A delicious World Cup discovery: SOCCER BREAD

Soccer is the food of life in more ways than one.

The goods arrayed in the window of Poilâne’s unassuming little storefront in the sixth arrondissement are typical of what you’ll find at any bakery in Paris: pains au chocolat, tartes aux pommes, small shortbread cookies called punitions. But proudly set out on a green turf mat, next to 11 cookies arranged in a 3-4-3, sits the real pièce de résistance: a full-sized regulation soccer ball, complete with light and dark panels, and made of nothing but bread.

The store has been there since 1932 and has seen the neighborhood gentrify, the buildings transforming from monasteries and convents to a row of fashionable shops and eateries. Inside, the front room is tiny but warm, large enough for maybe a dozen people to crowd in if they don’t mind some uncomfortable touching between strangers. To the right, more punitions, along with smaller sliced loaves and jars of jam. To the left, several rows of enormous sourdough rounds, the top shelves displaying lavishly decorated crusts, including one designed, again, like a soccer ball. There are soccer ball punitions as well, for sale in plastic sleeves or by weight. In the window display, the punitions look like pawns gathered around the throne of the queen of the bakery, the bread ball.


Simply calling it a bread ball is to do it a disservice; it’s a dense, solid ball of milk bread that requires a custom cast-iron mold to create. Lugging it around requires a commitment to hauling a dead weight of at least a good three or four pounds, while resisting the temptation to dropkick the thing into the sky. As I was fortunate enough to be gifted one of the balls, I had the chance to taste it, and it is possibly the most fortifying bread in existence. This is not the kind of bread that leaves you hungry half an hour later; it is close-textured and filling, the perfect foil for a smear of jam or cheese, and it will sit solidly inside of your stomach while you tramp up and down the steps of a stadium or wander for miles through narrow stone-paved streets.

At a café a few blocks over from her bakery, owner Apollonia Poilâne tells me they prefer to bake several of the balls at once in their vintage wood-fire oven, because the completely enclosed nature of the mold means they never know if they’ll get a good result until they actually crack it open. Even though they’ve been making the balls for 21 years now, there’s still an element of uncertainty.