A Paean to Mille Grane

First, let us be clear: the Essential Baking Company Café is open for business, with no plans to change. The bakery, however, she has passed into that faraway land we euphemistically call Cloverleaf.

Actually, that’s not a euphemism. Cloverleaf is an area by Georgetown, and, as we reported back in December, EBC purchased the Parisian Desserts Company down there a few years back. As of last week, they finished consolidating all their baking operations at that facility.

What this means for Wallingford is a) fewer local jobs and, more importantly, b) no more dumpsters full of bread.

Yes, yes, we know that the very idea of rooting around through the garbage for discarded food disgusts some people, but really,  it’s not like that. When the baking trucks put the fresh bread on the shelves, they pull off what’s the unsold loaves, drive them back to the bakery and empty them into a dumpster. Often times, the bread would still be in bags within bags, and there was never anything but bread in the dumpsters (no garbage, no discarded food). They would drop off at 10 am, and we would pick up at 11 am, hours after it had left the store shelf.

What this meant was not just as much free bread as we could eat, any day we wanted. It meant the freedom of choice: we could choose whatever type of bread we wanted. Without having to worry about wasting money (or bread), we felt free to experiment: rosemary diamante getting boring? Let’s give the ciabatta a try. Or maybe the sweet perrin. Desem? Pain du George? Yum, yum, meh, and delish, in that order.

The winner, though, for day after day eating, was the Mille Grane, an organic whole grain loaf with polenta, millet, sunflower seeds, poppy seeds and other bits of tasty. Rich and flavorful enough to eat on its own, but not “so much” that you couldn’t just cut some for a sandwich.

Alas, the days of free experimentation with loaves is over. The photo above shows where the dumpsters once lived. An empty lot. Was it all a dream?

Perhaps. And so back we go to the humdrum daily grind of gathering our loaves alongside our eggs and milk, queuing up at the register, and counting out our nickels and dimes before trudging off to work. Still, we’re better for it. That sandwich wrapped in wax paper: there’s a certain nuttiness to it, and well worth the price we now pay.