At Pains, in Paris, “the babka incorporates a mixture of melted dark chocolate, farm butter, brown sugar and roasted hazelnuts”

MIt’s best to go there as soon as it opens – at 4 p.m. – so as not to relive the cult scene of Seinfeld, where Jerry Seinfeld gets his favorite pastry handed to him by a couple who arrived just before him: “They took the last babka!” » Thus the American public was introduced, in the 1990s, to this festive brioche, made from leftover challah dough (traditional Jewish bread) usually topped with jam and cinnamon before being braided and then put in the oven: panettone Jews from Central Europe. In the 20th^e century, the Ashkenazi community of New York replaced jam with Nutella.

Unlike its competitors, the babka de Pains, an organic microbakery open since 2022 in the 19^e district of Paris, incorporates not spread, but a mixture of melted dark chocolate, farm butter, brown sugar and roasted Italian hazelnuts. Kneaded early in the morning (the house does not have a cold room), the brioche dough is made from natural sourdough and T80 wholemeal flour. Its long fermentation develops the aromatic molecules which give it its length in the mouth.

At the time of unmolding of the babkas, which is also the time of school release, the scent, which spreads all the way to Melun, would surely encourage Jerry Seinfeld to take the first plane to Paris. The American comedian would then notice the bister color of this French babka, to which all gourmands are not yet accustomed (“You don’t have anything white here?” “, a lady asked one day as she poked her head in). He would bite into its firm, melting crumb and discover its taste from another time. “I have elderly customers who tell me that my brioche reminds them of their childhood,” says Vanessa Dezallé, the baker, in her floured pink apron.

Flours ground with a stone mill

Above his head, a faded copy of Our bread is political (Editions of the last letter), published in 2019 by a group of millers, farmers and bakers denouncing the baking industry, sits on the electricity meter. It is to this manifesto that the hostess owes her reconversion, she who first let herself be drawn into the world of business, after studying economics and social sciences. Interested in ancestral practices brought up to date by a new generation of artisans, she did her apprenticeship in a neo-rural village in Minervois, with a feminist baker who bakes her bread over a wood fire.

For her own loaves with ancient wheat, Vanessa Dezallé uses a mixture of varieties from this region – bearded from Roussillon, blue emmer – ground with a stone mill. Black, dense, slightly sticky, his Friday rye pie is made with flour from the very old Colagne mill, in Chirac, in Lozère: “She has a taste that I had never found in Paris. » Chestnut, einkorn and khorasan complete the picture of exceptional flours. If the still warm babka rarely survives the journey home, the breads keep for several days.