What is a Canelé? The Story of Bordeaux Famous Pastry

What is a Canelé? The Story of Bordeaux Famous Pastry

Do you know the story of Bordeaux famous pastry the canelé? Have you eaten a canelé de Bordeaux? There are certain things you see, do or eat in France that once experienced, you simply have to do or eat again. The canelé de Bordeaux is very much one of those things. Let's start with what is a canelé. A canelé is a small, dark, ridged, and gleaming little pastry that looks rather like a piece of mahogany-coloured architecture with its high ridged sides and dark colour.

Once you bite through the caramelised crust and taste the soft, custard-like interior infused with vanilla and dark rum, you'll understand immediately why the people of Bordeaux have been devoted to this small cake for centuries. It is one of those things that once tasted is never forgotten. We look into the story and history of Bordeaux famous pastry, the canelé, in this post. [Photo of Bordeaux town above}

Where does the name Canelé come from?

The name canelé comes from the Gascon word canelat, meaning cannelure — a groove or fluting — and refers to the distinctive ridged sides of the mould in which it is baked. I find it interesting that even the spelling of the pastry has its own history. Until 1985 the cake was commonly written as cannelé with two n’s, but in that year the Confrérie du Canelé de Bordeaux (the Brotherhood of the Canelé), was founded specifically to protect and champion the pastry as part of the city’s culinary heritage. And one of their first acts was to standardise the spelling to canelé with a single n, distinguishing the authentic Bordeaux version from all imitations. You'll still find both spellings today, but a single n is the mark of the genuine Bordelais article and the correct spelling.

The Canelé History is Steeped in Wine and Mystery

The exact creation of the canelé as we know it is a little mystery as it cannot be pinpointed. But what is known is that the Bordeaux wine trade played a central role as the winemakers had long been using egg whites to clarify their wine. The egg whites were whisked into the wine to absorb impurities before the whole mixture settled and the clarified wine was drawn off. This left winemakers with large quantities of unused egg yolks, so they frequently gave them away to local convents and religious houses. Those egg yolks, in some form or another, were the beginning of the canelé.

The origin story told in Bordeaux itself is that the nuns of the Couvent des Annonciades (a convent in the city) were making small cakes known as canelas or canelons from the egg yolks donated by the winemakers as early as the 16th or early 17th century. The convent also had access to the exotic imported goods of vanilla, rum, and cane sugar that were arriving through the Port of Bordeaux from the Caribbean colonies.

Whether or not the convent story is entirely true, what we do know is that a guild of professional canauliers, bakers who made a specific type of small baked cake, was formally established in Bordeaux in 1663. This tells us that the trade was already sufficiently established to require regulation. These canauliers made their canaules in fluted moulds and sold them in the markets of Bordeaux. They also engaged in bitter disputes with the bread bakers’ guild, who periodically attempted to absorb the canauliers into their own trade.

The recipe then appears to have been lost, or at least mislaid, for much of the 18th and early 19th centuries, before being rediscovered and refined in the early 20th century. It was at this point, or so the story goes, that an inspired pastry chef gave the canelé its definitive modern form, creating the twelve-fluted mould. This shape was deliberately modelled on the Doric columns of the Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux, one of the finest neoclassical buildings in France. He also incorporated the rum and vanilla that are now inseparable from the canelé’s identity, and produced the recipe that, with various refinements, has remained essentially unchanged ever since. The dark, almost mahogany crust, the result of the batter caramelising in extreme heat and contact with the hot copper, became the canelé’s signature. 

By the 1980s, the canelé had begun its modern renaissance. It was being made again in the patisseries and boulangeries of Bordeaux, gradually winning a wider following, and in 1985 the Confrérie du Canelé was founded to formalise and protect what had become one of Bordeaux most prized culinary treasures.

The Art of Making a Canelé

The ingredients of a canelé are deceptively simple. You'll only need whole milk, butter, flour, sugar, eggs and egg yolks, a whole vanilla pod, and dark rum. And yet the canelé is widely considered one of the most technically demanding pastries in the French repertoire — a cake that requires patience, precision, the right equipment, and a willingness to accept a degree of trial and error before achieving the perfect result.

The process begins the day before baking. The milk is brought slowly to a simmer with the butter and the split vanilla pod, its seeds scraped into the warm milk to infuse. The eggs and egg yolks are whisked gently with the flour and sugar — gently, because the batter should be barely mixed, not aerated — before the warm vanilla milk is incorporated and the rum stirred in at the end. The resulting batter is very liquid, barely thicker than a crêpe batter, and it needs to rest in the refrigerator for a minimum of 24 hours, ideally 48, to allow the flavours to mellow and deepen and the texture to become properly elastic.

The moulds are the other essential ingredient and they should be brushed with food grade beeswax or melted butter. This creates the thin barrier that allows the batter to caramelise against the hot copper without sticking. The moulds go into a very hot oven initially and then the temperature is then reduced to allow the interior to cook through slowly while the exterior continues to darken and deepen. The canelé should be turned out immediately of its mould and left to cool on a wire rack.

If you wish to try making them at home, the recipe is deeply rewarding once mastered, though it does require patience — and ideally a set of copper or good non-stick tin moulds. The batter is simple to mix, the long rest in the refrigerator is essential and cannot be rushed, and the courage to leave the canelés in the oven long enough to achieve genuine darkness of crust is perhaps the most important lesson of all. To help you start baking canelés at home, I've sourced some baking essentials from Amazon, which if you purchase will cost you no more, but I will receive a small commission.

Get the recipe with all ingredients, method and baking tips in our post Canelé Recipe: Canelés de Bordeaux

Where to Find the Best Canelés in Bordeaux

The most celebrated maker of canelés in Bordeaux is Baillardran, whose distinctive red boutiques can be found at several locations throughout the city. Baillardran’s canelés are made fresh each day and sold warm, and they are the benchmark against which all other canelés in Bordeaux tend to be measured. The queue of locals and visitors at the counter is generally a reliable guide to freshness  and there's rarely much of a wait before a new batch arrives.

Other patisseries in Bordeaux with a strong reputation for their canelés include La Toque Cuivrée, whose name the Copper Toque, pays honour to the copper moulds. A visit to the great covered market of Bordeaux, Marché des Capucins, sometimes called the belly of the city, is another excellent place to find canelés along fresh produce of the region.

If you find yourself in Bordeaux, a fresh canelé on a sunny morning is as good a way as any to begin a day in one of France’s most beautiful cities. Do not share it. You will want it all to yourself, or maybe two!

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