Apollonia Poilâne

Apollonia Poilâne has been described as a "fierce defender of a magical tradition and also a brave innovator for a new era". Alice Waters claims, "In many ways, the good bread we have now in the United States exists thanks to Poilâne. Poilâne bakery and the Poilâne family have revolutionized the way we think about bread, and it is deeply important that we preserve and learn from their legacy."

Cradled in a breadbasket fashioned by her mother, raised on the playground of her father’s bakery, and the precocious inheritor & leader of Paris’s most iconoclastic and celebrated bread bakery, Apollonia Poilâne stands at the helm of baking tradition that has been chartering new frontiers for three generations and is a singular authority in the world of bread.

After taking charge of the family business at 18 years old following her parents’ accidental death in a helicopter crash while simultaneously completing her undergraduate at Harvard University, she has transformed her grandfather’s "le vrai gout du pain" and her father’s "retro-innovation" with her own "contemporary by tradition" philosophy.

Poilâne’s techniques and philosophy are simple but the execution is masterful. At Poilâne, bakers use their five senses to bake, shedding standardization and calibration and choosing instead to acknowledge the life present in our flour and sourdough ingredients. No loaf of bread is identical from one batch to the next. The consistent quality of their creations, however, is the result of true artisanal craftsmanship. For Apollonia Poilâne, baking is the transmission between each individual baker and their production, the transformation of grain to bread with the aid of fermentation. The bakery and Apollonia stand not only as champions of breadmaking but artisanal craftsmanship in all its forms.