's go in and this is. It's a very special place in the Adirondacks you're in for a real treat. Here we go again. Jerk. Been right there. Yeah I think it's over here. Hard at work. Good morning. You're hard at work. You get what you make and

they can read. Why do you bake bread. Well I spent time in France with my grandparents when I was growing up in Brittany. And I was one of those kids that like that a lot and when I came back there just wasn't any good bread. So I started trying to bake bread when I was about eight years old and I was just in the house and make it about them and slowly but surely you know I would get a little bit better at it. And eventually people would I would say well you know if you could bake this in regular basis we'd buy it for you. And then I started thinking about getting a better of in this way. Well-earned break with the bakers in France when I was a little kid. They'll still tell you stuff when you're a little kid you know. Yeah.

Yes. Because if you get older it may tell you they're telling you a secret. Well they're pretty suspicious. So is this recipe this recipe is yours but it's based on a and I and my Brittany recipe for and so it's based on a pretty basic French bread that they would have been in France which changes the bread is the rebels in France they have flour that just works so easily you know bread is really over there. So I've had to play a lot with different ingredients to be able to approximate the bread or the way of making bread. They have over there and no preservatives that's important no pretty preservatives. Just flour salt water. It's the American way to make a loaf of bread the last time we Europeans make a bread that last one day. Well if you did it the day basically don't you. Yeah you do. And you buy it.

People have a different idea of how a loaf of bread should last. You know my bread mold you know. You know it will get hard eventually. It won't it won't ever rot. Where is a lot of the Wonder Bread that you see. You know it's in a plastic bag and that will that will last a week. But then pretty soon it will be blue and here we were in their grade school I thought that's what you're saying How about mold was with the piece. Look at that. Yeah. I mean was he making today so they're making about 44 large loaves and 24 small loaves. What are you doing now you're taking a back out after they've arrested and doing well now and forming them into the actual law of science for a little shape. Now these will go back into the a tube or the rising box and they'll go to that to the point where they're ready to go into the oven. There's one secret in

learning to make good bread is that to do it every day and then you know you'll figure it out. But I have no idea how to explain to someone how to make one loaf of bread. I wouldn't even try it. You know 60 is another story. Sixty I won't make less than one. It is a critical ingredient in his bread making process. He built it in his mother's potting shed and surrounded it with four dump truckloads of sand for hours ago. Jani built a wood fire in the oven. Now he scrapes out the coals and ashes then scrubs down the interior bricks with clean water. It will be the hot bricks surrounding the interior of the oven that will actually cook the bread baking bread about the same way that they did 200 years ago or even 2000 years ago. They're still using

ovens like this one that the Romans built in northern Italy. And you've got something that works you think with it because that's the only time you bake right now in the winter time I'm taking five days a week. So you do this five days a week in the summertime. I bake every day. You can it's easier to just keep going than it is to have a fun weekend and get back into it. Your bread tastes great but it's going to taste even better now that I know exactly all the effort that went into it. You're going to check that what are you going to keep it there. You're right. After a full morning of prep work it's finally time to put the bread in the oven. The cuts are important because that they allow the bread to expand. If I don't cut them the face off.

Jani doesn't use a timer to cook his bread. Just a few tunes on his fiddle and his nose which always tells him when his crusty country French bread is done. Some folks stop by Yonex mountain bakery to pick up their daily bread. But most of you want to go down the mountain in a struct with just a couple of local stores where they usually sell out quickly. You see the word is out and people who live vacation or just passing through know where they can usually find a fresh loaf of young crusty country French bread. I have four Yani baking bread has been transformed from a routine into a ritual one he carries out every

day in search of perfection. Basically it's making a good bread is making bread all the time and having having lots of practice every day I learn some little little thing about how to make it work better. So it's not boring. No it's not boring at all and I don't make any other kind of bread right now and just making one kind of bread and trying to do it really well. And I try to stay. Stay focused on my imagined ideal look for bread you know and always strive towards that. And I'm always thinking about it. You know just like somebody would think about you know how they want their music to sound. You know what they don't want their presence to be like if they're on a stage you know and I think about the brother the same way you know think about the way people wouldn't eat the bread when they're you know sitting at home after they pick it up in a store and all of the all of the different aspects of it. You

know the aesthetics of just the physical loaf the way it the way it chews do it taste of the whole thing. Right. Jani even takes his baking on the road at the annual reenactment of the French and Indian War at Fort Ticonderoga. He and some friends have built several mud and brick ovens which are historically accurate and provide a very critical mainstay of the soldier's diet. In any war everyone knows after all then an army any army marches on its stomach and the stomachs here keep marching in large part

on Yonex bread This is the way they did it back when they don't have any machines and all they had was muscle. All this is about 20 pounds of dough here. Last night we mixed up about 80 pounds of dough. Well took us about an hour to get it all mixed up. Well gotta keep on pulling on it. I never want to press down the dough. This box is a it's a dough box copied from the French original in a museum of Paris. That's that's right. Back when the the French were in the fore here the baker was making two thousand loaves a day in the large oven large

ovens in the fort which measure about nine feet deep. And we were talking last night when we were mixing up all that dough about how much work that would be needed to mix up two thousand pounds of dough. All the soldiers that are around here they had more to do than just gather firewood and repair the fort. They had to spend their their turn at the docks. So this bit is really very close to the bread that they would have had back when. So it's it's risen very slowly over a long period of time. We use stone ground flour and cracker grains. The main difference is that we leave out the sticks and twigs and clay and dirt that they had a lot of back then they used to

put different materials in to make the bread or make the flour go go a little farther. Now the old fashioned way of of baking they didn't sweep out the oven with a wet broom like I do in my shop on point. They would actually sweep off the breads. It's with the little bits of ash that are left as long as your loaves a well-formed Oh they won't pick up the stones or ice or coals from the oven. Twice

a year at their place up in the Adirondack Mountains in his family sweep out the barn and celebrate the community rocked together by Yonex bread. These get togethers are not advertised the time and place gets around largely by word of mouth and folks are encouraged to come early and bring something to share at the feast. It usually turns out to be quite a night with a watch the eat and all kinds of brand new people to get to know. Some are from just up the hollow and others have traveled for hours from as far away as New York City. He calls these shindigs his good bread festivals and it's his way of thanking all the folks for buying his bread in the days before

telephone and the Express Mail. This is how things were done. This is how people lived. And this is how they came together to celebrate their common good. And this is how Yannick believes in keeping things simple whether it's making some of the best bread in the Adirondacks or celebrating all that his bread has brought together. Yes man you look so satisfied. I came to meet you. Oh man this is another good hour with old fellows who are all over. Oh I'm sure I'll miss

writing. We'll leave you but as you hear oh liberty. I think that what one neat thing about having these dances is that it's really part of the musical heritage of the area. You know that this this whole place was full of fiddlers and musicians even as recently as about 50 years ago. If you yelled

out square dance at such and such and such as your friend and you didn't get there by 6:00 you had trouble getting in the door. That's one thing that's neat is you get people together listening to music and it's all it's kind of like the bread happening here it's it's entertainment happening here instead of you know something piped in from elsewhere. Yeah you get your bread coming in on a big truck or you got your music coming in on the on the FM waves. So trying to get it more like we're living here from what we got. You know that's the way I see it. Little bit. Keep it traditional. Sure definitely. You know because it's something that makes people happy and it makes them feel alive. When he has the time Jani likes the uses of and to expand his baking talents on

one of our visits. He showed us a simple but delicious recipe for a scrumptious onion pie. OK this is a recipe from the south of France. It's called the Eth and pretty. Typical of traditional things to do with leftover bread you can buy a pizza shell in at the local grocery store and do this at home. Great so you just need a piece of shell and what are the ingredients ingredients or just onions and you can also put in Showbiz on their or dress it up ever so often they would use black olives and pitted black olives. So I took the onions and put them in a pan to cook down with olive oil a slow heat just cut up this pepper and put it in the other nice red bell pepper for this large wooden thing is called a peel and this is the door that you've made but again you can do this is this is from

my bed. If you make your own bread you can use that or you can you can buy a bag of pre-mix dough in the store. So the way to do this put a little bit of olive oil on it and then if you could grab one of those answers one of the filet ones open those and put on all those onions. Then back now if I were doing this home how hard of an oven would I use. You would want a pretty hot oven. OK. Forty or fifty. Good. Nicely done. Why is this.

My goodness. Yannick thank you this is good this is going to be wonderful. This is the way they do it in there. Oh my gosh. The silverware All right. Waiting to happen. So this cut into this. Yes. The. We'll see who did it. Very nice. Well you don't need to. No thanks to you have one too will do a toast and you get the taste. So Oprah

week. Cheers. Take a little bit of this off boy. Look at this one. It's wonderful to look good. I think there are four stars on this place in America. Blah blah blah blah blah. Thanks. Now the American tradition says that bigger

is better right. But Yannick says he's not going to fall for that old saw his bread is good because he makes it by hand every day. And that's the way it's going to stay with one important change. You see Jani has plunked down some of his hard earned bread for a vacant lot down the road from the farm in the small village of Crown Point in the years to come. It will be here that you bake says bread can still be old fashioned way in a brick oven. It's worked after all for 2000 years and that's good enough for ya. No matter how you slice it. Well there you have a living proof that a hundred fifty total strangers in the being the best of friends on the end of a Saturday night barn dance in the Adirondacks. And how did they do it. They sat down together and broke bread.

We have a videographer Paul Frederick on during your dancing. Thanks for watching. We hope you'll tune in again next time when we do some more interesting people.