Daniel Wing - The Bread Builders: Hearth Loaves and Masonry Ovens

THE BREAD BUILDERS

THE BREAD BUILDERS

HEARTH LOAVES and MASONRY OVENS

DANIEL WING and ALAN SCOTT

CHELSEA GREEN PUBLISHING COMPANY
White River Junction, Vermont

Cover photo: The Bay Village Bakery, Point Reyes Station, California (see ).
Chad Robertsons naturally leavened loaves really pop. They have great oven spring and a well developed and fully baked crust that shows the full range of colors from tan to nearly black.

Frontispiece: Bread oven in Point Reyes Station, California. Oven dome by Alan Scott; oven stonework by George Gonzalez; flanking wall by others.

1999 Daniel Wing and Alan Scott.
Illustrations 1999 Elayne Sears.
Unless otherwise noted, photos 1999 Daniel Wing.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Designed by Ann Aspell.
Printed in the United States.
10 9 8 06 07 08
First printing, April 1999
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scott, Alan, 1936
The bread builders : hearth loaves and masonry ovens / Alan Scott
and Daniel Wing.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eBook ISBN: 978-1-60358-013-7
1. Bread 2. Stoves. I. Wing, Daniel, 1948 . II. Title.
TX769.S397 1999
641.815dc21 98-46016
Chelsea Green Publishing Company
Post Office Box 428
White River Junction, VT 05001
(800) 639-4099
www.chelseagreen.com

for Dina DuBoiswho is always ready to visit another bakery, and Gladys Littlefield, lifelong baker

With thanks to David Auerbach, Albie Barden, Laurence Baudelet, Graham Beck, Greg Borchelt, Anne Bourget, Sue Conley, Pierre Delacretaz, Theresa and Richard D-Litzenberger, Michael Gnzle, Al and Keith Giusto, Maggie Glezer, George Gonzales, Gerard Grabowski, Dale Hisler, R. Carl Hoseney, John House, Nancy Iott, Philip Johnson, Chris Kump and Margaret Fox, Rachael Kuo, Heather Leavitt, Lothar Lilge, David Lyle, John McChesney-Young, Pat Manley, Gina Piccolino, Laurent Pouget, Christian Pozzar, Helen and Jules Rabin, Chad Robertson and Elizabeth Prueitt, Laurel Robertson, Frank and Brinna Sands, Rani and Keith, Jim Sargent and Amy Bernhardt, Alan Ricker, George Schenk, Steve Schwab, Joe and Nan Schwartzman, Andrea Smith, Norbert Senf, Susan Sibbet, Tom Stroud, Tina Subasic, Steve Sutcher, Michel Suas, Pam Taylor, Doug Volkmer, Kathleen and Ed Weber, and Doug Wood

CONTENTS

I first met Dan Wing when he showed up on my doorstep and generously offered to help me with whatever would further the cause of Ovencrafters. Dan had come to California to be with his wife, who relocated for a while to Berkeley to be nearer her grandchild. Temporarily un-harnessed from his profession as a doctor, and far from their Vermont home and his beloved workshop, Dan was hot to find a worthwhile local project to which he could apply his talents, and which would tap his abundant energy and enthusiasm. My often started but never completed book about masonry ovens and the Flemish Desem bread was one project that immediately appealed.

Dan quickly found his feet on familiar ground; as a bread baker, an oven builder, and an already published author, he was qualified for the task ahead. It was not long before every book, file, and photo in my office was unearthed, scrutinized, and absorbed by this dynamic new super apprentice from the East. For some considerable time after that the place retained the distinct feeling of the starting line of the Indianapolis 500 after the racers had sped off. More visits followed in succession, as Dan lapped the course, flying by in hot pursuit of his quest. Ovencrafters would never again be that quiet, rural, home-based, one-man, not-for-profit (by default, that is) business it once was. Never.

My path to California was different. After growing up in Australia and living for a time in Denmark, I came here from two very different democracies, both small, both very socialized if a little restrictive personally. California is anything but restrictive for the individual, since private venture is king. And yet outside of ones home environment, and apart from the regions natural splendor, farms and park lands, California tends to be a rather stark wasteland dominated by the automobile. Small-town America had already been brushed aside in the rush to profitable developmentor had it? Fortunately I discovered the small, rural townships of western Marin County, and moved into a comfortable renovated barn on half an acre at the edge of one of them. My determination to live and work in a small community, to be always on hand for family and friends, meant honing up on appropriate survival skills: renovations in exchange for rent, a grain mill, an outdoor oven, two milk goats, a large vegetable garden, a corn patch, and a few fruit trees. For cash and community service, I had a welding and fix-it shop at the front gate. Life was grand.

Alan Scott baking and teaching at Rani and Keiths. Notice how convenient it is to have a roof overhead and a counter that comes out from the side of the oven, in front. Alan is squeezing water from the hearth mop (or scuffle) before cleaning the last ashes off the floor of the oven.

All too soon, however, I was ejected from the garden into the real world of single parenting, of soccer mums, of house hunting, of first and last months rent, shared child care, and job searching. But better than a job I eventually salvaged the bread baking part of my former life and took this to the next level. Necessity again proven to be the mother of invention, so was born a successful baking business based on one bread alone. I built a commercial oven and bakery at home for less than a months pay, gathered firewood free from the neighboring farms, and baked and delivered warm bread to friends and neighbors on two days each week. One pound of organic wheat at seventeen cents, with almost zero overhead, became a loaf of bread worth three dollars. As little as 250 loaves a week paid the basic bills.

However it was not just any bread. What I learnt from Laurel Robertson, a neighbor, was two lessons: how to make the venerable Flemish Desem bread, and what an astounding difference it makes to bake the loaves in a brick oven.

The Desem bread is also a story of rebirth. Desem is a bread researched and developed in Belgium after World War Two to meet the demand for a healthier diet, a brown bread, the European equivalent of the fashionable but imported brown rice. Besides utilizing the whole grain or brown flour, this bread was made out of a thoroughly fermented dough using the ambient microorganisms of the flour itself as the leavening agents. The starter dough was called Desem. The return to the age-old practice of natural fermentation put this bread on the map. At last, here was the real thing, truly a staff of life dating back millennia. I knew that this new age bread was popular both in Europe and now on the east coast of the U.S., so it promised to be an easy sell here too, but not unless it was baked in the right oven.

Health breads tend to get overly ponderous, if not downright stodgy, but the Desem bread even with health credentials enough to sink a ship became dark, delectable, and simply irresistible when baked in a brick oven.

Natural fermentation has been key to the paradigm shift that has sparked the new bread revolution in North America today, no matter what flours are used. I do enjoy a lighter loaf of artisan bread occasionally, but it has to be a mature loaf thoroughly fermented by a natural starter, and of course baked in the inimitable heat of a brick oven. This book contains heaps of my enthusiasm for the success stories of those true baker-artisans who have gotten their many ducks in a row, and who are now successful family and community nurturers. Without nurture I do not think that there can be nutrition, since nutrients, numbers, and other heady stuff can lack heart whereas nurture, being from the heart, is the more powerful mover and shaker. And yet, although it was the freshly ground wheat-flour Flemish Desem bread that energized me in the early 1980s to create the appropriate ovens to bake in, and that became a cornerstone of my vegetarian diet, the Desem remains a bread with relatively narrow appeal. Now, nearly twenty years later, it has become obvious that the nurturing qualities of the artisan process, even when directed toward production of perhaps less nutritional breads, are what is energizing this new generation of successful bakers.