Rouses_FINAL-November-December-2017

the Holiday issue

GINGER ALL THE WAY by Erin Z. Bass

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

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MY ROUSES EVERYDAY NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2017