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MY
ROUSES
EVERYDAY
NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2017
the
Holiday
issue
C
arl LaJaunie arrives at LeJeune’s Bakery in Jeanerette each
morning at 1 a.m. That’s when this master baker begins
making dough for the famous bakery’s ginger cakes.
LaJaunie has been mixing, rolling and baking dough at LeJeune’s
for 16 years. He says he enjoys the repetition of baking. “You can’t
mess it up,” he explains.
This bakery on Bayou Teche has a long history dating back to 1884.
Five generations of LeJeunes have had more than 100 years to
perfect their ginger cake and bread recipes.
LeJeune’s breads are ready by 6 a.m. each morning, but that’s only
after a rigorous process of mixing, rolling, rising and, finally, baking.
While LaJaunie and another employee tend to the baking in the
back of the shop, customers pull up to the side door off Main Street
to purchase hot dog buns, fresh bread loaves, ginger cakes and sweet
dough pies in flavors from blackberry to fig.
The soft, wide French bread loaves and Original Old Fashion
Ginger Cakes, affectionately known as stage planks, are also sold at
Rouses Markets throughout Acadiana, in Iberia, East Baton Rouge
and Ascension parishes, positioned close to the registers.
The small bakery — which was the first bakery in Louisiana to
be named to the National Register of Historic Places — houses
an industrial-sized mixer that can handle 400 pounds of flour at a
time, but the bakery’s famed ginger cakes are made using a smaller
version that resembles a KitchenAid mixer.
Mixed dough comes out of the mixer via a long metal trough; it
is then transferred to a roller, where it is also broken into smaller
pieces. LaJaunie lets the dough rise on a wooden table in the center
of the room, then measures each piece on a scale before shaping
it into a ball. The old table eventually fills up with many balls of
dough, which rise for an hour and a half in stacked wooden boxes
before they’re ready to go into the oven.
Every loaf and ginger cake is made from scratch using recipes
handed down from generation to generation. And while Jeanerette
surely got its nickname of “Sugar City”from the longtime cultivation
GINGER
ALL THE WAY
by
Erin Z. Bass