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Your evening longread: What it's like to move to France to become a boulangerie apprentice

It’s a coronavirus-free zone as we bring you an interesting longread each evening to take your mind off the news.

EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.

For the next few weeks, we’ll be bringing you an evening longread to enjoy. With the news cycle dominated by the coronavirus situation, we know it can be hard to take your mind off what’s happening.

So we want to bring you an interesting read every weekday evening to help transport you somewhere else.

We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.

Life in Lyon

A writer recalls what happened when he moved to Lyon with his family to become an apprentice at a boulangerie.

(The New Yorker, approx 33 mins reading time)

They also discovered Bob’s baguettes, which Frederick developed a practice of assaulting each morning before eating: breaking one open with his hands, sticking his nose inside, inhaling, and then smiling. On Wednesdays, when Bob was closed and we bought baguettes elsewhere, Frederick subjected them to his test and, without fail, found them inedible. (Bob was thrilled by Frederick’s findings.) Bob’s bread had aromatic complexity and was long in flavor in ways that we’d never known before. We were at his boulangerie every day. Some days, we went three times, which concerned him: “You’ve had enough bread today. Go home!”

Read all of the Evening Longreads here>

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    Mute Hello DAVE!
    Favourite Hello DAVE!
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    Apr 10th 2020, 8:45 PM

    Coming Tomorrow:

    Robbie starts his first day in Brennans.

    It was my boyhood dream to work here, my first day began with the smell of hot metal from the metal fabricators next door.

    When eventually landing into the workforce ,i was informed i would be on the batch making process. ( just remember one thing, said Tony the Wiley old bread maker , make sure one heal is bigger than the other)
    The adventure had begun.

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    Mute Desmond Lyons
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    Apr 10th 2020, 11:14 PM

    @Hello DAVE!: one heel. Not heal. That’s an entirely different thing!

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    Mute Emma Long
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    Apr 10th 2020, 8:51 PM

    French people seriously value their bread.

    The baker in the village we used to go for hols went bust; the locals stopped buying his bread when a boulangerie opened in village 4K away and made amazing bread. I was stunned that people would make a 8k round trip for bread- they had better stuff than we had in Ireland on their doorstep!A different appreciation of a €1.20 baguette than I was used to.

    The locals also derided the flour that the boulanger they shunned used, just like Bob’s assertion in that article.

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    Mute Hello DAVE!
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    Apr 10th 2020, 8:55 PM

    @Emma Long: would this constitute another long read?

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    Mute ed w
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    Apr 11th 2020, 10:00 AM

    @Emma Long: french Baker in our town must go and get the bread I ordered. the bread is just fabulous.

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    Mute Peter McGlynn
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    Apr 10th 2020, 10:02 PM

    Ah sure we have Cuisine de France.

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    Mute Andrew Letcher
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    Apr 10th 2020, 7:50 PM

    Have no interest in reading it but am gonna go with a bit naff at the moment.

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    Mute Monika Rumpf
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    Apr 10th 2020, 11:38 PM

    Now I am hungry.

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    Mute owentighe
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    Apr 11th 2020, 10:04 AM

    Enjoyed that. Good French bread is truly a thing of beauty. Rip bob!

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