Fete du Pain

[Fat Bob]

It's a great yearly event put on in our village that gets over 150,000 visitors.

You do get some strange Brits in S&M gear that do not realise what Pain is.

For three days there is free music and fireworks plus free circus and other stuff.

It is all put on by the local bakery who want to put something back into the community.

A few years ago they built a WFO on the Fete site, followed by a flour mill.

This year the WFO has a shedlike structure added to the front.

Here are some pics (on dialup only took two hours to upload - Photobucket reckon watching videos does not slow down upload of a 216KB file - tell me another one).

View of bakery - 18th century apart from dodgy wiring. The big barrel was bloody hot it was full of hot charcoal to add to the oven.




Take a close look at the roof of the oven - looks a right mess.



Pic of oven.



Pain de Campagne - Sourdough bread.

Last night was final night and they had a man on a horse covered in flame retardant material that did a 10 minute firework display with rockets and stuff zooming from the horse.

I do not approve but a daft sight.

I hope you like this post it took two hours, much patience and two litres of plonk!

[cannyfradock]

Bob

Nice pics (well worth the time and effort). The roof does look like it's about to collapse at any time, but the pure nature of a dome means it can't go anywhere. The loaves look mighty fine as well.

There's something about those French Fete's and Foires that we just can't replicate.

Terry

[rivergirl]

Well worth the effort Bob!! I hope that there are no after effects to the plonk!! We have the cauliflower festival coming up but I won,t be showing photos!!

[turkey]

herculean effort given the dial up , is there no such thing as le Broadband in your region? pretty shocking for what was such a progressive country in that field, with minitel now off folks will need a bit more digital grunt to actually get along in a connected world.

love the oven roof, looks more like a pebble spiral and very low, with such a low vault how is it fired?

ps if going to sites like that and just want to get the info ad go you can turn images off in your browser

kb.iu.edu/data/acpv.html

you can also setup ad-block plus which will kill off flash (if you even have it installed) adverts which will save precious time.

[Fat Bob]

There are big posters saying they have spent millions on putting in broadband - and it comes within a kilometer of my place. But we are too far from the exchange.

3G is starting to drop in price.

[minesamojito]

Fantastic pictures, love that oven, it looks like it's made of pebbles, the bread looks wonderful too.
Cheers
Marcus

[matt]

Very intriguing, and what an amazing bakery. That oven looks loaded to the gills.

Those loaves are the holy grail in my book - 'peasant soul of europe' loaves. Beautiful, thanks for taking the time to upload the pics Bob.

Matt

[Fat Bob]

There is a WFO in another local village that I must take a pic of, it is a communal oven with a roof over the working area.

If any one wants to check out these places I have a spare house at mates rates but as a veggie don't want meat on the premises.

[spinal]

That's spectacular! You may just be the person to help me.

I spent a long time in Bardonecchia as a kid, and we used to go over the mountain to Briancon to get supplies. One of the things was a small village (la vachette) en-route had a large communal oven which would be fired up once a month They would make bread.

One of the breads was a bread that had dry meat, onions and potentially other things in the dough. The idea was that the bread could be brought hiking when tending cattle in the mountains and it would provide almost everything needed if eaten with fruits/veg foraged. Once the bread was hard/stale, it could be eaten with soup made with the same veg and it would provide a complete diet...

Any idea what the bread is called, or what the dough recipe is?!

M.

[Fat Bob]

Did it look like this? I am 4 hours away from the mountains and they don't have bread like that in my department.

Did it look like this?

www.super-marmite.com/magnolia

[Fat Bob]

Can't dind it on the inter web but found this:

rosas-yummy-yums.blogspot.fr/2010/11/norwegian-mountain-bread-pain-rustique.html

[spinal]

Nope - nothing lilke it The first link looks like a lasagna, and the second like a loaf of granary bread.

If it means anything, the bread was baked in large doughnut shapes (around 2-feet in diameter), and looked like it was made of white flour what what I can tell...

Will do some googling tonight...
m.