Tanguy began Crown Point Bakery five years ago. He was drawn to baking while spending time with his grandmother in Brittany (France). He visited a friend of his grandmother's, a baker, and was, in his words, "enchanted." Returning to the U.S., he as discouraged to find no good bread, so he began to learn to bake. He's learned most of his skills through working on his own or through informal apprenticeships and visits with bakers in France.

Because traditional French bakeries use clay ovens, Tanguy studied ceramics at college in Montana, so that he could build a clay oven for his bakery. His oven served him well until last year, when he imported a twenty-four ton wood-fired French oven - an oven that is 14 feet in diameter, and 12 feet deep.

While the amount of "good bread" available in our area has increased since Tanguy was an adolescent, it is made in a more modern way than Tanguy's. He says he does not want to be surrounded by a "menagerie of machines" that do the work of baking. He has a "primitive" dough mixer, but the rest is done by hand. He weighs out the dough, forms the bread by hand, puts it into the oven on a bread peel, and takes it out on a bread peel. He works to the schedule of the bread, or the yeast, making the bread in a continuous operation, rather than using refrigeration to hold the dough at certain points. He says that both his methods and product are similar to those used in France until fairly recently. (It should be noted that traditional baking is now enjoying a revival in France.)

Tanguy bakes both baguettes and a more traditional, or old-fashioned French country bread. It is this latter, a multigrain bread, which he has so far sold at Honest Weight. (Look for baguettes and baguette dough rolls once he has bags printed for them.) A recently imported German 20-in. millstone is used to grind the grains for the bread. Tanguy uses organic grains and is working on getting wheat from a local farmer. Crown Point Bakery's business is seasonal, with summer being the busier season, when 100-200 loaves a day are sold. Tanguy has two employees and wants to keep the business at an artisanal level. To supplement the actual bakery production and sales, he also travels and works as a baker at re-enactments. He began selling his bread at Honest Weight this summer, bringing the bread down on Saturdays when he came to the Troy Waterfront Farmers' Market. He is working on establishing some restaurant accounts in Albany, and hopes that Honest Weight customers will buy enough bread to make the weekly journey worthwhile. Judging from the reactions of those sampling and buying his bread when he did a "Meet the Baker" day at the Coop in November, this should not be a problem.

Look for Crown Point Bakery's bread at Honest Weight the next time you shop-and see if, in eating it, you are transported back to Crown Point, c.1700, or perhaps to France, c.1960.

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