It's a wonderful loaf

He bakes thousands of loaves every day, and Hollywood stars have his bread flown around the world to them. So what is Lionel Poilâne's secret? Fiona Sims went to find out.

You can call him Mr Bread, or even God, one Seattle baker once said. "There is scarcely a gourmet magazine in the world, scarcely a newspaper food columnist who has not editorially sainted him," declared the USA's Smithsonian magazine. Lionel Poilâne makes the most famous bread in France - or even the world. He regularly sends as many as 4,000 loaves to customers around the globe by Federal Express.

He has many followers, and a fair few celebrity disciples - such as Catherine Deneuve, Robert de Niro and Lauren Bacall - who, Poilâne claims, demand that their day start with a wood-fired Poilâne loaf, wherever they are in the world.

Poilâne's bread is one of only a few to be credited on French menus. He sells to more than 1,200 restaurants in France and, according to his Web site, www.poilane.com, 3% of Parisians munch on a Poilâne loaf every day, having made a trip to one of his two Paris shops. And now he's over here - Poilâne has chosen London as the location for his third shop.

Situated halfway up Elizabeth Street, around the corner from Victoria Coach Station, the shop is decorated with a finely painted frieze, by a French artist, depicting the process from grain to finished loaf. Wooden shelves display bags of Poilâne flour, in case you want to try and make the bread yourself, while dainty Poilâne shortbread is wrapped in Cellophane - the great man has now diversified into pâtisserie.

Then there are the loaves themselves, magnificently crusted with a 16in diameter, weighing 1.9kg and with a Picasso-esque "P" scored in the dough. Shop manager Maité Ithurbide sets a loaf in the slicing machine for a customer. "Yes, you can freeze it." she tells him. "Just wrap it in an airtight bag and eat it within a couple of weeks."

A self-confessed Anglophile, Poilâne regularly comes over to London. "Eurostar is great - it makes things so easy," he says. He could have opened in Japan, he says - or anywhere, for that matter, he's had that many offers. "But this is a family business," he adds. "I want be able to keep a close eye on things."

Poilâne took over his father's bakery, founded in 1932, in the early 1970s. After a decade of running the business, he decided to go the traditional route and eschew the baguette in favour of the old style of French bread - sourdough.

Dark story

The baguette, apparently, is an Austrian invention and not French at all, becoming fashionable in France only after World War II. "It became chic to eat white," Poilâne explains. "Regional, dark French bread had almost disappeared because it was once the bread of the poor." But Poilâne Snr kept up with the old-style bread, experimenting with different recipes. Poilâne Jnr just picked up where he left off. He talked to retired country bakers and studied old cookery books - he now has a library of more than 2,000 bread books, the oldest dating back to 1544. But bread is only yeast, water, flour and salt - how difficult can it be?

"You've got to get the basics right," says Poilâne. He professes to know the millers and wheat growers personally and, while he hasn't gone down the organic route, he encourages sustainable agriculture. "Organic is a good idea but it's not totally honest," he says. "It's not exactly what people think it is. These people think they are clean and separate from the rest of the world, and I hate that because we are all part of the same world." He concedes, however, that sustainable agriculture is a good move globally, and that it has certainly helped his cause. "But do you know what the best thing for my business has been?" he asks. "Doctors."

According to Poilâne, some nutritionists encourage those with digestive disorders to eat pain de Poilâne. "It's easier to digest than most breads," he says, "because the natural fermentation breaks down the glutens, unlike other bread where the gluten remains. But it's boring speaking about my bread in terms of health. I prefer to talk about it in terms of pleasure."

Indeed, Poilâne's favourite snack is a cholesterol-packed rillette d'oie smeared over his toasted bread. And the water used in the loaves isn't the fancy bottled kind, but straight out of the tap at the storefront shops, and from a well at the larger bakery.

He opens the door of a large fridge to reveal the starter, stored in four washing-up sized bowls. How old is the starter? "It dates back to before the war," says Poilâne. "This isn't something a machine can do, you know. There are no thermometers or anything. But then this created my philosophy - we know by the colour of the oven when the bread is ready to bake, and we use our eyes to tell us when the loaf is ready. We are physically implicated and that's what we're about."

Ecological

The bakery looks like something out the 19th century, with its wooden benches, flat wooden paddles, and willow baskets lined with coarse linen (for proving the bread). Small blocks of firewood are stacked up in a neat pile in the corner - Poilâne gets through a few hundred kg a day in London, and some five tonnes in Paris. "It's poplar, mostly," Poilâne explains. "Left over from sawmills. Very ecological, non?"

It's sweltering, though there's nothing burning yet - not until the three bakers arrive at 10pm to start stoking the fire. "It never cools down - even if we shut up shop for a week," Poilâne says, opening the heavy cast-iron oven door. Brick lines the oven floor and walls, with the wood furnace near the front. At full throttle, the temperature hits 220ºC. There's space for 80 loaves at one time, and the London shop bakes 200 daily. In France, though, 15,000 loaves are made in a day, most of them at the "factory" in Bièvres, just outside Paris, with its 24 hand-made ovens presided over by 40 master bakers manning the ovens in two shifts.

The London shop opened in June 2000, supplying well-heeled locals, to start with. Now Poilâne is selling to restaurants. He has about 40 on his books at present, from London's Mirabelle and Hush, to Drones and Harvey Nichols Fifth Floor.

Star gazer

When he's not making bread, Poilâne likes to look at the stars - he has a big telescope at his home in Paris around the corner from the bakery in St Germain. And he's a bit of an artist - a "bread" chandelier hangs in the London office. Poilâne once even made furniture out of bread for his "great friend" Salvador Dali, and the Tate Modern has asked him to make another chandelier for its surrealist exhibition later this year.

Now that Poilâne has gone global, he has become something of a bread ambassador, with invitations to speak all over the world from associations such as the American Institute of Baking. He has just returned from a trip to Japan with his bread chandeliers - "they wanted them for an exhibition about bread," he explains.

So what next? "If you start to do too many things, that's extension," he says. "My motto is, do things with intention, not with extension."

Poilâne's top three bread reads

The Book of Bread, by Owen Simmons, first published 1888, Maclaren & Sons, London

The Baker's Book, by Emil Braun, first published 1903, D Van Nostrand, New York

The Baker's ABC: An Encyclopaedic Dictionary for Bakers, Confectioners, and Caterers, by John Kirkland, published 1927, Gresham Publishing Company, London