Baking School Diaries #1
Pristine uniforms, new classmates, and one very delicious syllabus.
The Baking School Diaries is a series about my three months as a student in the Intensive Professional Program in Bread Baking & Viennoiseries at Ferrandi Paris. Bienvenue!
After months of anticipation, it finally arrived: my introductory week at baking school.
On Wednesday morning, I showed up alongside a few dozen other cuisine, pastry, and boulangerie students from every corner of the globe, all of us buzzing with excitement…and just a little nervous energy.
We may not have actually baked anything this first week, but no matter! There was so much else to absorb. And that’s what you’ll find in today’s letter:
🥐 A look at life on campus,
🇫🇷 Our first bakery field trip, and
🎬 Daily video updates, if you’re here for the play-by-play.
On Sunday, paid subscribers will get a bonus letter called Weekend in Paris about my off-duty adventures abroad. This week, that includes:
🎹 A recap of my first spur-of-the-moment cultural experience,
☕ The pastries I bought at Mamiche and La Maison d’Isabelle,
🚿 Tips on navigating French pharmacies for cult skincare products, and
🍽️ The ups and downs of solo dining.
On to today’s letter!
Upon entering the Ferrandi building for the first time, I headed up the stairs to the first floor. (I imagine I’m not the only one to have learned from Emily in Paris that in France, the ground floor is considered “floor zero,” and reaching the first floor requires climbing stairs.)
Thus began a morning of orientation. Our first stop was a tray of breakfast pastries baked by our boulangerie class chef, Vincent Somoza, and eaten in the company of new students from all three programs.
Once sated, we met the other chefs and the fabulous administrative staff that keeps things running behind the scenes.
I’d already connected with a few cuisine and pastry students—very important, as we’ll all be bartering leftovers at the end of our respective lab sessions—but it was time to meet the dozen students that I’d be standing shoulder-to-shoulder beside every day.
A bit more about my boulangerie class:
We hail from Indonesia, Japan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, South Korea, and Germany. A few went to university in the States, but I’m one of only two Americans (and my other American friend was born in India!).
Our ages range from twentysomething to fiftysomething.
Our group includes everyone from newly-minted career changers to small bakery owners.
For some of us, it’s our first cooking school program; others have already taken pastry and/or cuisine programs, too.
Some of us want to continue our careers in France, others want to bring our skills back home, and still others want to sample new corners of the globe.
It’s a fabulously diverse crowd, but we have some important similarities: we’re all friendly, curious, and hard-working with great senses of humor.
Together, we took a school tour, walking up and down five sets of stairs along the way, and peeked into various classrooms, two on-site restaurants, a library stacked floor to ceiling with cookbooks, an atrium that serves as a de facto smoker’s corner—it is France, after all—and a cafeteria that serves incredible midday meals.
We took a more extensive tour of our boulangerie lab, which is separated by a glass window from the pastry students. (All the better for spying on their delicious creations.)
We each have a generously-sized workstation, and there are various communal resources too: an oven room with deck (and fan) ovens, two proofers, a walk-in fridge, the world’s fastest dishwasher, and sinks galore.
We all received toolkits decked out with everything we’ll need to carry us through our lab work, and attended a delightfully chaotic uniform fitting conducted in Franglish.
Each day, we have to report to class in a freshly-pressed, double-breasted white jacket, standard-issue black or gray pants, a clean apron, and laceless nonslip shoes. The cherry on top? A toque blanche (chef’s hat)!
Walking through our class syllabus with Chef Vincent gave us a taste of everything we’d be learning in the months ahead.
Our weeks will be a combination of 6-hour hands-on lab-sessions, a sprinkling of French lessons, and 2-hour technology classes—in which we learn the ins and outs of our ingredients and the “why” behind the techniques we’re practicing.
The most exciting part, though, was hearing about our final “creativity exam,” in which we’d have to develop two recipes: one sweet and one savory, one with brioche dough and one with croissant dough. The possibilities are endless!
In order to stoke our creative fires, we changed back into our street clothes for a series of neighborhood bakery visits.
The 6th arrondissement doesn’t do anything halfway. Without walking more than half a mile, we were able to drop in on a who’s-who of Parisian bakeries: Ten Belles, Poilâne, Des Gâteaux et du Pain, The French Bastards, and the boulangerie at La Grande Épicerie de Paris.
By the time we returned to school, Chef Vincent was carrying an overstuffed bag filled with bread and viennoiserie for sampling.
We tasted our way through the haul, noting details about each baguette and boule that I wouldn’t have noticed without prompting, and learning which styles and flavor pairings we gravitated toward.
Every school day, I’ve been posting a quick video recap as a Note on the Substack app.
Here’s a roundup of this week’s baking school mini-vlogs from Wednesday through Friday (or, more accurately, du mercredi au vendredi!).
And with that, it’s on to le weekend!
Warmly,
Maddie
Breakfast Club is a newsletter about pastries with a side of personal growth, from an ex-financial planner turned baker. If you savored this edition, click the ❤️ (or share with a friend!) to help new readers discover it—and subscribe to get each letter fresh from the oven.
How often are you ironing your jacket??? The "freshly pressed" directive would give me so much anxiety!!!
Omg you make me want to go to Paris and eat allllll the things!