Paris' best baguette 🥖 🇫🇷
How Sri Lankan baker Tharshan Selvarajah won the top prize
The Seine is apparently swimmable and the athletes are posting TikToks from their cardboard beds – in other words, the XXXIII Olympiad is ready to begin. By Friday’s opening ceremony, 10,000 people will have carried the Olympic flame across France since it arrived in May, but as far as I’m aware, I’ve only ever met one of them.
Last week, Tharshan Selvarajah became the first Sri Lankan to carry the flame during these games. He won the honor after spending the past year delivering baguettes, croissants, and rolls to French president Emmanuel Macron as the winner of the 2023 Grand Prix de la Baguette de Tradition Française de la Ville de Paris – more commonly known as France’s best baguette competition.
The contest is just one of the many ways that France honors its legacy of good bread. French people tend to patronize their favorite local bakery, and although it’s not required to work in the field, there’s a nationally recognized baking degree covering bread and viennoiserie – which means croissants, pain au chocolate, and anything made with a laminated dough base (this does not include pastry, for which there is a separate program!)
Tharshan, however, didn’t earn a degree. After moving to France from Sri Lanka in 2006, he found work in an Italian restaurant where he got to know the owner of a local bakery who often came for lunch. When the restaurant shut down putting Tharshan out of work, the bakery owner invited Tharshan to try his hand at making bread instead.
Tharshan was interested in the offer and joined the bakery, but soon found the transition difficult.
“The beginning was really hard because I didn’t speak French and I didn’t know how to make bread,” he said.
Although he lacked language skills and formal training, Tharshan became determined not only to become a great baker, but also to build a reputation for himself and his bread. In 2016, he bought the bakery where he worked, Au Levain des Pyrénées, from his boss and mentor and set his sights on winning the best baguette competition.
The contest rules are deceptively simple. On the day of the competition, each baguette that’s entered must be produced in a Paris bakery using only water, flour, yeast, and salt. The bread must weigh between 250 and 300 grams and must contain 18 grams of salt per kilo of flour. Baguettes are judged both on taste and appearance.
The competition is only for “traditional” baguettes, which are crunchier, browner, and contain less dough than regular baguettes. Most bakeries offer both since the two recipes differ significantly in flavor and texture.
Tharshan entered the competition in 2018 and won third place, but he wasn’t completely satisfied. He spent the next several years perfecting his technique and patiently waiting for the right moment to try again.
Bread is about scientific calculations, Tharshan explained while I filmed him poking a thermometer into various bags of flour during our shoot for Eater.
He first takes the temperature of the raw materials so that by the end of the two-stage kneading process, his dough will be as close to 24 degrees Celsius as possible – the perfect temperature according to his years of testing.
The ingredients themselves are also important, especially the flour. Tharshan mentioned that over the years a statistically significant number of first-place winners have all used flour from Moulins Bourgeois, a family-run organic wheat farm and flour mill located in a village two hours east of Paris.
But the most important ingredient is patience. Tharshan lets the dough rest for 3-5 hours between the first and second kneading, then overnight in the fridge. After being shaped the next morning, the baguettes rest for 20 more minutes to let the dough rise a bit more. Otherwise, they’ll look perfectly fine but will turn hard soon after coming out of the oven.
When a batch of steaming-hot, perfectly golden baguettes was ready, Tharshan grabbed one and began squeezing it next to his ear, smiling at the sound of the crunch.
“Sometimes people think that well-baked bread is hard to eat,” he said, flexing a piece of the crust between his fingers to show its malleability. “With our bread, there’s no problem… when you are done eating you always want more!”
In 2023, Tharshan felt ready to enter the competition for a second time. Out of the 1,305 bakeries that participated, he won first place. Word got out before he and his team even knew what had happened. When he came to work the next morning, the line outside his bakery in the 20th arrondissement stretched down the block. By noon, they were sold out of traditional baguettes.
Since winning the competition, Tharshan has opened a second bakery and created a brand around his bread, which he hopes to bring back to Sri Lanka and beyond.
“France really gave me a beautiful life because I learned everything here,” he said. “France gave me this life so I want to bring French products around the world.”
After spending two days with Tharshan, including an early morning trip to take 20 hot baguettes to the president, I was struck by his perseverance and charisma. But I wanted to know: in a competition where every baker must use the same ingredients, how did he really manage to make the best baguette?
“It’s always the same recipe,” he said. “But we are always truly happy. It’s not just a smile, but inside our hearts. That’s our secret.”
I wasn’t buying it. But what are the techniques? I asked.
Tharshan smiled and then began to laugh. “That we don’t say!”
Watch the full video for Eater here:
If you’re headed to Paris for the Games or otherwise, you can find Tharshan’s competition-winning bread at Au Levain des Pyrénées. The 2024 winner of the contest was announced in May and, in a full-circle moment for me, the prize went to Boulangerie Utopie, where I filmed my first video for Eater back in 2020. Try their bread and also their sourdough croissant!
It is good to know that there is such a thing as an edible baguette! I stopped buying them as they were far to hard to bite into. They need to be slightly firm and crunchy but soft on the inside, not tooth breaking. Tharshans sound perfect!
Sweet! Ohhh, for a French baguette today!