miche

A miche is a large, round country loaf, the kind baked in a wood-fired communal oven once a week because it held moisture for days. The word appears in Old French texts from the thirteenth century, applied to a loaf of unspecified size, usually round, made from whatever flour the baker had available. It is the country loaf before there were cities to complicate things: sturdy, dense, meant to be cut in thick slices and eaten with whatever the season offered. French villagers carried miches home from the communal bake on wooden boards.

The etymology of miche is contested in the usual ways of very old words. Some medieval Latin glosses connect it to mica, meaning crumb or small piece, which is the ancestor of English mica (the mineral that flakes into thin sheets). Others trace it to a Frankish source, a Germanic root meaning large, which would make the bread's name almost the opposite of mica's sense. Whatever its origin, the word had settled into French by 1250 and showed no sign of leaving.

In modern French baking, miche refers specifically to a large round sourdough loaf, typically made with a high percentage of whole wheat or rye flour and a long cold fermentation. The Poilane bakery in Paris, founded by Pierre Poilane in 1932 and continued by his daughter Apollonia, made the miche internationally known through the twentieth century. Their loaf weighs approximately 1.9 kilograms, is marked with a P, and ships to subscribers in forty countries. The Poilane miche became the reference point for what a miche should be: thick crust, open crumb, a sourness that develops over the three or four days the loaf lasts.

English bakers and food writers began using miche in the 2000s as sourdough culture spread through the Anglophone world. Chad Robertson's Tartine Bread from 2010 described a country loaf using the French vocabulary, and miche entered English baking forums as a term of art for a large round sourdough. The word is now used without italics in English bread writing, which is how a loanword signals it has arrived. The round loaf it names is older than the word itself.