Jeff Renner, who turns eighty in September, brought his forty-six-year career baking the Best French Bread in Town to a close in June. | J. Adrian Wylie
Early in Jeff Renner’s forty-six-year bread baking career, his baguettes bested all others in crust, taste, and texture at a competition for Alliance Française, a local club dedicated to the French language and francophone culture.
“They sent me a nice note saying that your bread is the best French bread in town,” he recalls. The compliment became the calling card for his cottage industry supplying loaves to homes, caterers, and local markets (several of which he’s outlasted). “And I didn’t make up the claim. These French experts made it for me!”
A blue ribbon from the 1979 state fair still hangs beneath the food service license at his Scio Twp. home, although he can see “it’s faded to purple.”
Born at the vanguard of the baby boom, Renner admits to feeling his age—he turns eighty in September—so he got a hearty sendoff June 5 with his last delivery of the Best French Bread in Town to Arbor Farms Market. The farewell party “was very overwhelming,” he says. “It was just sort of a whirlwind.”
In 1975, the middle school science teacher took a year of paternity leave—unprecedented in Ann Arbor Public Schools—to care for his and wife Nancy’s newborn son. With Nancy secure in her career as a medical technologist for University Hospital (she eventually retired thirteen years ago), he never went back.
“We decided it made more sense for her to continue working and me to be the stay-at-home parent,” he relates. “Quite pioneering at the time.” They welcomed a daughter four years later.
He’d make bread for Triangle Cooperative Preschool bake sales and “people would always buy it,” he recalls. “I mean, it was gone immediately, and then they’d say, ‘You know, I’m having a party. Can you make some of that for me?’”
Flashback: Passing the Baguette (Dec. 2009)
A small ad in the October 1979 Observer was the only paid publicity he’d ever need. He once set up a card table at the Ann Arbor Farmers Market with eight loaves of free samples and some index cards. “I went home with a stack of orders,” he says. “Back then, the farmers market was a little more casual.”
He’d personally deliver the baguettes, sold in batches of eight since they froze well, for $13 total. “The kids would ride along when they were too young to be left at home,” he says. “They would complain about the overwhelming aroma of the bread, because it was also outgassing a little bit of alcohol. I think it made them a little woozy.”
The gregarious baker held many a doorstep conversation, “and the kids would get fussy because I wasn’t coming out quick enough,” he says.
He says he eventually called the health inspector to keep the business aboveboard. “He said, ‘I’ve been wondering when I was going to hear from you!’ He wasn’t worried about me poisoning the citizens of Ann Arbor with bread.”
Renner equipped his home with a commercial sink, a twenty-quart Hobart mixer, and a Little Caesars pizza oven that lasted until replacement parts went extinct. Some 300,000 loaves ensued.
His formula combined elements from Julia Child and a recipe included with a pan purchased from the former Kitchen Port, where he deployed his teaching skills for cooking demonstrations.
Flashback: Farewell to Kitchen Port (Mar. 2009)
The key is adding very little yeast and taking lots of time so that “wild yeast and bacteria aren’t overwhelmed by the yeast, and they get a chance to do their own thing, ferment, and they produce a lot more flavor than commercial yeast,” he says. He’d let the dough rise overnight, knock it back in the morning, and give it several more hours before baking “so the dough is quite tart, like a sourdough almost, and much more flavorful than if bread is rushed.”
He enjoys making other varieties and is accomplished at beer as well, as a founding member of the Ann Arbor Brewers Guild. But he says the business was “at capacity with the baguette, so my feeling was, why complicate my life?”
A similar sentiment saw him spurn offers over the years to expand beyond his accustomed ritual, which produced 320 loaves per week at its peak.
“I’m very glad I resisted that,” Renner reflects. “It just wasn’t my style. I like kind of being a big fish in a small pond.
“What I will miss the most is definitely the people. Sometimes they would treat me as a celebrity. I’ve signed more than one autograph. It’s kind of embarrassing, but I told them I just put my pants on one leg at a time, like everybody else.”
Flashback: Jeff Renner’s Back (October. 2012)
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