Alsatian Barches or Pain au Pavot

Daniel Helmstetter lives his life by the sign that hangs above his bakery in Colmar: “Le talent et la passion.” A fourth-generation baker, he told me that he “fell into the mixer and never came out.” The Helmstetter Bakery was started by his grandfather in 1906 in the central square of Colmar, a town once known for its large Jewish population. Each Thursday and Friday, Daniel still makes barches au pavot, an oval-shaped challah with poppy seeds and a thin braid on top, for his Jewish clientele. Barches (also spelled berches), which means “twisted,” is also a derivation of the Hebrew word birkat (blessing), from the verse in Proverbs 10:22, Birkat Adonai hi ta-ashir, “The blessing of the Lord, it maketh rich.” “A local rabbi said that the braid represents the tribes of Israel,” Daniel told me over coffee and pastry at his home near the bakery. “And the poppy seeds, the manna in the desert.” Poppy seeds, once grown in the region, may have disappeared from the fields, but the taste from them lingers on. For his barches, Daniel makes a dough that is tighter than his baguette dough, so that it can be easily braided. In a few nineteenth-century versions, boiled potatoes were substituted for some of the flour in the dough, perhaps to help preserve the loaf over the course of the Sabbath.