Welcome to Out of the Kitchen, our ongoing exploration of the relationships that build and sustain the food industry. This year, we’re traveling the country to look at how sustainability has become a rapidly growing movement within the food world. Chefs at the forefront of this trend are introducing their patrons to local farms, fresh ingredients, and innovative dishes while farmers are educating chefs and consumers about where their food comes from and what it takes to grow the food served. Their practices and personal customer approaches provide a bigger impact to the community at large, hoping to create a better and more sustainable future for all.
There was a problem in the kitchen of the well-regarded restaurant Invitation V, in Montreal. The chef and co-owner, Kelvin Au-Ieong, was out a bread supplier. Seeing as how some of the most popular items on the Mile End eatery's menu is its burgers, the problem was a big one. "The bun is the first thing you bite into in a burger," he points out.
There was an additional concern, too: Invitation V is a vegan restaurant (the "V" is a letter, not a number, standing for "vegan"), so whoever its new bakery turned out to be had to be able to make great-tasting bread without any animal products. (The restaurant also goes organic for 80 percent of all of its ingredients, Au-Ieong says.) "We'd used two or three different bakeries, but they tended to use a lot of eggs and butter in their products, and we asked for something that didn't require a lot of butter or eggs in those recipes," Au-Ieong says. "It's difficult to find a bakery that can do it, and I'm busy enough that I don't have time to bake my own bread."
Then Au-Ieong met the people from Le Fromentier, an organic bakery in the Plateau neighborhood face to face in his search for the right bread for his restaurant. He'd known it by reputation already, of course–the boulangerie has been a city institution almost since it opened in 1993. But when they took his vegan baking recipes and ran with it, he was impressed with the results. Now all of Invitation V's hamburger buns and ciabatta sandwich bread come from Le Fromentier. "Everybody loved their bread," he says.
You can't have a bakery in a Francophone city without baguettes, and Le Fromentier's sustainable approach always keeps them in short supply.
It's easy to walk by Le Fromentier and miss it entirely on your first pass–you have peer down the ground-level skylight to realize that it's located in the basement of a building on Avenue Laurier East, and that the front door is located midway down a courtyard. It originally opened in a much smaller space when the spiritually minded founder, Benoit Fradette, thought it was time Montreal had a bakery that used sustainable methods and baked entirely with Quebecois grains and flours. "The idea of his bakery was to feed the soul and the body with the best ingredients," says Lucie Massinon, the bakery's head of business development. "He really wanted to provide nutrition with organic ingredients that was also very good for your thinking."
Montreal was a city that already knew its bread, and with mainstream breads available on nearly every street corner, it was an uphill battle convincing people that it was worth their time and money giving organic breads a shot. "People were very skeptical in the beginning, but once he opened the bakery, people were lining up every weekend because of the taste," Massinon says.
The bakery grew in reputation partly because of its rigorously tested recipes. Fradette toiled hours and hours alone making all the bread himself at first, and was notorious from starting from scratch when he didn't like the way something came out. "He was very hard on himself, and I guess that's why the quality was always super good," Massinon says. "So we still have the same recipes, and still try to use the best ingredients, even though the prices are not the same today."
It also became famous for the poems Fradette wrote on every bag, in keeping with his philosophy of nourishing the soul as much as the body. "Every weekend you would come back and you'd have a new poem on good food, good energy, and being in harmony with nature," Massinon says. (The poetry tradition, unlike the recipes and emphasis on local organic ingredients, left with Fradette when he moved to Aix-en-Provence, in the South of France, 12 years ago, selling Le Fromentier to a new owner.)
Le Fromentier's baker helpfully highlights the different looks of its locally sourced flours.
The boulangerie makes generous use of both modern and ancient grains–kamut, spelt, quinoa, buckwheat, white and whole wheat, rye, rice, corn, oats, millet. Most come from Milan, Quebec, a tiny hamlet of 300 about two hours away from Montreal, and are all certified organic. Others, like the spelt, come from fields near Lac St. Jean, a lake in the south of Quebec. The bakery similarly tries to make sure it uses organic fruits and nuts for all its add-ins–sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, poppyseeds, cumin, walnuts, raisins. The storefront retail side of the bakery alone sells 40,000 baguettes, 18,000 other loaves of bread, and 50,000 croissants a year. "The spirit of Le Fradette is still here, and people have been coming here steadily for 25 years," Massinon says.
Now one of those loyal customers himself, Au-Ieong says Le Fromentier's organic ingredients create bread that not only stays fresh longer, but is a great complement to his vegan burgers and sandwich fillings. "When you use those generic brands, they've added those additives to make the bread artificially have better texture, but when you taste it, there's some kind of funny aftertaste that I don't like, that metallic taste, that sourness on the palate," he says. "The organic flours don't have any of those preservatives or additives. With the organic ones, it's just naturally sweet. Le Fromentier's mastered the technique to make it perfect. They're spot-on."