La Fete Du Pain

Our next adventure, on a rainy Monday, was the annual Paris Fete du Pain, held in the forecourt of the cathedral, which, nowadays, unfortunately, is not very crowded. The Festival of Bread occurs in several tents, where you get to watch the judging, the making of bread items by master bakers and their students, and also buy some of the goodies. Having doubled or quadrupled our bread intake, particularly baguettes, since returning to Europe, we felt we needed to learn more, especially yours truly, who needs to better distinguish the €.45 cheapies from Franprix from Vicki's preferred €1.30 traditional artisanal type. Oh, I made a couple lengthy videos of the action, which will appear on my YouTube channel some day.

Front-end of the baking tent

Back-end; of the 30 or so people working there--elder bakers and
students from the various culinary/bakery schools about Paris--we
saw only two females; in most any boulangerie you walk into, the
front-end will be women, the back-end, maybe not

Making croissants; it's all in the wrist action

Love the T-shrt

Spare parts; but as we'll see, these get fed back into the rolling
machine and will come back out as a nice, huge, sheets of dough

Thus

Measure twice; use a cooling rack to make a cutting grid

Cut many times

Assemble and roll; ready for the oven

Having mastered pain au chocolate, we moved on to these guys,
who were making (we learned at great length) apple tartlets

Teacher and student; the student is cutting out the tartlet rounds

Of course there is an MC narrating it all; also cutting up bits of a baguette
for the audience to sample; the whole thing could have used a Noel Fielding, 
I thought

Satisfied customer

I think this is an oven

Huge dough-mixing machine; designed to resemble R2D2

Expert interview

Now the student is piping glops of apple sauce onto the tartlets-to-be

And cutting the (machine-pre-skinned/pre-cored/pre-halved)
apple halves into slices; the teacher also was doing this, his
slices half as thick and twice as quick

Next door, making Eiffel Tower cookies for the tourists

Thus assembled, ready for the oven...one of several trays

Back at the front-end

Of course we bought one; nice shot with the student
baker in the background

Now in the judging tent, where, I think, they are judging best baguette
in France; or possibly somewhere else; the best in Paris turned out to
be a young Indian immigrant in the 20th; our local baker, around the corner,
won 5th

Parthian shot

Takes his baguettes very seriously