Leah Tinari

2011 | No. 87

The Cannelés of Bordeaux
How One of the Most Complex French Pastries Is Made

By Molly Wizenberg


During the six months of college that I lived in Paris under the roof of Corentine, my French host mother, she almost always made dessert. She was a skilled cook who worked part-time doing in-home demonstrations for Demarle, the French company that popularized silicone bakeware. Her four children and I were her prime tasters, the first to sample recipes that she hoped to demo. If one of her desserts wasn’t on the table, it could be for only one of two reasons: either the evening’s meal had been unusually rich, in which case fruit was the only sensible choice, or the day’s errands had taken her past Le Moulin de la Vierge, the nicest bakery in the neighborhood. There she had bought us each a prized cannelé, her favorite pastry, whose milky batter is baked in a fluted mold until its outer edges are crisp and caramelized and its interior has set to a dense custard.

Cannelés were not easy to find then in Paris, and a dozen years later they’re still not commonplace, though they’re made by some of the best-known bakers in town, from Ladurée and Fauchon to Pierre Hermé. The cannelé’s hometown is Bordeaux, and on a visit there in late 2008, I saw them in every pâtisserie I passed. A local company called Baillardran has nearly Starbuckized them, opening close to a dozen outlets, including stands at the airport and train station, that sell nothing but. And yet, finding a great cannelé is a challenge. Daniel Antoine of Pâtisserie Antoine made truly great ones, the best I’ve tasted, though sadly his shop was destroyed in a fire in November 2009. Lemoine, in the nearby town of Saint Émilion, is a close second.

It’s no easier to track down the history of the cannelé. The pastry may date back some 300 years, although its details are murky. Renowned chef Jean-Marie Amat, who serves small, impeccable cannelés as an end-of-the-meal mignardise at his restaurant in the Château du Prince Noir, in the Bordeaux suburb of Lormont, told me that the origin of the cannelé is a mystery: no one knows how or when it was created. It might be descended from the regional cake millas, made with milk, egg yolks, sugar, cornmeal, and bitter almonds or lemon zest, and raised with beaten egg whites. But written evidence is sparse, and no document supports two common rumors, both rooted in the city’s particular geography. One holds that cannelés were invented in a convent where, before the French Revolution, the nuns baked cakes made with egg yolks donated by local winemakers, who had used the whites to clarify their wines. The second claims that residents living near the banks of the Garonne River collected flour spilled in the loading areas on the docks and used it to make small cakes for poor children. Just as convincing is the off-the-cuff guess of Dorie Greenspan, author of several books on French pastry, who said to me: “Maybe the first cannelé was a mistake, like the first tarte Tatin. Maybe someone put a custard in the oven and forgot about it.” That would explain the caramelized exterior though not the elegant fluted mold from which the pastry surely takes its name — cannelé means “fluted.”

If cannelés were ever in style in the past, they were then nearly forgotten. Only in the last 30 years have they come distinctly into favor. They’re now found with increasing frequency across France and in French bakeries around the world, sometimes flavored with chocolate or orange, and in sizes from a large thimble to an extra-large egg. The surge in popularity wasn’t well received in Bordeaux, where in 1985 a group of bakers responded by forming a brotherhood to protect and differentiate the local specialty from imitators and imposters. The Confrérie du Canelé de Bordeaux decided that the correct mold must hold three ounces, vowed to keep secret the ingredients and method, and, to further distinguish their product, removed one of the ns from the traditional spelling, making canelé de Bordeaux the official name, while cannelé bordelais is used everywhere else.

However it is spelled, no other pastry combines the same flavor and texture, and few are so remarkably difficult to make well. A cannelé is built on contrast. Its thin, crisp, chewy crust, between brown and black, yields with a light, crackling crunch. The smell and taste of dark caramel come with a pleasant, subtle bitterness. The butter-colored interior, shot through with small bubbles, has the texture of thick pastry cream. It tastes gently sweet and milky with a hint of rum. Some cannelés are cakey, but a true one is closer to custard.

The cannelé’s ingredients are similar to those of a crêpe, but the cooking yields a very different result. The basic recipe calls for a thin batter of milk, egg yolks, sugar, pastry flour, butter, and flavorings — usually vanilla bean and rum, though sometimes orange zest or orange blossom water. For each liter of milk, there are six to eight egg yolks and about 200 grams of cake flour. (Crêpes contain less milk, more flour, and whole eggs.) Like crêpe batter, cannelé batter must rest overnight in the refrigerator to allow the flour to absorb the liquid completely. Fully hydrated flour particles cook more evenly, making a fine, smooth texture. Ken Forkish, of Ken’s Artisan Bakery in Portland, Oregon, who makes a model cannelé, told me that insufficiently rested batter tends to swell out of its mold and spread during baking. “You wind up with a cannelé that flares at the bottom, like it’s wearing a hoop skirt.” After the rest, the cold batter is poured into chilled molds resembling short sections cut from a skinny Roman column, about 2¼ inches in diameter at their widest and 2 inches tall. The batter then bakes in a hot oven for a surprisingly long time — one to two hours, depending on the oven, the baker, the desired darkness. The finished cannelés are pulled from the oven still slightly soft to the touch, unmolded, and left to cool, harden, and crisp. A few hours after baking, however, even the crispest crust begins to soften. Not to worry, Amat told me: with a quick pass through a hot oven, the cannelé is almost as good as new.

There are many possible deviations — and many ways to mess up. Traditional cannelé molds are made from tin-lined copper that’s relatively thick for the size of the mold, to promote even heating and good caramelization. But the copper molds are expensive, and bakers now have the option of cheaper silicone ones. I’ve never eaten a properly cooked cannelé from silicone, which tends to result in uneven browning. Franz Gilbertson of Honoré Artisan Bakery in Seattle, where I live, says that silicone molds are also so slippery that cannelés tend to “jump up out of them” during baking.  Gilbertson uses tin-lined copper. It took him the better part of a year to hone his recipe and technique, and because the copper molds are expensive and the pastries so time-consuming, he makes only a dozen a day.

Bakers also differ in how they grease the molds. Most common is a mixture of neutral-tasting oil or clarified butter with beeswax; the latter, although used in small amounts, is important to the crust’s crunch and subtle shine. Acclaimed pâtissier Pierre Hermé, who learned to make cannelés in the early 1990s from a recipe given to him by Jean-Marie Amat, told me that he uses both butter and beeswax because it’s more reliable. Forkish uses beeswax alone. But some bakers, including Amat himself, use only butter. He insists that the composition of the mold and the substance used to grease it make no difference, that what matters is that the mold is evenly coated. He is able to get a very fine crunch with butter only, but I find that most cannelés made without beeswax have a dull crust and an odd, cookielike crispness. It’s tricky to figure out how much of the greasing mixture to use: too much and the oil puddles at the base of the mold, preventing the top of the cannelé from proper browning.

Then there’s the question of doneness. Many French bakers cook their cannelés to a range of colors, so that customers can choose. But the darker the cannelé, the stronger the textural contrast, and the less sweet and more nuanced the flavor. When I asked Hermé how he bakes his cannelés, his reply was quick and emphatic: “When it’s black, it’s cooked. I sometimes see bakers cook them only to golden, and that’s no good. A cannelé has to be black.” Gilbertson agreed, lamenting that “a lot of [American] bakers won’t even make them, because when you bake them properly, people look at them and think they’re burnt — or chocolate-flavored! They say, ‘What’s that chocolate thing?’”

I was in Paris not long ago and went back to Le Moulin de la Vierge to see if its cannelés lived up to my memory of them. To get there, I had to walk through the no-man’s-land around La Tour Montparnasse and through an eerily quiet housing development. And once I’d arrived, the cannelé was disappointing: splotchy in color, light brown at best, with a crust more chewy than crisp. But in his pastry shop near Saint-Sulpice, Hermé sold a thrillingly crunchy cannelé with a light, creamy interior whose flavor rivaled the best of Bordeaux. A number of American bakers, particularly on the West Coast, are also turning out cannelés in the true Bordelais spirit. Ken’s Artisan Bakery bakes them to an unapologetic deep chestnut, and the payoff is a remarkable flaky crunch and caramel flavor. Colville Street Pâtisserie, in the Washington wine country town of Walla Walla, makes a cannelé with a crackling crust and an almost airy center. In San Francisco, Pâtisserie Philippe’s cannelé is well-browned, its burnt-sugar exterior so complex that the rest of the pastry tastes barely sweet. Though emblematic of southwest France and guarded by its own local brotherhood, the cannelé does not seem to suffer from being transplanted. Whatever Bordelais flavor may be inherent in the local milk, eggs, and other raw materials of its making, long baking times and intense caramelization tend to equalize the differences, so that quality depends on the craft of the individual baker.

That’s true even in Bordeaux, where the cannelé of every pâtissier has a slightly different look, taste, and crunch. “The cannelé has a life of its own,” says Amat. “Each has its own personality. Bakers work within the same basic concept, but everyone tweaks it to their liking.” ●

 

Here’s Pierré Hermé’s recipe for cannelés.


From issue 87

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