Pain de mie for me

One of my favorite breads growing up was Pain de Mie. Interestingly enough, in English there is no word for 'mie'. Mie is the white part of the bread, and as a child I liked the crusts cut off mine. For some reason I thought the 'burnt part' aka crust, was bad for you. Maybe I was onto carcinogens at an early age.

My mom used to go to a nearby French bakery and buy these long square loaves of white bread with thin crusts. They were perfectly square with creamy white insides.

A few weeks back, we made some pain de mie. The larger loaf I made turned out to be a literal pain, since I put on the lid to the metal box on incorrectly, and when removed, it essentially decapitated the bread. Well this week when given the choice to make some 'special' bread, I opted for pain de mie again, hoping to get it right. And we did!

The loaves looked perfect and tasted amazing piping hot out of the oven.

With the seasons changing in Paris and the weather getting chilly, there are very few things as comforting as a warm piece of pain de mie slathered with melting butter and strawberry jam.

On a side note, the entire class has been pretty annoyed lately with the French pastry students who share our lab. Not only are they young, loud, and don't take class that seriously, they seem to have sticky fingers and have a penchant for our tools. I had a knife and two spatulas go missing. We now pack away our tools every day and this is what I've resorted to in order to identify my tools.