From West Africa to Chelsea, the Story of the Best Laminated Baguette
If a croissant and a baguette had a perfect baby 🥐🥖
The Deligram shines a spotlight on the many incredible food artisans in New York. In our last feature, we spoke to Mina Park of 99, a micro-bakery in Bushwick, Brooklyn. This issue highlights another baker, Amadou Ly, who spent years working as a pastry chef in fine dining restaurants before falling in love with bread and working for five years at the beloved Arcade Bakery (RIP). Now, he’s ready to do his own thing: ALF Bakery, which is opening this spring in Chelsea Market.
The Product: Artisanal breads and baked goods.
The Deli Pick: The laminated baguette and flan de boulanger (we couldn’t pick!).
How To Buy: Get a taste test at ALF Bakery’s pop up at OStudio on March 4th (walk-ins & takeaway available), and then visit their Chelsea Market location when it opens.
Price: Pastries start at $4.50.
I’ve lived in America for the last 18 years. I come from two countries in West Africa; I’m half Senegalese, half Togolese. I grew up in both countries, traveling back and forth with my families. I came here 18 years ago to study, but I fell in love with cooking because I worked with a lot of French [people]. I also like eating good food. While I was working in kitchens, I traveled a lot. I went to France a couple of times and took a couple of baking [classes], and in Spain, did some chocolate work. I was lucky to meet a lot of great pastry chefs, and I thought, “Maybe I have that art in me,” so I pursued pastry and chocolate work. Eventually I worked as a pastry chef for restaurants and hotels [including Insieme, Mas (farmhouse), and Le Restaurant]. But for the last 10 years or so, I fell in love with bread. For me it's a more spiritual journey. Like, it’s only a trilogy of ingredients – basically flour, water and salt – and the rest is imagination, heat, and what you can do with the ingredients.
I fell in love with fine dining earlier in my career. I would totally like to go to three-star New York Times restaurants, four stars, two stars, you name it… and then I switched [interests]. It’s an exclusive society that comes to fine dining. Like, who are you cooking for at the end of the day? Do you want to cook for the rich people that are sitting around the dining room, or do you want to make a good loaf of bread? I switched to bread because, for me, it’s unique in that it's as old as the world. It's a tradition of humanity where people have always baked – they baked on a stone, they baked on an open fire. I grew to not care about fine dining desserts anymore. I’m glad I know how to do it, but you get tired of it at a certain point.
Roger [Gural] at Arcade Bakery introduced me to the laminated baguette. Because I came from a pastry background, I thought I knew a lot about bread, but I didn’t until I met him. He’s a totally different beast. He knows a lot about different kinds of bread. He doesn’t cut corners. When I started at Arcade, the first thing I had was the croissant and it was the best croissant I’d had in the United States – maybe even in Europe!– because everything was just right. So I wanted somebody to walk in, have a croissant, or a baguette, or a loaf of sourdough, and go “oh my god, I’m coming back for that.” I’m always gonna try to do my best to put the best product out there and let the people be the judge.
I think for the last 15 years, for a lot of bakers, the emphasis is more into something living than “dead.” We call it the living bread, le pain vivant: making the bread with minimal interaction [from the baker], using flour, water, salt, yeast, to a minimal point, and sourcing your ingredients carefully – but not to manipulate them. Bread has been manipulated so much over the last maybe 100 years now. All the additives they put in the bread to make have a long shelf life that are actually not good for you. With le pain vivant, you do minimal interaction with the ingredients and then you bake it in a proper oven – a wood-fired oven, a good tech oven... And then the rest is just the bread speaking for itself.
We’ll see! There’s a lot of opportunities on the horizon: working with small restaurants, and working with small mills all the time if we can afford to. The dream and the vision is to be a teacher and pass on what I know. I want to be able to teach people about baking the same way I was taught. People were open to [teaching] me baking in general, making doughs, the fermentation process, the lamination process… I think the vision should be something besides just being able to survive, make money, grow. It needs to do something else.
Greatest hit: People love the laminated baguette, and the laminated brioche. There’s going to be a lot of emphasis on lamination in bread.
Most underrated product: Baguette and butter. Something simple. Something where you want to eat the whole loaf. What’s not to like?
How to best enjoy your products: Always, always, always have it fresh. And always save some for the next day. Be curious about what a product can give after two days. That’s how you can really know a great baker – does it go stale after two hours? Or does it last for days, for a week on your table?
Favorite restaurants to eat in NY: Hard question. I love Japanese places -- [it's] like the same thing as le pain vivant. I love Japanese food. It’s the simplicity of things. I love yakitori places where you can get either a whole grilled chicken or different parts of the chicken. I love the simplicity of that, you know? A bowl of rice, a glass of sake, or a glass of good wine. There's this place called Yakitori Totto I go to a lot.
Story by Megan Perry
Photos by Teddy Wolff for The Deligram.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.