Direct Woodfired Oven Build (with a difference)

The Back Story

Like a sucker for punishment, I put my hat in the ring. As Paul Kelly said, ‘I’ve done all the dumb things’.

A new client was looking for a wood fired oven and someone to teach her how to make sourdough, and I fitted both requirements. Not that I have ovens on a showroom floor or anything - over the years I’ve designed and commissioned quite a few wood fired ovens around this country, and from time to time these bakeries change hands or close, or grow, and the ovens come onto the market. As I have learned quite a few times now - when you really need a wood fired oven there are none to buy. And when there is one to buy, you don’t need it. So, having already designed what I thought to be a ‘quick to build’ direct fired oven, I volunteered to fill the temporary woodfired oven market void. I confidently informed my client that I could do it in about 6 weeks give or take.

Only a couple of hundred bricks were needed. And some steel I had lying around for just such a project. I’d built a similar oven a few years back so I roughly knew what to do. What could possibly go wrong?

Three and a half months later, it’s finished, and it’s lovely. It turned out quite a bit differently to the original plan in some ways - little refinements which became integral to the design. I’m yet to fire it up (days away), but the design is so simple and robust it will be a good oven to use straight out of the box. It’s made from about 95% repurposed material - just the framework, wheels and mortar are from the hardware store, and the rest has been gathered from wherever I’ve been able to find it.

A ‘Direct’ or ‘Black’ oven

I usually design ‘indirect’ or ‘white’ ovens. These are a type of oven which directs the flue gas around the baking chamber to heat it. They are tricky ovens to get right - the methodology for flueing the gas around the chamber can vary in complexity, but when you get it right (and yes, I have) it creates an even heat in the oven. It also allows you to burn virtually any combustible material as the smoke does not enter the chamber. This new oven design is different - it’s an ‘indirect oven’, or a ‘black’ oven, like a pizza oven, but it has a separate firebox at the bottom, with the flue gases running directly through the baking chamber. Thus, the fuel is limited to wood or charcoal.

Baffle and steam

In order to avoid the issue of too much bottom heat, I’ve developed a combined baffle and steam system which will tame the heat on the bottom deck, and provide large volumes of instant steam, exactly when it’s needed. The baffle system is very important, and over the years it has been the number one wear point in the ovens. I’ve designed this one to be easily removed and replaced. It also has a lot of thermal mass so it creates a steady base heat in the oven.

The oven is a vertical deck style, and the footprint is less than a square metre. It has 5 ergonomically arranged shallow decks made of cast steel BBQ plates. 4 of these plates can be easily slid out and replaced with a rack for smoking or drying. It will hold 20 large free form loaves, or 30 triplet tins. Possibly 80 buns, or 4 large pizzas. It can be used continuously like all my ovens. You don’t have to wait for the fire to become coal, you can use it and fire it at the same time.

The firebox

The firebox design incorporates a gasifier system which shoots hot air into the top of the firebox, causing the oven to burn its own smoke. The degree of gasification can be controlled by the top flue. The oven gets its air from underneath, but during lighting, the firebox is left half open to provide maximum air whilst establishing the fire. Airflow is governed down by closing the base bricks off, forcing the oven to gather air from underneath. This air is pre heated by a layer of stamped brick which warms up as the firebox is used. The oven can be converted to smoking mode by simply shutting down the outlet when hot coals have been established and loading up the firebox with aromatic twigs. The smoke can be made to be hot or cold according to your skill and taste.

The base of the oven is road grate, with heavy duty castors attached. Bricks are laid in channels on the bottom made of steel angle. The steel angle is also attached to the base for vertical framing, and will be tied in above the firebox and then at the top with more angle bolted on. Then I simply lay bricks between the framework. This ultimately makes the oven stronger, as the steel becomes an integral part of the masonry. It also makes the oven transportable.

The firebox itself has two rows of stamped bricks running up either side - these get very hot and provide hot air injection just under the baffle. This is how the oven gasifies. The firebox is lined with firebrick up both sides, which protects the stamped brick from the intense heat the bricks face.

The Baking Chamber

The baking chamber has heavy duty fins built into the brickwork to support the baking shelves or racks. They are positioned 2 brick rows apart, or approximately 160mm height. This is adequate for most sourdough or artisan breads - too much crown height means the base of the breads will cook too quickly - and the steel BBQ plates can be removed for tall baked goods or larger meats. The oven could potentially hold an entire small beast if customised. The BBQ plates could be replaced by racks, if the oven was to be used to create smoked meats or chickens, for example. The oven will also hold about 12 = 14 bread sized cast iron ‘dutch’ ovens as well.

So with that kind of capacity, the oven can cater for big numbers, which is very important from a business perspective. I’ve seen it hundreds of times , the new baker sets up their Rofco and gets a gig baking for their local market only to find they need a second Rofco pretty soon, creating a shackle for their back rather than a profitable business. Every time they grow, they need more equipment. I designed this oven to stretch it’s capacity from very small to quite large, as required.

Hanging The Door

The thing that proved to be the biggest challenge for this build was the door. It is quite large and is effectively a quarter of the wall space of the baking chamber. I had to make it both light and heavy at the same time. It had to be light enough to be hinged from a masonry base but heavy enough to be able to provide some thermal mass. The frame is made from 1 inch steel tube, wrapped in thin galvanised sheet on one side. I had two attempts at getting the insulation right, as weight was a bigger issue than I expected it to be. In the end I used a sandwich construction of cardboard, perlcrete (perlite based concrete - very light), cardboard, cork tiles and finally timber. The framing of the door was made from hardwood fencing, which I had to carve down to reduce weight. Finally I’ve lacquered it with marine lacquer and linseed oil. It’s a sturdy finish, very tough. Inside, the galvanised sheet steel is coated with many coats of high temp paint. Nicely rustic which my client loves. Other finishes and materials can be used as required.

Hanging the door with piano hinge was a two bloke job, but luckily the other bloke was good at doors and came prepared with a door bladder!

It would take up too much space for this article, but the process of building steel plates onto the masonry in order to hang the door took a lot of hours and a lot of errors. I’ll just say that working with steel and masonry is never easy, and total destruction of the brickwork is a possible outcome if you happen to be unlucky. Happily, I was eventually able to get something really solid on, but it actually took two layers of steel and many repetitions of swearwords at great volume to make it work!

Using this multi layered system meant I could get cement nails through the steel and into masonry in parts, while in other places I could use heavy duty bolts. In the end there were about ten anchors in the masonry. The door holds on very well under load. It came in at just under 20 kg when finished.

So now it’s finished!

I hope this oven provides my client with many thousands of profitable and enjoyable hours of use as her business grows and unfolds. It presented me, as the builder, with lots of new challenges. Building this oven took me well out of my comfort zone many times. I’m a baker, not a bricklayer, carpenter, boilermaker or mason. But I had to get a grip on all of these things over three winter months in Gloucester NSW. Nothing is perfect on this oven - it’s flawed in every way - and yet it is quite a lovely thing. You kind of want to hug it.

My aim was to make a baking tool which operates on minimal fuel off grid using repurposed materials. My client asked for a wood fired oven which could bake a variety of loaves and other baked goods in a session. Both objectives should be achieved. The oven is also a smoker, which will, I believe, prove to be very handy.

While I blew my own time budget, I was able to keep the materials budget within 33%. In future commissions, I will have some better strategies thanks to the learning this oven has enabled. And my client now owns a very decent piece of kit which should never need replacing.

So what’s next?

I’ve designed quite a few ovens over the past 15 years, but I’ve only built maybe six or so from start to finish. Almost every build has turned into an epic tale, simply because they are hard on both the body and the brain. Once you get into building them, every bit of the build involves hard physical labour, muscles I didn’t know I still had, and challenges from a practical perspective which involve re doing things many times just to get them right. And lots of research. I never find a whole lot of good info online about what I want to do, EVER. So it’s largely trial and error. It’s for this reason that I’ll declare right now that I won’t be building too many more before I’m done. I’ve decided I’ll make my body and mind available for 6 more ovens, and that’s it. Six. No more, and it’s in writing here so you all know.

In building this oven I’ve also been able to create a matching design for a ‘white’ or ‘Indirect’ version of the same oven. It has a couple of extra layers of brick so it has a slightly larger footprint. It will have a similar if slightly larger capacity, and will have the added advantage of being able to burn waste materials for fuel, rather than only seasoned timber. The ‘white’ version will also have a number of refinements making it more suitable for virtually continuous use. Thus, it will b able to work all day long, every day , as required by shopfront bakeries and cafes.

If you would like to commission me to build one of these ovens, follow the button below. If you would like to discuss more about possibly having one of these built for you, my number is

0409 480 750

Post script Sept 2025:

I find myself the custodian of this amazing oven. I no longer have a venue to house it, so it needs a place to live and work. I need to transport it somewhere soon, and I'm happy to discuss possibilities, which may involve a yearly rental or possibly an exchange for my occasional use. I'm open to hearing your thoughts. Ring me on the number above if you are interested.

Can I leave the grid now please?

This last couple of years has tested a lot of us in small business. Cafes and restaurants have had to pivot into whole new areas as a result of various mandated restrictions imposed from on high. Some have emerged relatively unscathed, while others have had to call it a day. Businesses which rely on the free movement of people also suffered. Tourism and teaching businesses like mine were just two of the casualties.

I was unable to run workshops for the better part of 2 years due to the ongoing threat of lockdowns and various border closures. I know of many local operators who have relied on steady flows of tourists to build their businesses, who have had to either hibernate or move on. Some are emerging from this hibernation now, still viable, but without a whole lot to show for a couple of years of unplanned disruption.

I’m not going to debate whether any of this was necessary, or whether it was an effective approach to dealing with the flu. Economic reality is my focus here. When small business suffers, the long term consequences are felt by everyone, especially in a small community.

And dire economic consequences are the legacy of a couple of years of all this. Now, however, we have a whole new raft of issues to deal with, and these are potentially bigger than the ones we have had throughout this extended flu season.

I’m talking about energy and fuel prices. As of last week, electricity prices for the past quarter from my supplier have gone up by 25%. Fuel prices have increased by between 30 and 50 percent. In other countries, energy price hikes have been even more dramatic, and I’m told that here in Australia we will be facing more price hikes over the coming months. We have already seen massive increases in the price of gas over an extended period, as the previous government thought it would be a great idea to sell off all of our plentiful gas supplies to the highest bidder, and save none for domestic consumption.

If you are a bakery, you might have thought you’d survived the whole pandemic intact, but if your energy and fuel costs have gone through the roof, it’s only a matter of time before the bills start scaring you out of any kind of post pandemic slumber.

Bakeries are without a doubt one of the most energy intensive businesses - the simple fact is that we heat up ovens on a daily basis to bake bread, and this heat is proving to be very expensive to make. We also require energy for refrigeration, and in many cases fuel for transporting our wares. We also are paying extra for flour, as it has to be carried long distances and is affected by these increased fuel costs.

Meanwhile, energy and fuel companies are making record profits. These price increases are not the result of a supply issue, they are to do with our international market systems. A market will very quickly capitalise on disruption, if for no other reason than to preserve or improve the bottom line or market share. We are seeing the very worst of the monopoly focused capital system play out, and many of us will hit the wall as a result - especially those who are ill prepared for these changes.

Early days with Luna

I saw the future many years ago. For my bakery, energy prices jumping suddenly has not been such a dramatic issue. I’ve been heating my oven with waste fuel (timber) for the past 12 years. In my case, my oven can run on sawmill offcut, tree fall or even old pallets. I run my oven a certain amount of the time using biochar, created from waste bread also. This past few years I’ve dived deep into the process of making ovens as well as using them, and so I’ve had the opportunity to experiment with ways of making them run more cleanly, and to get the most out of the wood. The latest prototype from my micro setup has incorporated a naturally aspirated gasification system into the firebox design, which, when running hot, emits virtually no smoke at all. The smoke actually gets burned, creating more and cleaner heat.

On a larger scale, all around the world oven manufacturers are developing cleaner and less expensive ways to heat ovens. In Europe, many old diesel powered ovens have been converted to run on wood pellets, which themselves come from waste material. However, for the average baker in Australia, the capital cost of converting from electric or gas ovens to this biomass technology is beyond their reach.

Old style shopping centre bakeries, operated by a franchisee or family, will need to find ways to pass on these cost increases, and hopefully they can convince their customers that the price of a loaf of bread will have to go up on a fairly regular basis until all this volatility settles down. I’m not sure that all of them will be able to do this, and I anticipate many will go under.

I’ve been helping new bakers to set themselves up as ‘off the grid’ as possible for many years now. All of these bakeries are holding their own at the moment - indeed, many are thriving in their local communities. They all report having to deal with a number of increases to input costs, and yet as a result of using wood fired ovens and the like, these bakeries will whether the energy storm better than most.

But being ‘off the grid’ can be leveraged in other ways, and the definition doesn’t need to be strictly associated with the energy grid. More and more people are seeing the cataclysmic events unfolding in front of us each year as a directive to detach from the system in as many ways as they can. I’m going to call this ‘off the grid thinking’ - in other words, how one can remove oneself from the established system. To do this, it is imperative that we create new systems, which in the end are more directly linked to their customers.

‘Off the grid thinking’ can involve new ways of providing one’s services or products which circumvent or reinvent traditional ways of selling one’s wares. For example, many bakeries once relied on being in a good location to get retail price for their bread. This was once an almost foolproof way to get your bread out there. Now, with main street rents rising every year, the price of retail space is becoming more and more out of reach for the small operator. Only corporate entities with share market support can afford the prime locations. This has led to many bakeries setting up on the edge of small population centers, and they are supplying their bread via subscription systems directly to their customers. Many others are setting up at home, opening up their ‘retail’ from their front porch, and, via the use of social media or email, promote their offerings to fit with their customers weekly routine. Still others focus on a variety of weekend markets to sell their wares. All of these strategies are examples of different ways of doing things, and for many they are proving to be viable and satisfying.

Tiff, from Bread Local in Esperance, has her shop in her front yard every Friday!

There are bakeries who specialise in using their own produce as ingredients in their baked goods too. I know of a farm based bakery who use almost all their eggs and some of their vegetable production in their products. I have a number of clients who mill their own flour to create their bread. I have helped cafe owners to modify their setup in order to bake in house, thereby reducing their input cost. I even have one client who grows their own wheat, mills it and uses the flour in their bread!

To my mind, these are all ‘off the grid’ ways of doing things. These different approaches to the age old craft of baking for one’s community are showing that resilience is the name of the game, and a bit of imagination and some decent research can really make the difference between making it work and giving up because things are out of your control.

I’ve focused on the commercial side of things in this article, as these energy price hikes are effecting us small business operators in very direct ways. However, plenty of home bakers are doing the same thing, and indeed, there is becoming a large overlap between home and professional baker.

I run regular 2, 3 and 4 day intensive workshops for anyone who wants to get serious about their baking business and lifestyle. Don’t hesitate to give me a call or email me on the address at the bottom of this page. Or you can check out just what’s on offer on the link below.

If you’d like to chat about the next step, why not ring me on 0409 480 750? I’ll be able to make some suggestions as to what I think might help you in taking the next step. I’m also very happy to provide mentorship on your individual bakery journey.

Reasons to bake at home (and they are not just economic)

I read an article about the ‘real’ cost of making a loaf of bread at home the other day. The writer seemed to think that labour cost should come into it, and so it was over $30 to make a single loaf. Of course, by the same logic one should make each car separately, and perform every action or task as a stand alone task, and apply a labour cost to it.

So cooking dinner would take forever and cost a small fortune. Your average car would be the same price as a house, and your morning workout would require a bank loan when sustained over a year or so.

Everything in this world comes about as a result of an economy of scale. If you are going to bake a loaf of bread at home, firstly you will most likely make two or more. If you are doing it on a regular basis you will have tooled your kitchen to accommodate the production of bread, so you will have it down pat and very efficient. Your process will integrate into your existing kitchen function, so that you utilise the moment to moment kitchen process efficiently. You will have each bread process down to a matter of minutes.

When I timed my last home bake, it ended up requiring about 15 minutes of actual labour to make two loaves - the rest of the time it was either fermenting in the fridge, or I was shuffling around in the kitchen doing chores and cooking, while my bread was doing whatever it was doing without me.

The idea of applying a labour charge to household chores is problematic. It implies that you should be working constantly; as if to feed yourself, you are taking time out of your working life, so this should be costed.

It’s insane. An unhinged mentality that should be called out at every opportunity. This is why we are in the shit we are in. Too much emphasis on productivity as measured by our labour, as if all we are is a cog in the machine. A value is not attributed to pleasure, to engagement, to the joy of learning and accomplishment. There is no number in the GDP which measures things like life skills and lessons learned. No measurement for how ingenious or resilient a population is. And there’s really not much thought applied to what a healthy mind looks like. It’s considered healthy if it is functioning. If it needs a bottle of wine a day to function, well that’s fine. If it needs a bunch of pills to take the edges off life, that’s okay too. As long as the human cog continues to turn without excessive amounts of grease.

Making stuff, growing stuff, creating stuff - this is the antidote. To create for oneself is indeed a revolutionary act. And if the ‘stuff’ is part of ones own sustenance, even better. Bonus points!

Of course, economics is always lurking around these things. It’s predatory nature is everywhere, especially when the mortgage has just increased and food prices are going through the roof. Here’s how my home baking process stacks up economically, as compared to supermarket sourdough in my country town.

‘Premium’ supermarket sourdough (if you had to put a category on it) is $7.50 per loaf. We have a little bakery now who specialises in sourdough, and they charge $9.50 loaf. So the ballpark ‘average’ retail price is about $8.50.

I can buy reasonably good flour from the supermarket for approximately $2 per kilo. My water is almost free - not even cents per loaf. Salt is perhaps a cent per loaf. Sourdough starter comes from the flour, so the cost is included already. There is also the cost of driving to the supermarket, which I would have to do whether I made bread or not, so I won’t add this.

If I used 500g of flour per loaf, it’s about a dollar. Add in every other ingredient cost and you might come to an extra ten cents, and that’s being generous. So $1.10 total.

When I bake for home, I usually make enough dough for 3 loaves at a time - this is about a week’s worth of bread, or $25.50’s worth of premium sourdough bought from the shops.

Adding up all the time for making it, I would spend no more than 30 minutes. And that’s a generous time estimate too. Most tasks take very few minutes to complete. Cleaning up is included in my time estimate. If I was splitting hairs I would deduct the time I would have spent in the supermarket selecting and paying for my purchases, but I’m not - I just make note of it.

Is this 30 minutes of time that I have had to borrow from elsewhere? Not really. I cook for myself every day. I clean my kitchen every day. I shop for food and supplies most days anyway, so when it all boils down, the extra time to include making bread is negligible.

The other cost to be considered is energy. This can be significant, especially if you are buying yours straight off the grid at retail prices. If this was the case, you might want to add a couple of dollars per bake of 3 loaves. If you have another way - for example a wood fired oven, a solar oven, or have solar panels on your roof to offset this cost, the price will be less, of course. But let’s call it $2 for 3 loaves.

Thus, the actual cost of my 3 home made loaves is $5.30 for the week, vs $25.50 premade. And my bread is better, more satisfying for my soul, and has cost me very little time. I’ve saved at least $20 for my week’s supply of quality sourdough bread.

The numbers stack up, especially over time. A small amount of equipment to improve your process - for example a dutch oven, good kitchen scales, a good quality mixer etc can be another cost, but carefully considered and well used pieces of equipment pay for themselves very quickly.

The investment in learning is important. The cost of my own breaducation was and is expensive, as I have learned almost everything from scratch through trial and error. Luckily, this education has been able to broaden my expertise over the years, to the point where I can show you the results of this experience in a variety of ways.

You can come and be the recipient of my three decades worth for just $300. It will take a weekend of your time, but is there a price applied to having fun?

Gloucester village on the mid north coast of NSW is just a few hours from Sydney, and has numerous accommodation and tourism options. Our weekend workshop intensive is designed to allow you to have plenty of time to take in the town, so get in touch to be connected with what’s available locally.

Phone Warwick 0409 480 750

Keep on keeping on

The end of the School of Sourdough?

The ‘pandemic’ - or how to destroy a small business in just a few easy steps…

Whether it was a global flu, or something more to do with controlling the masses for a couple of years in a very overt manner, lockdowns and travel restrictions meant that for over a year and a half, my primary business, teaching and consulting, had to be paused. I tried to ‘pivot’ things, but in the end the business I created is all about bringing people together to learn and experience something. People were not allowed to travel, so I had no customers.

Towards the eighteen month mark, I began to think it would never recover. Every time some glimmer of hope would be presented, just as quickly, it would be snatched away again. Lockdowns, travel restrictions, changing requirements for businesses all the time - I don’t know how many times people had to cancel attending a workshop at the last minute. I had to cancel workshops many times, as it was just too hard to even attempt to coordinate a bunch of people to come together for a day to learn how to make a loaf of bread.

So my teaching business was on the rocks. Those who follow my story know that I also consult to the trade. Businesses I had been consulting for were put into a kind of intermittent hibernation as well, with many of them unable to open consistently as rules changed every week. Paying me to consult was an expense many of them simply couldn’t carry, so not much work was happening for me to help pay the bills during the extended lockdown period.

And how effective was the lockdown, mask up, coercive vaccination strategy? Here in Australia, we still seem to have high rates of the disease, despite taking all the draconian measures. And pretty soon we will begin to see many issues emerge from shutting down a fair percentage of the workforce for the better part of 2 years. Expect inflation, business closures and higher underemployment to be the result.

Musical Bakeries

While I used the time to build a new oven, the bills could not be paid without work coming in, so I fell behind with the rent. My very patient landlady decided to cut her losses and sell the property I was living and working on (for a tidy profit). When the sale finally went through, I was given a couple of weeks to move everything, and at the time there were no options for relocation of the business. Gloucester, like many rural towns, was filled with people escaping the city, so space was hard to find. So all my gear moved into storage. I lived in the local showground in my caravan for a couple of months.

I had to move twice in a space of 3 months. No teaching was possible, and consultation via zoom was all I could manage to help pay the bills. Needless to say, it has been a struggle to keep on keeping on.

As the lockdowns wore on, my business of some 30 years was reduced to almost nothing. I would be homeless now if it were not for the kindness of some local people and some friends of the business, and for that I will remain grateful. The strength of community is not to be underestimated.

Looking back, how the powers that be thought that locking down an entire nation would solve the flu I will never know, especially as doing this was clearly going to hurt many small businesses like mine. It seemed to me (and others) that the only survivors at the end of it all would be the largest corporations, who had deep enough pockets to carry the can while the rest of us fell over. I suspect ulterior motives. For every newly minted billionaire, there are a million paupers created, and the pandemic has proven this to be true.

Now that some resumption of ‘normal’ life has occurred, we are seeing the price of everything skyrocket. Is this the cost we pay for our ‘safety’? And while we are not actually locked down right now, many people really have to think twice before embarking on a car journey, as fuel prices are going through the roof. The powers that be seem to have created a sort of ‘soft’ lock down now.

The flu is still raging, btw. And a few very big companies seem to have gotten very much bigger. The pandemic has seen the largest transfer of wealth in history.

The baker goes busking

The whole process led me to explore other options, with a complete change of direction for my life and profession being actively explored. For a time, I returned to my musical roots - before I was a baker, I was a musician. So I did a spot of busking and playing at local events. It was great fun, but keeping the wolf from the door proved to be a big ask. Too big for this fella. who has got a lifetime of baking experience, and only a small amount of making a living with strings and voice to fall back on. It kept me sane, singing and playing, but to start again in this configuration proved to be just a bit more than I could manage. Nonetheless, I called my little one man band ‘The Reinvention Engine’. I thought it fitting.

Just when everything seemed lost…

However, some new opportunities for a better site for my school and bakery emerged. With a bit of fancy footwork, I found myself in a new space with cheaper overheads. It’s in an old kitchen factory in the industrial area of Gloucester. I moved in with a bunch of other ‘makers’ back in January.

It’s turning out to be very workable, and I have just finished setting up to resume production and teaching. The return of my equipment from storage has seen me renovate all my baking gear to the best of my ability, and everything looks ship shape again after over a year of inaction. Since moving here I have relocated once again to an outside setup, as the owner didn’t like the so called ‘risk’ of having a wood fired oven near his property. This has shrunk the classroom a bit, but it’s also really great to have things all potentially relocatable and close to home. I’ve really enjoyed the new space and students love it too!

Low tech is beautiful

I’ve used the new barrel oven more than a dozen times now, and while there are some teething issues, it is basically a very good piece of equipment and should serve me well. Once again I have built a decent prototype. It will need more work to make it look pretty, and there are a few little workarounds when in use, but it’s a bloody good unit so far - probably the most promising design I’ve made in the past 15 years or so. But more on that later.

Enrolments for sourdough courses are beginning again, and this last month I’ve been readying the bakery for production once more. There have been some big changes to the way I produce. These have been mulled over for quite some time, and just last week I did a trial bake using the new set up. Having some enforced down time has led me to re imagine my idea of how to go about what I do.

The dough trough

I have incorporated hand dough making into my routine. My trusty mixer was damaged in the fire, and repairs will be done when I can afford them (soon, I hope). In the meantime, I have crafted a large scale dough making trough so I can handle 30kg - 40kg doughs completely by hand.

People say this is crazy. Why would you choose to work hard when you could just fix your mixing machine? When I started out 33 years ago, I made all the dough by hand - and there have been a number of times between now and then when, for various reasons, hand dough making became my normal process. For example, during the Tour Down Under a few years back I was traveling across Australia, teaching my craft, and all the bread I made during the trip came from hand made dough. Before that, our cafe bakery in Hunter street Newcastle was based around a hand made dough system. Going back 33 years, my first commercial bakery had no mixer in it.

More recently, I’ve been using 12kg dough boxes I constructed for the aforementioned Tour Down South. I’d been getting good results, with only some loss of efficiency. I thought that if the capacity of the box was increased, efficiency might also improve. So I designed a big dough trough for making multiple doughs in, like I have seen in overseas bakeries. Now this trough has been finished, I have just begun to use it. I can comfortably manage dough of up to about 30kg at a time, without growing new muscles.

The technique is very gentle and slow - basically it engenders a different way of working. The bread is quite lovely too, being a little moister than before. At the time of writing I am perfecting the technique of mixing large amounts by hand, and I think it will be viable to go this way longer term. I am re thinking my production process, and I like the way this is going.

Once things are generating cashflow again, I’ll fix the mixer - but I want to keep the dough trough as part of the system anyway. It’s a great way to learn about dough development, and is actually reasonably efficient when used to capacity. It is large enough to handle multiple doughs at the same time, and it has surprised me with regard to how easy it is to make dough this way. It’s very a very relaxed way of working, and nothing can break down! Not only that, but cleaning up after making dough is now very easy. Those of us who use spiral mixers will attest to the fact that these machines are a bugger to clean. Not so with a trough!

The Barrel Oven

The new oven will speed up the baking process, as it easily fits 18 or so loaves at a time, and it heats up much faster than any of my previous ovens. I did a trial production run through the oven last week and can confidently report that the oven can easily bake 20 leaves per hour over an extended period. This is almost as fast as my two point five tonne ‘Luna’ oven some years ago, and is only a quarter of the weight.

Overall, the oven has blown my expectations out of the water in a good way! There will be developments on this basic design principle in future ovens. The barrel oven employs some nifty tricks, like a gasification system (no smoke) and a new way of generating large volumes of steam, which has worked better than previous methods.

So my bakery is becoming even lower tech than it was, and I believe it is all the better for it. For years I have been taking my baking ‘off grid’ in a multitude of little ways, and this is another step in this direction.

In these times of skyrocketing energy prices and ongoing uncertainty, being able to control at least a small part of my universe is both satisfying and economical on a number of levels. The bakery now has one less appliance to break down, one less power point required. All that remains now is to work out a way to simply do refrigeration without power. I’m aware of some relatively high tech approaches to this, but I’m keen to play around with the lowest level of tech available. I’m hoping this time I don’t have to have another enforced period of inactivity to think it into existence!

Barrel Oven Build

Early sketch of the Barrel Oven

It’ll only take me a month or so, I said.

Six months later and I’m starting to see the end of the process. As I write this, I’ve done a couple of little fires to cure the masonry, and two trial bakes of 14 loaves each to see how things work. I’ve made some running repairs after each burn, and I’m finally wrapping the whole thing in render. It will be a lovely pink/orange colour when it’s finished.

The Design Brief

Firing it up has surprised me. The oven has definitely achieved part of the design brief - to be able to heat up from cold in 60 minutes. I’ve fired her up four times now, and the last three have made 220C easily. The fourth firing achieved 220C in just 15 minutes! In fact, the fourth burn achieved well over 350C in that time - I didn’t expect this at all.

The second part of the brief was to be able to bake between 12 and 20 loaves per hour. The first trial bake failed at achieving this - the oven achieved 7 loaves per hour at best. At the time I put it down to learning to drive the oven, and having sufficient dry wood on hand to really push it. Ovens, like cars, need to be learned, and they need the right fuel. My previous prototype oven took half a dozen bakes before I was able to drive it along at speed.

The second trial bake was MUCH faster - I only had 14 loaves again, but this time I had the bulk of them baked in under an hour. I will need to do a larger trial bake to get better data on throughput, but I believe the oven would easily be capable of the high end of the original brief - which is around 20 loaves per hour. This is very exciting!

Unfortunately, like half of the country, we are locked down due to Covid restrictions, so I can’t get to the sawmill at the moment, and they don’t deliver. I’ve been buying bags of wood locally, and using whatever else I have to burn from the workshop here. This has meant a mixed result each time, so without a common yardstick (consistent fuel) it’s difficult to get precise data sets, however the fourth burn really showed me just how quick this oven was going to be. I used substantially less fuel than in the previous 3 burns, and yet the chamber was consistently hotter.

This oven has been specifically designed as a small commercial baker’s oven. There are lots of micro bakeries baking once or twice a week, and this oven is intended to be for this type of use. It can heat up quickly, and be capable of baking up to a hundred or so loaves per session without taking an eternity to do so.

My idea is to develop a DIY set of plans for the oven so that people can build their own and get their micro bakery up and running without going into debt. Part of the design brief was to utilise reclaimed and upcycled materials wherever possible. To this end, 95% of the build has satisfied that part of the brief, with only the base, castors and masonry inputs (cement, sand, clay, perlite, lime etc) having to be purchased new. Everything else has been scrounged or purchased second hand.

Finally, I set myself the task of creating a super clean wood fired oven, which would create as little pollutants as possible. Thus, I designed the oven as a ‘gasifier’, that is, to be able to burn its own particulate. To this end, so far I can happily say the gasifier works well. The oven, once heat is in the bricks, expels very little smoke - much less than all my previous ovens by a comfortable margin.

Building a fire in it, as long as one is patient, is also a low smoke process. That’s because the oven has a very direct air supply coming from underneath, with lots of air available to assist with combustion. The fire gets established rapidly, with very basic kindling. I haven’t needed to use super fine dry split timber to get it going. It only takes a few minutes to establish a strong flame in the firebox. At four burns, I can comfortably say this is the most efficient wood fired oven I have ever worked with. It is already the cleanest I’ve designed by a country mile. It seems that my gasifier and high airflow design has been a success.

Progress so far

Here’s a quick summary in words and pictures, now that the oven is nearing completion.

I’ve used various mortars and renders as I’ve gone along, including a special clay render and as well as insulating concrete. Hundreds of hours has gone into researching various combinations of clay, lime, cement, sand, perlite and aggregate. They have been used in different parts of the oven. It has been a process of discovery, and my knowledge of the above materials has expanded exponentially. I’ll also say that once again, the internet isn’t the easiest place to research, with more bad advice than good. But with time, the good stuff begins to shine. It has been a huge lesson in chemistry - which is ironic as I was always the guy who got kicked out of chemistry class at school. Mixing lime or cement with just about anything will yield a chemical reaction!

I’ve used as little steel as possible in this design. There are obvious exceptions - I mean, it IS a barrel oven - though in the end, fortune has allowed me to incorporate steel into places I wasn’t originally planning to use it. For example, it has plate steel decks internally, as I managed to wrangle some great pieces from our local Tip Shop for next to nothing.

Gasification system

To be clear - I have no issues with steel in ovens, it’s just that steel tends to fatigue, so I use it very sparingly - in places which don’t suffer direct flame. Indeed, I designed into this oven a baffle system, which was made of old BBQ plate; the idea being that these would be sacrificial, and would allow the barrel to be spared from direct flame. It turned out that the baffles slowed the oven down, so they have now been removed. I think the distance between the firebox and the barrel being quite large has done the job instead.

Storm water grid on castors!

I’ve built the whole oven on top of a storm water grid with heavy duty castors attached. It can therefore be moved around. The oven has just under 200 bricks, and weighs about three quarters of a tonne, so this is not something you can do with one person - nonetheless it is transportable.

The heavy plate steel decks work extremely well as a setting surface for the dough - better than brick and more consistent. A pleasant surprise, and as they are thinner than firebrick, they have also allowed a bit more crown height in each deck.

In designing the oven, you have to make quite a few guesses. My ‘back of the paper bag’ calculations led me to believe I would be able to load 40 loaves at a time into the oven - but when I actually used it I could see it would be between 24 and 30. Still happy with these numbers - and if you were really pushed you could cram a few more in.

Steam is created by simply pouring water in to the existing spout at the bottom of the barrel lid. This system works as well as any I’ve made in other ovens.

It is actually possible to put too much water in and therefore restrict the temperature reaching the bottom deck, but used correctly this system is as good as a combi steamer! It produces huge VOLUMES of steam.

The firebox has no flue control on the inlet side, just a sliding steel sheet before the chimney, which restricts airflow while also holding in heat. Once the fire is established it’s pretty easy to tune the flame so that the outlet is quite small, while getting maximum draw from the fire. I have found that the oven seems to be very economical with wood so far, and during the tests it held a bakeable heat for over two hours.

I’ve been adding a thick layer of coarse concrete render to the outside this last few days, and I believe this will further assist heat retention. On the second trial bake, I tested the temperatures of the render vs sections without it, and on average there was an improvement of about 5C from the concrete render. I think I will add another layer or two to really maximise the effect.

My original idea was to wrap the whole oven in high temperature insulation blanket, but I decided this would not be necessary. My logic was it takes a good few hours for the heat to penetrate through the brickwork, and mostly the bake will be finished by the time heat begins to escape.

If I was using the oven every day I might consider adding more insulation, but that wasn’t part of the design brief this time around. Adding ceramic blanket would add weight, and draw up heat from the bricks, thereby slowing the oven down.

Insulation actually does have a heat cost. It is best sandwiched between layers of solid material.

From experience, if you want to hold heat in for a long time, it’s best to make the walls more than a foot thick - and in this oven I simply didn’t have enough room for that, as it is built on the storm water grid. This limits how wide the oven becomes.

Issues along the way

There have been some issues with the clay work internally. Some of it has failed, and I was very worried this might occur. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried - the bits that have fallen off can be replaced with firebrick later. It’s a job, of course, but in the short term it won’t affect the oven or the performance.

I have built the oven door with a steel back and hardwood from old fence palings. During high temperature peaks, the timber began to smoulder a little, so I will have to add some more insulation to the door.

Clay work in the firebox

The build has been characterised by lots of stopping and starting. I have been financing the build via a crowd funding campaign, and as such I had to wait until I had enough cash to get each stage of the build done. Then I approached some old friends and was able to get some larger amounts of cash so that I could finance new tools and some of the more expensive bits.

To backtrack a bit by way of explanation - I’ve written about the fire last year in which I lost most of my tools on this blog. Not having things like angle grinders and paint stirrers and so forth made it impossible to do certain jobs. Thankfully, these old friends and accomplices came to the rescue, and enabled me to rebuild my tool kit. I’m eternally grateful!

Another issue has been the weather. Here in Gloucester over the past 6 months or so we have had a number of extended rain periods, which meant that work on the oven, an outdoor process, had to be halted a number of times while the rain did its thing.

There was also the process of experimentation to do - in this build, I embarked on a number of things which I have never done before, and which the internet had very little information I could leverage. For example, the clay mix to coat the hot faces was a real challenge to get right - too much clay meant the mortar simply didn’t dry for weeks on end, and so I had to redo a lot of fiddly stuff a number of times until it was robust enough to be satisfied it would survive heat.

At the time of writing this, I am doing finishing touches - mostly covering the oven with a thick , iron oxide coloured concrete render. It’s very tough stuff, and should protect the brickwork like a skin. It’s a slow process, and will probably require a couple of coats to really get a good surface seal. I plan to let the render cure for a few days, and then fire it up again for another small bake. It’s looking quite similar to the drawing I did when I started planning the oven, which is quite satisfying.

What’s next?

Once I’ve done this next test bake, I’m hoping to get my usual weekly bake going again. It will be nice to have some regular cashflow coming in, and to finally return to the trade I’ve been involved with this past 30 or so years. It HAS been nice not having to bake each week, but I miss the routine, and certainly the regular income the bake provides.

To everyone who has helped me to finance the build, and to those people who helped me do certain jobs which I was unable to do, I say thank you from the bottom of my heart. Not too much longer now, and you will be receiving fresh woodfired sourdough bread once again!

Risks and rewards of baking with a wood fired oven

Years ago I got the wood fired oven bug. Having used them to bake in for nearly fifteen years now, I would say I’m fully infected. Something about them defies reason, I guess - it’s so much easier to turn on a power switch than it is to gather and store wood to fire your oven, especially for a commercial bakery operation. But somehow, for me the hard way wins every time. Someone asked me a few years back if I would ever consider using a ‘regular’ oven again (in my baking practice), and without any hesitation I was able to say ‘no way!’ Baking with a wood fired oven is where the fun is. The whole idea of not having the convenience of flipping a switch to bake is a bit challenging for some people though, so I thought I would weigh up the risks and rewards in this article. So, the good stuff first:

The rewards of wood fired baking

Wood fired baking has a number of rewards attached to the process. The first, and most obvious one, is the quality of bread that you bake. ‘Quality’ is something that is really hard to pin down, and yet it’s also so obvious. The bread from a wood fired oven is just more earthy, more real. These are not exactly scientific terms - and if one did apply science to it, I think it would be difficult to quantitatively measure exactly what it is that’s different. I mean, wood fired bread smells different, especially if it’s baked in an oven where the fire is inside the baking chamber. You get the smell and taste of the fire, and I’m definitely partial to this flavour.

Mostly, though, the ovens I work with do not have the fire inside the baking chamber. I use what is known as ‘indirect’ style ovens, so the fire is a separate thing to the baking chamber. In that way, they bake just like any other oven. The flavour of woodsmoke is not part of it at all. Nonetheless, few who have eaten bread from one of these ovens would argue - they just bake great bread. I put it down to the difference between baking with ‘thermal mass’ versus baking using ‘convection’. The former causes the bread to rise with heat which passes directly into the dough, whereas the latter is heated by the air around the dough. So one type of heat goes directly through the dough, and the other goes around it. It makes a huge difference to the way the bread bakes, and to the way the bread’s ‘mouth feel’ is when you eat it. It also means the bread will keep for longer. In short, sole baked or hearth baked bread in an oven which is heated by thermal mass is more robust. It doesn’t ‘soften’ like ordinary bread - it holds its own.

The second reward of baking using a wood fired oven is the cost of operation. Even when you take into account the time it takes to gather wood - whether it’s felling your own, gathering ‘tree fall’ (sticks and branches), or using sawmill offcuts to power your oven - the cost per bake of an indirect woodfired oven is substantially less than an electric or gas oven. Having said that, if you have to purchase split timber from a vendor, your costs may be similar - but anyone who runs a wood fired oven commercially will work out very quickly that fuel is a direct cost and this has to be minimised. My own practice has involved using sawmill offcut for the past six or more years, as I’ve been living within easy driving distance of a sawmill. I calculate that my cost per bake is less than a quarter that of electricity on average.

Which leads me to the third reward. A wood fired oven makes you think about resource usage. Using an electric oven only causes you to worry about how much resource you use when the bill comes in. It’s an invisible factor most of the time. Your only real awareness of resource use is how much it costs you. On the other hand, when you can see the pile of fuel in front of you getting smaller each time you bake, you become aware of the resource you are using. You also become tuned to the qualities of the wood itself - which types burn hottest, fastest or longest. And when you fell your own timber, you see just how many loaves a single tree can bake. This type of consciousness is something I believe we all could use to our advantage when it comes to lowering our footprint on the earth. I guess the word to describe this reward would be ‘connectedness’. A wood fired oven helps the user to connect to the environment meaningfully.

These three rewards, for me, are enough. There are others, though. A big reward is not having to hook up three phase power or commercial gas supply in the first place. If you are wanting to bake from home, as so many people are now, the cost of this can be crippling, and simply makes the whole enterprise unviable before even leaving the planners desk. A wood fired setup can enable people to run their own show with very little capital, and longer term can also help them to keep their running costs down. A fully off grid setup is also possible, which means the baker isn’t affected by power outages. These can really throw a spanner in things when you are half way through a bake and the power goes down.

And the risks…

Wood fired baking does raise some issues though.

• Wood fired ovens create smoke, and this can have an affect on air quality.

• Working a wood fired oven involves a bit more labour than using a regular oven too, and this has to be factored in to the cost of operation.

• High thermal mass ovens take time to heat up, and this is a resource use issue which needs to be carefully managed.

• Wood fired ovens also tend to radiate a lot of heat from opening the firebox, so they need to be carefully planned in to the bakery so as not to create too much heat or smoke.

• Using a woodfired oven in a fire prone area could potentially be an environmental risk.

Lets unpack these risk issues one at a time. The first is smoke. An inefficient oven creates smoke, as smoke itself is unburnt particulate. A pollutant to be avoided or at least reduced. There are two parts to this - operation and design. From an operational view, the fire has to be managed at all times. A smouldering, slow burning fire generates smoke, especially when fuel is introduced. However, a fast burning fire creates less smoke. Thus, a fast burning fire is desirable, no matter what type of oven you are using. This can be quite an art to master. In the end, fires are smoky when they are first lit, and then as they establish, the smoke becomes less. Learning the art of running any wood fired oven takes time, and this is something people have to learn how to do properly if they want to keep doing it for a long time.

The second part of smoke management is oven design. There are a number of things which can be helpful if addressed at the design stage. The first is the way the firebox works. In a direct oven, where the fire is inside the baking chamber, the internal shape and proportion of the oven is critically important. These ovens can be shockingly smoky, especially if the fire can’t get the right amount of air to burn efficiently. However, a good design coupled with skilled management will minimise the issue.

Indirect ovens, or ovens which have a separate firebox, have an advantage here, especially if properly designed. These ovens can utilise a smaller, well ventilated firebox, which, when the fire is established, have so much heat stored in them that they burn their own smoke. I have been working on what I term ‘high airflow’ fireboxes for some years now, and all my designs incorporate this principle as the basic starting point. In my latest design, which I’ll be writing about in an upcoming article, I have incorporated ‘gasification’ as a central tenet of the way the firebox works. I have used it before with limited success, but trials of the latest approach have so far shown me that this is the way to go. My barrel oven design has the entire firebox built as a gasifier. Stay tuned for more about this when I have finished building the oven.

Another design initiative to minimise smoke is the way the chimney works. The height of the chimney in any oven is critical. The chimney should be made high enough to lift the smoke away from nearby buildings and into the atmosphere where it can disperse rapidly. Having a tall chimney also allows the fire to draw batter, which in turn leads to less smoke coming out. Often, a smoky oven can be improved by simply extending the chimney. Of course in some cases a chimney being made longer can cause the oven to draw less efficiently - but this is mostly because the firebox cannot establish enough airflow to push the smoke fast enough up the chimney in the first place.

Running a woodfired oven means feeding it with fuel on a regular basis, and this in itself brings us to the next issue: labour. There’s no getting away from this issue, but it can be minimised by thinking through the baking process carefully.

Most bakers will be doing preparation duties while they are warming the oven, utilising their time efficiently while the oven is heating up. They will time the production and baking carefully so that everything works in sync with the oven. The ideal is to run production so that the oven is optimally hot at exactly the right time for loading, and then once the oven is loaded, it is kept full until the bake is finished, with no gaps between loads. There is also some labour involved in preparing and storing wood. Having a wood splitter or using fine offcut can minimise this, but it has to be factored in nonetheless.

The issue of heating large thermal mass can be minimised by the way a bakery is run, as well as in the way the oven is designed and insulated. Bakeries using the oven on multiple concurrent days achieve efficiencies by the effect of heat being held in the thermal mass from the day before. Wrapping the oven in the right amount of insulation to best store heat reduces the inefficiency of having to heat the thermal mass from cold each time.

Another solution to this issue can be to design the oven to heat up quickly from cold. My barrel oven is specifically designed to do this, as the thermal mass is outside the baking chamber, rather than inside it. Thus, heat up time is minimised. This type of oven is best for weekly bakers like me.

Using my travelling oven in Western Australia some years back. The terracotta pots on the top of the oven are ‘heat sinks’ - I heated them up on the top of the oven and then transferred them to the proofer to heat it.

Heat and smoke from the firebox is an issue with all woodfired ovens. Again, it can be minimised by bakery design. I like to put my wood fired ovens outside if possible, where there is separation from the bakery production space, and where there is plenty of natural airflow. I tend to wrap these outside baking areas in shade cloth or similar to minimise the possibility of flies or dust or smoke. If an oven must be placed inside, there should be some thought as to internal ventilation of the space. As anyone who has worked in a bakery will tell you, this is not an issue specifically for wood fired bakeries. Any workspace with a big oven in it is going to get hot, so proper thought around this issue at the planning stage is essential.

Using a wood fired oven in a fire prone area is another real issue, though it is also one which is fairly easy to mitigate. The simplest solution to reduce potential embers escaping from the chimney is to install stainless mesh (there is an Australian Standard mesh available for exactly this reason) on the chimney outlet. The mesh is fine enough to prevent ash passing through, though you need to design the mesh protector in such a way that airflow is maintained. This can be done by fashioning the mesh into a tall cylinder so that air between the holes is maximised.

Some wood fired ovens spew out embers fairly easily, while others don’t. In a well designed wood fired oven, embers are either burnt before exiting the oven, or pass around a number of turns and twists before heading for the flue outlet. Each turn captures particulate.

If your oven is allowing embers to exit in the first place, this shows it isn’t very efficient. This is definitely something to become aware of, and is important in a management sense, whether you are in a fire prone area or not.

Barrel Oven Sketch

In my next article here I’ll be talking about my latest oven build, the Barrel Oven. It’s a small commercial wood fired oven, capable of baking about 30 - 40 loaves at a time. This one has been specially designed for occasional bakers like me, who do not bake on a daily basis. We need an oven to be able to heat up really quickly, and one which will use as little fuel as possible. This design is a refinement of my original barrel oven, which I built about 8 years ago. I’ve incorporated gasification into the design, as well as some new tricks to make living with the oven long term more enjoyable.

At the time of writing this, I have not completed plans for this oven as a DIY project - but I do intend to, once the oven has been commissioned. If you would like to support the build, I have been running some crowd funding campaigns to help with building costs and retooling my bakery. All support is welcome, and once the oven is finished I will match your contribution dollar for dollar with services or bread. At the time of writing, the Barrel Oven is nearing completion, but extra support is still needed, as there is still a bakery to rebuild!

Note: Since beginning the build, I have had lots of support from friends of the bakery directly, as we were beset by a fire late in 2020. This support has been through another channel, which can be linked here. This one shows total contributions towards rebuilding the bakery, including direct contributions and Gofundme ones as well. I’m eternally grateful to everyone who has assisted so far. You will not be forgotten!

My thought funnel

It’s been a long year for everyone, and it’s only halfway through.

Covid 19 seems to have turned most people’s world around - certainly in the cities. We’ve learned that the disease is transmitted by the air - it’s in the wind, so to speak. It’s everywhere around the world, quick as a flash.

While country folk missed out on the brunt of the pandemic, rural Australia has had to deal directly with other issues.

Here in the land down under, Covid come hot on the heels of the worst bushfires we’ve had in many years. These bushfires were the result of the worst drought in living memory. The country around us just turned to dust. It was hard to watch.

Then La Nina kicked in, and the weather did an about face. We have had widespread floods on the eastern side of the country. Where I live in Gloucester NSW, for example, was flooded for the first time in 42 years back in March. As I write this, rural Victoria is in flood. Intense rain has replaced intense heat.

So we have pestilence, fire and flood. Did I mention plague?

Here in NSW, we currently have plague of mice. This is an even bigger issue than Covid for country people, as crops are lost, and years of hard work are destroyed. If the plague isn’t under control soon, we will soon have famine, because the mice are eating all the grain. Grain feeds humans and animals - it’s the basis of modern society, when you think about it.

Anyway, there has been plenty of ‘biblical proportioning’ going on here in the land down under. The cliche of fire, flood, plague and pestilence is without a doubt top of mind for many. And quite obviously there has been pretty much the same level of intensity everywhere else on the planet. No matter how you look at it, people (and some would say the planet itself) are in some way at breaking point.

This bit of the big picture feeds into my small picture, which I will attempt to unfold for you today. Grab yourself a cuppa and I’ll continue along my thought funnel.

Our western society is built upon the idea of endless growth. To this end, we have ignored science, which has been telling us for over fifty years that climate change is accelerating, and that it’s to do with too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. They told us that if we continued causing more CO2 to be released into the atmosphere, the planet would heat up and the oceans would rise.

Our response for the past five decades? We just keep pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Why have we done this? Because our economic system ignores the lessons of nature by relying on growth as its primary metric. Nature, at its finest, is a balanced system. There is a cycle of growth balanced by a cycle of decay. Decay itself becomes a life force, as it creates food for growth. It’s a process in constant motion.

We have all been waiting for a significant breakthrough which will solve the issue we’ve created. We place hope in this ever advancing technology; that it will, one day, solve every problem. By betting on our technological future, we can go on buying more and more stuff; it’s business as usual. In short, we need not change our consumption addiction because technology will save us. That is the subtext, and it’s kind of paradoxical.

This is really ‘magical thinking’. And it ignores decay as the balancing element. Decay is inherent in every natural system. Are we witnessing, through all this breakdown, actual change?

I’ve always thought that change is in the individual, which then flows into the collective. Change has to happen, no matter what - we must evolve or perish. It seems to me we need to evolve the way we think - everything from capitalism to environmentalism; everything needs to be re imagined, right down to a community level. It boils down to two things - the continued willful ignorance of the dramatic changes in the weather we are all experiencing, and the social changes which have been exacerbated by the ‘pandemic’, but which really have been occurring very slowly for a long time now, as we have all migrated from the physical world to the virtual one. These social changes are significant too. We are now remote global citizens, connected by the internet. For most of us, the computer screen has become the portal to everything else in our lives. Including each other.

Consider this as a ‘big picture’ background to the small picture I want to unfold.

I have been quite fortunate with regard to this worldwide smorgasbord of cataclysms. I live and work in a small rural community. It has been directly affected by the weather, and indirectly by the flow on effects of our responses as a nation to the pandemic. Lockdowns in the cities, border controls and quarantine restrictions have altered things here in some ways. Nonetheless, life goes on for us without huge change. The pandemic has actually boosted tourism in our region. It has also caused the cost of living here to skyrocket, as city dwellers escape to the country, forcing rents and house prices up. So a mixed bag; some good things and some not so good.

I’ve been trying to stay on top of an entirely different set of circumstances. Back in November I had a fire here at my partially completed ‘new’ site in Gloucester. The details of that event are here if you are interested. In that fire, I lost my beloved bakery trailer, the little one I called the Gypsy. That trailer started life as a mobile bakery shop to sell bread at markets. After I stopped doing markets, it was repurposed to become a tiny bakery and mobile classroom on the Tour Down South a few years back. When I returned, it became a part of my Community Supported Bakery, doing the proofing for the bread. Since moving to Gloucester I refitted it to carry the prototype small oven mentioned in the article linked above. That’s when it became part of the fire which engulfed pretty much my whole enterprise. Now it’s a pile of twisted metal, charred wood and ashes.

Growth and (rapid) decay, you might say.

And just to make matters more, well, interesting, I’ve managed to revisit an old ankle injury from my motorcycle riding days. It started as a minor issue, but it grew to the point where I was laid up for months, with twice weekly visits to the local health centre. No commercial baking was possible during this time. Nor any physical work. Not much of anything, really. I had plenty of time to think things though.

Probably too much.

I’m slowly mending now. Still a way from good health, but things are beginning to take shape. My body is healing, and the thoughts in my head are resolving.

I came very close to calling it a day, baking wise. When you add up all the trials and tribulations I’ve had in my long three decades as a professional baker, the case against continuing in this profession is pretty strong.

It’s worth noting that my body has kept me baking for over thirty years, and walking on the planet for sixty or so. Thus, I’ve given just over half of my body’s useful life to the ‘trade’. You only get one body. Baking, like any other physical trade, is tough on the body.

I didn’t start my first bakery to become a baker. I did it to find a substantive use for organic grain. I’ve written about this before, so I won’t cover it here. I made my naturally fermented bread, the bread that made the bakery, to answer a need (no pun intended). This was for decent, nutritious and tasty bread. Bread that made a meal. Bread that satisfied something deeper.

Back when I started out, organic wheat farmers had no manufacturers to help them get their grain into volume production. They could grow it, but they needed volume users like bakeries to justify the expense of going organic.

I decided to create the first (to my knowledge) ‘organic’ bakery, without the faintest idea of how to do it. I just followed my feet. I ended up loving the act of baking, of being a baker.

I believed in what I was doing then, even though I wasn’t actually a baker and had, prior to this, no pressing desire to become one. But that’s what I became anyway, just doing what I thought was needed. Over many years, I baked thousands upon thousands of loaves. Demand always outstripped supply, so I started to pay people to help, and to buy machines to help me make thousands more. I kept growing my bakery, with nothing but belief in what I was doing. There were some good years, and then there were some grindingly bad ones. I made some bad investments, some bad decisions. I lost my way, and then I lost everything else.

I learned the true meaning of capitalism the hard way. It’s a blood sport, and there are winners and losers. I’ve been on both sides.

But still, I found ways to bake. People told me the bread I made was an essential part of their diet, just as it was for me. Other artisan style bakeries sprang up, and they began making more (and better) bread than mine. Other bakeries began using organic grain too; totally organic milling companies sprung up, and established flour mills started to source organic grain as well. Organic flour was on its way. Organic grain was commercially viable and nutritious bread was now available.

Along the way to this successful outcome, I taught many small baking teams, and learned from them as well; bakers and bakeries sprung from my enterprise; many are still baking to this day. If my objective was to get organic grain into production, then my job was well and truly done. But then the life of a sourdough baker began to work its way into me.

It is a different way of baking, making naturally fermented bread, and the skillset required is something that takes many years to really master. You can’t create satisfying sourdough by adding ingredients and out pops a loaf. It’s like a culture, and inoculation begins in many small bakeries, like mine, all around the world. These bakeries have either rejected the chemically enhanced baking practices of the mainstream bakeries, or they just fell into it through the process of discovery. The trade has shifted, with proper artisan bakers being in demand now. They get decent pay and are treated with a degree of respect which didn’t exist when I started out. Bakeries were already mechanised then, and a baker was pretty much a process worker in a large machine.

I had replicated the machine through my own enterprise, and I came to think that I had unwittingly joined the enemy. It took me a while to rethink my position, and even longer to build the kind of bakery I wanted - one where nobody was enslaved. I had been enslaved by the need for capital but I didn’t see it until it destroyed my business.

Fifteen years ago, I started to think about how one could simplify things in the baking business so that ‘capital’ was not part of it at all. This started with the use of wood fired ovens, and then developed into things like community supported bakeries, co ops, social enterprises, and then teaching people about naturally leavened bread.

I figured that If enough people knew how to do this stuff themselves, I wouldn’t be required to do so much baking - it would let me off the hook! I shared my knowledge very freely, until I had to charge for it - another paradox. This past fifteen years or so, on average I have taught about a dozen people a month the basics of sourdough. Very roughly, that’s a couple of thousand peeps directly learning the fundamentals of sourdough and naturally leavened bread making. And through my website SourdoughBaker.com.au, I taught many thousands more.

Sometimes I feel all ‘baked out’, though, and I try to have as little to do with the world of sourdough bread as I can, beyond simply eating it.

Yet I still want to bake! And it seems people still want the bread I bake. Baking offers me connection, a rhythm of life, and cashflow, though if I was hard nosed enough to work out the hourly rate for what I bake, I’m pretty sure I would be looking for alternative ways to earn a living. Nowadays I just bake for subscribers, using the Community Supported Bakery (CSB) principle so that there is no one person carrying all the debt. There is a community of interest sharing in resources for their mutual wellbeing. The baker gets to bake and be loved by his customers, and the customers get the love which the financially unencumbered baker can provide through their bread.

Often people don’t appreciate that those expensive loaves are not actually making the baker rich - they are part of the bakery’s debt structure, because baking equipment is generally pretty expensive. Thus, a Community Supported Bakery spreads the debt among all the customers, and removes the bank from the equation.

So here I am again. My Community Supported Bakery continues to be a work in progress. It’s like the phoenix, rising from the ashes of itself so many times. Now, however, I’m interested in returning what I have learned to the wider community. I want to help bring possibility to fruition. I see a place in the scheme of things for ‘tree change’ bakeries and other food based enterprises to really make a difference in this very confusing world. People who come to the baking business for the right reasons, people who want to have a small footprint but a big legacy, people who want to work with less and who want to minimise waste and create something meaningful for others with their own lives and enterprises- you are my kindred spirits, and I hope I can help you to do the thing you want to do.

So where does this thought funnel lead me now? I want to concentrate on the things which disrupt the corporate mess we have are now mired in. To this end, I would like to do what I can to influence our course of action so that we don’t destroy this beautiful organism we live in. If we can get back to meeting each other, learning about our local communities while attending to their needs; if we can see the process of enterprise not as an exercise of applying capital, but as a creative act, akin to art; if we can reinvent technologies which aspire to self sufficiency and simplicity; if we can consume less; if we can make quality stuff which lasts long after we are gone; if we can learn to waste nothing; these things matter and I want to get behind them in any way I can.

So i’ve decided to carry on for a few more years. I’m going to bake for my people and advance the CSB model locally. I’ll continue to teach people of all levels how to bake, but in a different way. It’s going to be more immersive, and more focused on low tech, hands on baking. I’ve been consulting to the trade for many years already, but now my focus will be on helping what I call ‘tree change’ bakers get themselves up and running without becoming enslaved to the capital cycle. I’ll be showing various ways of running micro bakeries which have the baker themselves at the center, so that families can prosper rather than just businesses.

To this end, I’ve designed two ‘low capital’, wood fired commercial ovens which people can build themselves, with a minimum of capital outlay. These ovens will do an excellent job of baking, while keeping the baker out of debt. The designs are based on my past ovens, but without all the complex fabrication my previous ovens have required. These are truly ‘third world simple’ pieces of kit. I hope to have the process of building them well documented so that anyone can get in touch and be able to get started on their own. I’m offering virtual backup on the build process too, so that each oven built works as it should, for a very long time. Yes, I’ll be charging for the design and support, but it will be a one off fee which won’t have a time limit attached.

I’m currently building the first one - the Barrel Oven Mk2 - here in Gloucester. It can be built as a DIY project from mostly reclaimed and repurposed materials, and when I’ve finished building it (any day now!) I’ll have a lot of documentation completed so that more can be built in this DIY format. I’ve also designed a larger, Commercial Oven, which can also be constructed in a DIY manner from mostly repurposed materials. There are two of them being built as I write this - one in Far North Queensland and the other in Western Australia. God knows how I’ll get to see them in action when they are completed, but I’m sure I’ll get to experience them when they are finished.

If you would like to have a chat about your own tree change bakery, or your own wood fired oven, or almost anything else that’s bakery related, ring me on the number below. I’ll be happy to help wherever I can. It would be great to see some more Community Supported Bakeries springing up around the country too, so I’m up for a chat about that as well.

In fact, it would be great to see other types of community supported enterprises finding their way into the world. I see this type of enterprise as being one of the few remaining ways to fight increasing corporate control of every aspect of our lives. These have to be grass roots, and they have to be local, so that physical connection rather than virtual connection becomes the norm. It’s been shown time and time again that communities can be very effective at doing things, especially when the common good is at the heart of the initiative, and people can take ownership of these initiatives in some way..

Thanks for hanging in on this rather long thought funnel, and I do hope you’ve been inspired to act. We need to be moving ourselves away from this ‘magical thinking’, and towards practical thinking again. Please do what you can, whether it’s supporting initiatives in your community, or creating an enterprise that’s human centered, rather than profit driven.

Happy to chat more on

0409 480 750

The saga of my new wood fired oven

Shock Horror! Luna the wood fired oven has been decommissioned!

A closeup of Luna’s firebox recently after having the new V baffle fitted.

After over 7 years of use, Luna was facing yet another bout of major surgery. While this could be considered fairly routine for a well used oven, those who follow this blog will know just how much work I have put in to keeping Luna functioning.

After only a year of use since refitting her with a new steel baffle, the same baffle was completely destroyed by heat. This was a 10 mm thick piece of steel which my boilermaker advisor and collaborator assured me would do the job (at least for a few years) instead of going the whole hog and putting in stainless . Cost is always a factor in these decisions, and our judgement call wasn’t the right one. I expected it to last for at least a few years, as I was only using the oven for a day or two each week. But I watched that baffle gradually burn out over the past couple of months, working around it as best as I could for that time, and found myself thinking deeply about my history with every oven me and the boilermaker have ever created this last 12 years or so.

Bertha II and her firebox repairs. Big firebox, and a bugger of a job!

Berth 1, Bertha 2, and Luna, being the names I’ve given to three woodfired ovens I have had a direct and long term association with, have all caused me lots of physical and financial pain. I have crawled inside each of them, as well as other ovens made with our template - in a couple of cases while they were fully hot - and it’s never a pleasant (or healthy) experience. While all of them, after much post production work, have functioned well in the end, they each have had massive problems. These problems usually stemmed from the fact that metal degrades and warps over time, or is simply a very unforgiving material to work with.

Thus, I decided to avoid the material as much as possible in all my future ovens. I’m totally done with the complexity and cost associated with ovens which are essentially using lots of metal to hold masonry in place. Woodfired ovens have been made for centuries successfully with just brick and mortar. Why reinvent the wheel?

I’ve been working on a full masonry design for the past 12 months, and have finally built a small prototype to see how the masonry version of a ‘white oven’ will work. The design has morphed into something quite different over that time; when I look at what I’ve created I can see the original concept, but that’s about it. The way I got to the concept twisted and turned quite a bit.

The new prototype at the firebox stage.

The materials to make the oven evolved - I started with the idea of using common bricks with oven bricks used in various strategic places, which had merit; cheaply sourced common bricks can do the job, especially if you also use high temperature bricks on the parts of the oven where there is a lot of heat. But this prototype was to be built on my trailer, and I was worried they would require a lot of bracing to hold them together. Trailers bump around a lot on the road. Also, weight (at that time) was an issue, and I wasn’t sure brick was light enough.

Then I considered cast cement and AAC (Autoclaved Aerated Concrete), both of which I could cast myself. This attracted me as I could cast exactly to size; if I could cast fairly thin sheets I could save weight. I designed some molds which enabled each piece to lock into each other. The further I went down the casting rabbit hole, though, the more complex things became. The casting process seemed like a lot of fiddling, and was fraught with traps for newbies like me, so this idea morphed into using pre cast cinder blocks and manufactured AAC (Besser bricks and Hebel, being two brands commonly available locally). Off the shelf, at least in theory, it was possible to get pretty close to the correct size for the project. I tweaked the original design a little to accommodate them - then came to a road block - my design worked on an uncommon size of besser brick, being thinner than the usual construction kind. I only needed about six of them, but they were critical to the flue design in the oven. Do you think I could find anyone who would stock or sell me 6? The smallest amount I could order was a full pallet. So I went off looking for other ways to skin this cat.

I’m wandering around various landscaping and building suppliers in my new home town of Gloucester, looking for stuff to build my oven with, when I notice an unusual brick with three large holes. Immediately I see how it could work in my oven. While I wasn’t able to buy it, the retailer put me in touch with their maker - Lincoln Brickworks, just down the road at Wingham.

A quick drive and I’m chatting to the brickmaker himself. Before long he’s showing me their kilns - which coincidentally are wood fired till they get to 700C, then oil fired to take them up to 1300C. Lincoln bricks are one of the last independent brickmakers on the eastern side of the country - and they make their bricks in small batches, catering to the niche of the trade interested in truly bespoke, rustic materials, and craftsman techniques from the past. I’m sold, and the brick maker helps me load up 40 of them to try for my ovens. When I go to pay, they wave me through, saying ‘you’ll be back - we’ll sort it out then!’

Brick sides are on and rendered.

The bricks were used in the final prototype, and they worked as intended. They are stacked directly on top of each other in the side walls of the oven, creating flue pipes for the flue gases to travel along. The flue pipes lead around the oven, transmitting heat from the flue gas directly to the baking chambers. This meant that the baking chambers would heat up quickly, and that I would be reducing a whole layer of brick from my design, making it lighter.

I also built the firebox out of common brick, and lined the insides with firebrick. For a baffle above the firebox, I did some research into concrete, as my local hardware store sold 600 x 600 (2 foot x 2foot) slabs which were about 100mm thick. This was about the right size for the base of the baking chamber, and would save me a whole lot of time and expense with fabricating some sort of lintel to support a brick baffle. This was my first major error.

Then, bang! The concrete baffle exploded!

According to everything I read, concrete could withstand 600C heat. From experience, the internal temps in all my previous fireboxes reached 500C, so I figured I had a bit of wriggle room. I was very wrong. On the first trial firing, maybe half an hour in, I heard a large deep ‘boom’. I checked the baking chamber, and a hole had blown right through the concrete! So much for 600 C! It’s possible the slab I had purchased was not adequately cured - because I had taken temperatures inside the firebox some 5 minutes earlier and it had barely reached 200C at that stage. Far too low, I would have thought, to cause the concrete to react with the heat. Despite this fairly intense reaction, the oven held together.

I visited our local ‘Tip Shop’ (a most wonderful community resource where waste is sorted, displayed and sold for super cheap) and found some really heavy duty BBQ plate steel. I was able to support this underneath the slab, and thereby create a secondary level of baffle. I then used a high temp mortar mix to fill the hole in the slab, and put 30mm oven bricks on the top.

Shelves are added and bricks used in place of a firebox door.

Thankfully, this very quick and cheap repair meant that I could use the oven. I had quite a few subscribers to my bread delivery service (see previous post on my CSB) who, having not received bread during the entire period of relocation and oven building, were starting to lose their minds. I didn’t want to lose them as customers, or to have them lose their minds due to bread starvation, so I was in a hurry to get the prototype fired up and baking.

Over the next 6 bakes or so, I grew quite fond of my prototype tiny oven. It was relatively quick - 15 loaves an hour vs 20 per hour in Luna, which was 4 times the size. It was fast to heat up too - from cold to bake temperature in 2 to 3 hours. It also gave a wonderful kick to the loaves - my original spacing between the shelves was now too small, as the loaves were bigger than they were before by approx an inch! The prototype worked better than I thought it would, and really didn’t require a whole lot of modification, beyond repairing dodgy little bits of my super low budget repurposed construction materials.

But there were some problems. The primary issues were:

A baking chamber door is attached. It opens to a flat 90 degree platform.

• getting the door to seal correctly. Smoke from the firebox would creep in under the baking chamber door and taint the bread. The door was a piece of fairly thin steel from a previous oven which had been used as a shelf. The seal between it and the masonry was less than perfect, so I used some ceramic rope and high temperature tape to bog up the gap. It worked, after a couple of less than satisfactory attempts.

• creating steam in the baking chambers. Due to my lack of welding equipment (and the lack of welding knowledge) I struggled to fabricate a way of holding water in a piece of pipe. The pipe system has been used successfully in all my previous ovens, but they required a welder to make them. This time I was in a new town and I didn’t know anyone here. Eventually I purchased some rectangular hollow galvanized bar and filled the ends with cement to block them off. Then I cut some grooves along their length with an angle grinder, which allowed steam to escape. They worked extremely well. They held close to a litre of water, which provided enough live, gentle steam to the baking chambers for some 15 minutes at a time.

• properly insulating the surrounds of the oven. I built the oven to fit into the existing space on my trailer. There had been a small oven there previously which I used for demonstration bakes and workshops. To save time, I simply beefed up the existing insulation around the wall area and re-did the roof insulation. The floor had a layer of insulation too, as well as a sheet of rubber to isolate vibration from the oven. The oven base was 100 mm hebel, which is, in itself, insulation. The outer shell was made of this also. I figured I had it all covered.

  I did not. After the first couple of production bakes, I observed smoke around the top of the oven. This worried me, so I removed the entire roof and replaced it with brick and corrugated iron. So much for weight! I could no longer tow the oven, but at this point I was quite happy for the oven to be semi permanently set up at my new home base in Gloucester.

Fired up for the first time!

After another couple of bakes, I noticed smoke coming out from UNDER the oven. While the top was now fine, smoke coming from under the oven really confused me. There was so much insulation and brickwork around the firebox, it just didn’t make sense. I added another layer of brick to the base of the firebox and the problem seemed to go away. Or it became less obvious, as I now know!

Needless to say, I was inspired by my little protoype. However, I could see that my construction techniques were not up for the long haul, and that I would need to be doing a lot of spot repairs to keep the little oven alive until I could make a bigger, more robust one.

Last week, after finishing the bake in record time, I felt I had mastered the oven, and made all the necessary tweaks for performance I would need to do for a while. I went to bed early and was keen to get the bread delivered the following day. A good bake is a wonderful thing for the psyche.

An early test run alerted me to the need to rebuild the chimney!

I woke to a loud ‘boom’ at about 2.30 am. I could see flickering light through the curtains, and stepped out to find the trailer and a couch in the undercover garden area fully blazing. As I ran to grab the hose, a second couch exploded into flame - I had put them perhaps 8 feet away from the other side of the trailer just two days earlier.

The fire from the trailer had engulfed them and caused the explosions. Luckily the local fire brigade came in 20 minutes or so, but those 20 minutes were I think the longest in my life, as I pointed an ineffectual hose in the general direction of the blaze. The fireys brought it under control in about half an hour. I wandered around on the footpath outside with loaves of freshly baked bread at 3 am for them as some form of thanks.

First bake!

(photo, on B+W film, courtesy of Maira Wilkie)

I lost the trailer, as well as a fair proportion of my power tools. I also lost some printing equipment, and a good deal of pride. I thought I had insulated the section around the oven well, and indeed I did. The problem was under it. I built the oven on AAC (hebel), with fire bricks on top. There was a layer of wool insulation batt under the oven, with a thick rubber matt under that, and foam under that, and finally the timber frame built on the trailer years earlier. The weight of the oven had slowly flattened the insulation, making it less effective. The heat from the firebox had found its way through all the insulation, and had created a smouldering heat issue which had slowly, over quite a few weeks, degraded the timber framework underneath. This simply gave way, the oven tilted backwards, and hot coal spilt out of the firebox, setting the whole trailer alight.

Disaster! Half a dozen bakes later, the fireproofing under the oven fails, and the oven tips over, catching the trailer on fire and destroying it completely.

Apart from feeling stupid at my errors of construction, I felt defeated. It’s taken me 30 years to be at a comfortable place with my craft. I get to bake commercially just once a week, with civilised hours. I have many happy subscribers to my bread delivery service, which has continued each week now for two years or so. I try to impart good info to anyone who wants to know. I’m deeply immersed in my craft, as anyone who has spoken to me will be quick to agree. Many 300 series students have gone on to start their own successful micro bakeries, as a result of my inspiration and guidance.

Over the years, thousands of home bakers have come to learn at my 101 workshops held each month, and many stay in touch, attending numerous workshops to keep their bread making processes improving and growing . I’m deeply happy to be part of the bread making renaissance in Australia. When I began, bakeries were heading away from natural bread; there was not an interest in using organically grown grain or in artisan milling or fermented bread at all. Now there are hundreds of successful bakeries turning out great bread all around Australia, and when I speak to them they are rightfully proud of their product. There are a number of mills creating superb, sustainably grown flour from quality grain. Of all this, I can say I was one of many who worked to make it happen.

The bakery business has been tough on me, and my body. I’ve earned a living though, and I’ve largely been my own boss for a long, long time. I’m rich in what I know, and I’ve been further enriched by the responses people have to my bread, my teaching and my professional guidance over many years. I’m not materially rich, though - I discovered some time ago that I have little interest in material gain beyond what I need to keep going. This I know is both a problem, and a solution to bigger problems.

Thus I find myself questioning whether I should go on; to rebuild, or to find another way of earning a living. I feel like I have been a professional crash test dummy for too long. It’s my own doing, I know. And I do question my sanity from time to time.

In Western Australia teaching Bush Baking a couple of years back, with the trailer on its second incarnation.

So I’m asking you, dear reader, to really help. I have decided to seek contributions to a crowd funding initiative, to help me build a new oven and to rebuild the site, so that I can get the School of Sourdough properly established here in Gloucester. I need to buy materials to build the oven, as well as some new tools and some professional assistance so that the new setup won’t have any issues down the track. If you think I should continue doing what I do, then follow the link below and make a contribution. If I can raise $20K I’ll be over the moon. If I can raise half that, I will still be able to get things up and running again. Any amount will encourage me to continue. Even nice words and a bit of virality by sharing this post will go a long way.

People who can contribute will be rewarded in any way I can - small contributions will get free bread to equal value when the oven is finished - provided you are somewhere in the Hunter Valley region. Bigger ones can receive one on one tuition/consultation to the value of their contribution down the track, here at the bakery or over the phone, if necessary. Really big ones will receive eternal gratitude and whatever else I can give to say thank you. And everyone will be supporting a community enterprise as well as a journeyman baker who needs to know if he’s mad or not. Please chip in and help me get this project finished!

The Community Supported Bakery a year on

It’s been just over a year since I began baking purely for subscribers here in the Newcastle region of NSW. Before that, I focused on local markets as my retail, but after six years of doing this, I found that in our region market operators have become very risk averse. They increasingly would cancel the market at the first hint of rain or wind. Not great for the local baker who has a day to sell their bread.

It’s my second attempt at creating a Community Supported Bakery - my first was a few years back when we set up the bakery out the back of Wesley Mission in Newcastle West. We were delivering bread every Saturday all over Newcastle, and while it worked quite well, the retail business and Cafe we built on the Wesley site took over.

I learned from our experience in supplying people directly that the subscription baking model needed a few tweaks for it to work long term. This time around, after building the model around Pick Up Points (PUPs) rather than home delivery, I believe we’ve got it close to right. I’ve approached a number of strategically located businesses, whether they are retailers or cafe operators, and offered them the opportunity to become part of our Community Supported Bakery network as Pick Up Points for our subscribers. This provides the subscriber, the PUP and the bakery with positive benefits. The bakery gets a retail location for bread. The subscriber gets a convenient place to pick up their bread, and the PUP gets added foot traffic to their shop or cafe.

The baby oven I used to bake my way across Oz became the CSB’s first baking tool.

When I began baking for subscribers again a bit over a year ago, I was using the Bush Bakery MkII for the task of baking maybe a dozen loaves every Friday night here at the farm. My proper bakery, here in the old dairy shed, wasn’t built, so I was living in my caravan, trying to keep things afloat. The Bush Bakery MkII would have to do while I was waiting. It was less than perfect, and the bread I was baking from it was also less than perfect. But I pushed on anyway. Thankfully, my customers were patient.

I was hankering to bake great bread again in Luna, my main flame. She was still in pieces out the back shed as Craig Miller was refurbishing her in his spare time. I had to play the long game if I wanted to have her baking again.

Not easy for me. I always want things finished asap so I can get on with other stuff. Everything seemed to be in permanent slomo. I was going crazy. My weekly bake in my little baking trailer kept me sane.

The dough box takes shape.

At first, I was doing the whole thing completely by hand, using my ‘dough box’, which I’d recently completed, making it out of used plywood transit boards. Transit boards are what we call the plywood boards used to rest finished and shaped dough on before baking. I had plenty which were old and needed to be replaced, so I cut them up and created my dough box from them.

I had just returned from my trip across the country in the above mentioned trailer bakery, and I’d been using standard dough tubs to mix my dough by hand for the trip. The idea was to make the dough box before I left, but I ran out of time. As soon as I got back, I set to work on it, and it was finally finished. I made it waterproof and super smooth, and began making dough in it. I found that it worked pretty well for 10kg of dough - in fact, it was surprisingly efficient.

The Community Supported Bakery (CSB)

A Community Supported Bakery can take many different forms. In some places, bakeries are set up to meet community demands - and thus are entirely funded by these communities. Bakery entrepreneurs have used crowd funding to get their dreams up and running for many years. I remember meeting a baker from Berlin who had done this some 20 years ago, simply by putting handbills on the walls of cafes to gather support from the community. In other places, customers and staff are members of a cooperative. I attempted this idea a decade ago in Newcastle and failed miserably. I have seen it working though, and while the environment for a cooperatively run bakery might not be here in Australia (with a raft of incorporation laws which make forming a coop very expensive to do, and then also expensive to run when it’s finally set up) , the idea has a lot of merit and could work in places where there aren’t such onerous laws. I’d be very interested to hear from anyone who HAS managed to get a cooperatively run bakery up and going here in Australia though!

There are lots of other ways for a bakery to be supported by the community. Turns out, communities like to have bakeries which are run by people rather than corporations.

There are CSBs which simply have a membership system, with members helping to finance the bakery’s operations each year by their membership fees. In return, members get first dibs at the bakery product, often for a discounted price. Other CSBs go for a share system, where the investors receive a dividend when the bakery becomes profitable. Still others tag on the back of established buying groups, enabling them to bake directly for buying group customers.

This incarnation of my CSB is supported by a subscription system. It’s a way of supplying customers over the long term with affordable, nutritious bread. Users of the system get discount bread by committing to a number of loaves which they can have delivered, one at a time if they like, over an endless time frame. The more loaves they commit to, the better the price per loaf. Bulk buying without the bulk, if you like.

It’s like a phone card - they just top up their credit when they need to, and receive supply whenever they want. Better prices are also available when a customer orders a number of loaves at the same time. This means that a reseller can be part of the system too. Bread can then be purchased by anyone at a standard retail price without actually having to subscribe by simply popping in to one of the resellers and buying it over the counter.

The subscription system can be tweaked to be time based, which encourages regular use. Ours isn’t done that way here, because in Newcastle, at least, people want maximum flexibility. It’s a tough market! Nonetheless, our subscriber base has steadily grown over the year, and we seem to be holding on to our customers.

Our CSB so far

So a dozen loaves, paid for in advance by members of the community, was the start of it. Now we are baking about 85 loaves each time I fire up Luna the oven. We have an ‘apprentice’ who is learning the trade from the ground up, and students regularly attend our bake day workshops so they can learn how it all fits together.

Over the coming couple of months, we’ll produce a hundred loaves per bake. At that time, I’ll consider firing Luna up a second day each week - once I’ve found someone who can distribute them more widely. Eventually she’ll get fired up more days, one day at a time. The whole idea is resource management - so when the oven’s five or six tonnes of thermal mass gets fully soaked with heat, she becomes much more efficient. I just have to find homes for all the bread!

Do you know someone who would like to distribute the bread more widely, so that we can fire up Luna more often? Leave a comment after the article and I’ll be in touch!

In the meantime, our bakery is settled into a steady rhythm. We have students visiting throughout the week to learn or revise what they have learnt. Tuesdays we make sponges for dough. Wednesdays we make the dough. Thursdays we de-gas the dough we’ve made for the first time, and prepare firewood for the bake. It’s a 72 hour process from start to finish, and it makes the bread really digestible and full flavoured.

Here on the farm there is a pretty good supply of wood, but there’s always the process of trimming the wood we have to fit Luna’s firebox. This happens on Thursdays. It’s also a good day for weeding our small garden, produce from which eventually becomes jars of pickles and pastes for our family, friends and subscribers. It’s also the day I do oven maintenance - Luna gets a deck and firebox clean, as well as a blow out to clear her flue system of all soot.

Friday is bake day, and we start by cutting and shaping all our dough, ready for the final proof. Luna is fired up in the morning, and we keep her going until baking time begins in the late afternoon and early evening. By this time Luna is steady at about 220C. When we have good fuel, it’s a matter of holding her down to temp; when it’s not good, it’s a matter of cranking the firebox along until the decks get hot enough to bake. Baking currently takes between 2 and 4 hours. Then we let the bread cool on racks, and pack it for delivery Saturday morning.

Saturday is delivery day, and I head off to our 5 Pick Up Points to deliver the bread early in the morning. Deliveries are all done by 10am. Then we rest, ready to do it again next week!

One or two Sundays each month are dedicated to teaching the general public, with 101 and 102 Workshops held. It gives people a chance to learn about proper bread as well as to have a look at what we do here.

It’s a comfortable rhythm to live with, and allows time for things like gardening, administration of our subscriber system (which takes a good few hours each week), essential maintenance of the bakery and oven, and development of the site here at the old dairy shed.

Once we start baking twice a week I can see the time becoming tighter, but there is still quite a bit of capacity time wise; the routine here somehow allows for extra stuff without too much stress.

If you would like to see how things work in our Community Supported Bakery, why not book in and learn about the process for yourself or for your group? You can bring along as many as 6 people for the one price.

Downcycling - is it really a 'thing'?

I’ve come to view resource use as a critical issue. This applies to me, as a bakery operator. It applies to you too.

The Zero waste bakery

I’ve been working towards a ‘zero waste bakery’ for a number of years now. My approach has been to either remove the waste from the system altogether, or to turn waste into a resource.

An example of the former approach is our paperless subscriber based ordering and supply system, so that there is less waste in guessing how much to bake each time, and no waste paper or ink to do the necessary communications for placing orders and so forth.

The example of the latter approach, that of turning any waste generated or left over from the manufacturing process into a resource, is our waste bread or food scraps being processed (using waste heat) into fuel (biochar) for the oven to burn and heat the thermal mass.

A bin full of biochar getting burnt.

This biochar is also a readily available soil nutrient. It’s rich in nitrogen, and its physical structure encourages worms and various soil grubs to inhabit it, meaning that it assists with the composting process. From time to time I produce enough biochar to compost (I occasionally manage to mess up a dough, or on bake day I have some ‘less than presentable’ bread). Mostly, though, I only have enough waste bread for fuel, as mentioned earlier; I bake to order.

I compost all other organic waste which finds its way through the bakery, and this compost will be used to grow various crops. It’s the next stage of unfolding things here - and when I have set this up, its crop output will be utilised by the bakery.

A bit of treefall - and Pippa, the bakery dog.

Another example of the way we use waste as a resource would be the oven itself; for many years it has been powered by waste timber - either tree fall, sawmill offcut or building waste hardwood. Upon her reinvention (for the third time) here, she has been insulated with waste brick, concrete crusher dust (leftover from building the bakery on site) and bottles. All waste, and all incredibly useful and fit for purpose.

Upcycling or downcycling?

The idea of a zero waste bakery extends to everything used in the process of making bread. So when a piece of equipment reaches the end of its useful life, I’ve been finding ways to either ‘upcycle’ or ‘downcycle’ it. An example might be ‘transit boards’. Many artisan bakeries use them. They are plywood (or similar) boards which are used to ‘final proof’ dough, just before it gets baked. These boards last for many years, but eventually they get mouldy, and often start to delaminate. Burning them is a problem, because they are made with glues and preservatives, and when burned these produces some quite noxious gases. So they can’t be burnt.

I made this Baker’s Peel for a student in Thailand from waste plywood.

Often I’ve simply cleaned them up, sanded and oiled them. Other times I’ve cut them up and used them to make other things. So far, I’ve made big and small baker’s peels, dough cutters, wooden boxes for making dough in, furniture (shelves) and bakery transport crates. This could be considered ‘upcycling’, I guess, as the new products have a greater value than the old ones. These old bakery boards have become a resource which I can either use again, or remake and sell.

Processing waste bread into biochar is definitely ‘downcycling’. The value of the bread when it’s fresh is far greater than when I have to reduce it to carbon; however, as carbon, it still has a value. Indeed, as a ‘fournier’ (one who runs a furnace), I use the biochar for quite specific things when I’m running my fire. I miss it when I don’t have it, actually! It’s extremely handy in establishing a bit of hot coal quickly. It also flames very strongly when the firebox bricks are hot, so I use it to kick the fire along as I bake.

I also use the semolina which finds itself on the floor of the oven after loading the bread as fuel. When flicked onto the embers in the firebox, it provides quick and intense flame, so that I can revive a fire after the fuel is spent.

I burn anything which can be burned in the firebox - paper, cardboard, cellophane wrapping being some usual things. Here’s the thing; once the bricks get really hot, most things burn with little or no smoke. After the oven has been running for eight hours or so, the bricks are almost white hot. At this temperature (I estimate about 500 to 600 C - my laser heat gun only goes to 500C), the firebox becomes an incinerator. I’d be kidding myself if I said there was no smoke at all, but once the firebox gets this hot, there is very little smoke at all. The firebox is so hot that it burns its own smoke!

I love this idea; smoke becomes fuel. So is this upcycling, or downcycling? It’s a grey area.

There’s a pun in there somewhere.

Downcycling, or just really good insulation?

Lately I’ve even been using bottles as insulation around the oven. These can easily be recycled, but if I use them as they are, without even breaking them, then I’ve saved the energy that would normally be used to recycle them. It’s another example of ‘downcycling’, which I put before ‘recycling’. The bottles work exceptionally well as a means of holding beer, and then to hold heat. Now on the hunt for more of them!

At the moment I’m working on a means of reducing packaging. The bread goes out in cellophane wrap each week (cellohane is NOT plastic. It’s made of cellulose, so it can be made from trees, or indeed any fibrous material including sugar can stalks and hemp), but with a bit of setting up, the bread will be delivered and displayed in special boxes, which will be health code compliant for retail purposes.

Prototype transport and display boxes. Watch this space!

There are many more practical ideas which have already gone into the setting up and day to day running of this bakery. It’s nothing new for me, it’s just an extension of things I’ve been working with for many years now. I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface; then I look back at what I’ve done and thought about over the years, and I can see I’m making progress towards a zero waste bakery business.

What about you? I’d love to hear about your ideas, or even better, what you have done to make a smaller footprint, or to reduce the wasteful use of resources. And if you want to come and check out what has been done here, and learn how this bakery runs, feel free to come and work with me for a day or more!

You can book by following the link below.

The Rebirth of Luna

Luna’s about 7 years old. For an oven built as a prototype, that’s getting on. She’s had a robust, quite eventful life so far. She’s lived in four locations, as well as a short stint living ‘on the road’, as the centrepiece to my first travelling bakery and classroom. She was designed to be a mobile, high volume wood fired oven. She was meant to be light, heat up quickly, and be able to bake 300 or more perfect loaves of bread in the space of a market - which would be around eight hours.

For this task, she was a complete failure. The entire mobile bakery enterprise had a number of flaws, as it turned out. I may well have covered these, and the mobile bakery, in a previous blog post; I can’t remember. Anyway, that’s not what this post is about.

That’s Luna’s bush hideaway. She’s in the box…

Luna found her place as a stationary oven. She lived on a fixed site, still on the mobile bakery trailer, at a bush hideaway in Ellalong, where she performed the weekly baking duties for local Saturday markets with incredible finesse. I knew the difference Luna made - a kind of crust that only a brick oven can give you.

She was always a bit tricky to work with - she liked to be pre heated for a good 5 hours before she would really begin to sing, for example. She had some hot spots (which became completely ‘worked around’, as one does with any old bakery oven), and she needed a major clean out and overhaul every year, or she would block up (and actually melt) in parts. I had to rebuild the firebox a couple of times, and used a crowbar to open up a pathway for flue gases when it fatigued after about 5 years use.

I learned the hard way with Luna, every time, but after each rebuild she returned to work, better than ever. She was, for many years, a ‘work in progress’. She eventually became an excellent oven, capable of baking an average of 30 average sized full sourdogh loaves an hour - provided I was on my game - and more if someone was helping me. She did her job as a test bed and we improved our Aromatic Embers ovens as a result.

When the first Bush Bakery at Ellalong came to an end, I packed Luna up in the trailer, took out her bricks, and parked her in a nearby paddock, where she lived for a few months. I towed her here to the farm, and she was parked again for a few more months. We removed her from the trailer after the Tour Down South, and a boilermaker began the task of refurbishing her, with design modifications we had now applied to some of our other ovens.

Luna was my third prototype. I was the test pilot and outside design consultant. Actually, I became the crash test dummy more often than not. The first two prototypes, both named Bertha, turned out to be absolute pigs of ovens, but pigs which were made to sing for their supper nonetheless, thanks to my need to bake decent bread.

Bertha 1 in Cafe mode. Note bricked plate warmer on top!

Luna was different. We really thought about Luna - all our mistakes taught us what NOT to do. So Luna was a decent oven from the getgo - but she developed some long term issues. That’s why I was always working on her - she took a fair bit of tweaking to make her really sing, I can tell you! So when I left her in the boilermaker’s capable hands, I gave him my wish list - or at least half of it. I knew I’d be doing the other half myself.

This time I wanted to make the flame generated from the fire really stretch, so that it could do the job of heating more cleanly, quickly and efficiently. We needed to get the bottom decks more even too. Back in the day, the area above the firebox was always the hottest part of the deck. It was so hot that I had to set loaves to one side so they didn’t burn.

The boilermaker takes Luna apart with the tynes of a tractor.

Stretching the flame in Luna’s firebox.

The top decks have always relatively slow, so we set out to improve the heat here at same time.

The boilermaker built a more sophisticated and heavy duty baffle system, based on my ideas. He made the baffle itself more angled so that flame was siphoned off better when it runs against it from the firebox. I later bricked the inside of the firebox to further enhance the ‘flamethrower effect’. He rebuilt the firebox to include more brick than before. He also incorporated a whole series of cleaning access tubes to the roof of the oven, so that the area nearest the flue could be cleaned - an issue which had reared its ugly head a couple of times in Luna’s life already.

I’m hoping the changes to the flue system will eliminate the problem of soot build up altogether. I’m fully aware that I may simply be experiencing a case of wishful thinking here. Every designer wants their latest and greatest innovation to work - we always wear rose coloured glasses, to a certain extent. Sometimes, though, it pays to take out insurance. If there was still a build up of soot, despite our new modifications, at least I can now clean it out more easily than in the past.

Luna’s cleaning tubes before they get bricked and mortared.

All this work took many months. Luna was positioned in the middle of a paddock full of farm equipment. When the boilermaker was on the farm, he’d carry Luna’s bits over to the shed on the tines of the old tractor. He’d weld and angle grind and rivet for hours on end. From time to time I’d ‘lackey’ for him - just as I did when Luna was fabricated here on the farm years ago. Only then, as I remember it, I was on crutches. That’s a whole other story. Not this time - I walk pretty well these days.

More heavy duty thermal mass is added before putting Luna back together.

As the work on Luna slowly got done, a bit here and a bit there, the dairy shed also got finished - in much the same manner. A few weeks ago we carried Luna’s 2 finished pieces over to the dairy shed on the tractor, and we put her back together for the first time in a year. Then we positioned her outside the new school classroom and bakery, where she will live for quite a while, I hope.

Luna 2 showing inner layer of brickwork. This will be wrapped with besser brick.

I’ve been bricking her up, inside and out, for the past two weeks or so. It’s slow, heavy work, as a great deal of the brick is in really hard to get at places - inside baking chambers, for example. These baking chambers are only 16 cm high and a metre deep. One slides the bricks in on the end of a metal peel, and manipulates them as best as one can from a metre away. Around the baking chambers there are two layers of brick, and another layer on the top of them. Getting the bricks in place involves climbing up a ladder with brick or bricks in hand, keeping a fresh mortar on the go all the while, for maybe a couple of hundred climbs. Each brick weighs between 2 and 5 kg, and so far I’ve put roughly 500 bricks in and through and around the oven, as well as another couple of hundred inside the baffles, which we did before she was put back together. I’ve only done enough, at the time of writing this, to fire the oven up and make it work.

First layer of brickwork done. The oven is functional here, though nowhere near thermally efficient.

All this extra thermal mass and insulation will become necessary when Luna goes into production mode for the ‘Steady State Bakery’. It will operate as a heat sink, as well as a kind of heat mirror; the thick walls of brick should hold heat for days. Luna will become a super efficient oven.

i was inspired in my design for Luna by spending time at Harcourt Historic Bakery with Jodi and Dave when I did the Tour Down South last year. Their oven is capable of holding high temperatures for days after firing, as it has some 72 tonnes of brick around it. It’s an incredible piece of kit for a 100 year old oven. Dave manages to keep it hot with very little timber each day.

My version only will have maybe four or five tonnes of brick when it’s finished. The principle is similar to the oven in Harcourt though - get the brick hot, and then once it’s hot, keep it there for as long as possible. I’ll be looking for new bakery customers very soon, that’s for sure!

Next layer done. Still have to complete the outer wrapping, add more mass to the roof, and fill the besser bricks with rubble and sand.

Upon firing her up after putting her in place here, I saw that Luna was really a serious piece of flame art now. The firebox works a treat, blasting flame a good few feet each side, in sheets, spread out right under the two baking decks. It takes the oven from cold to baking temperature in just 3 hours, but will do it substantially quicker when it is fired each day or two, as it will retain a lot of heat.

Just a teensie fire here. When I fully blaze the fire, it’s too hot for my camera!

At the time of writing I’m about two thirds of the way through the brickwork. There is an ‘inner outer’ layer of brick around the baking chamber, and another around the firebox. There are two layers on top, with two more layers of grog based on mortar and recycled crushed concrete. There will be another layer of brick and mortar on top as well. There is a layer of besser brick surrounding the three sides, and I’m currently filling these with rubble, glass and sand to add thermal mass, as well as to use up everything I can from a demolished brick wall I was given. I’m going to fill a void between the inner and outer layers with insulation board.

My experience so far has been a bit different to what the world of oven builders has been telling me. One commonly held belief is that insulation like ceramic blanket or rockwool or ceramic board will ‘reflect’ heat back into the structure. While this is possible, there needs to be an outer layer of brick or thick mortar wrapping up the blanket in addition to the blanket itself for any reflection effect to occur. The blanket will eventually dissipate its stored heat in both directions - back in and out. If you wrap your blanket in brick on both sides, the blanket still fills with heat, but it slowly dissipates the stored heat back into thermal mass surrounding it. If you don’t wrap your insular material in thermal mass, you will ultimately allow 50% of the stored heat run out into the atmosphere. In addition, your insular material will actually be absorbing heat from the bricks next to it, contributing to a slower heat up of the oven itself. I learned this with Bertha 2, which took over 18 hours to heat from cold, and really only started to get useful after the second bake for the week. Needless to say, once I figured out our insulation mistake, I got to pull her apart and replace the insulation with brick, and this sped her heating time up by many hours.

The advantage of brick is that while it absorbs heat, it also reflects heat. If you sit beside a brick wall in the sun, you will experience how brick reflects heat. When it becomes ‘soaked’ with heat, it then becomes a heat source - it actually ‘radiates’. So you get reflection, absorption and dissipation (radiation) of heat, in that order. Brick, as a material to work with storing heat, becomes more efficient over time.

One uses ones loaf to make a decent loaf. Or so they say…

So far I’ve used the oven for my standard bakes, and have kept the oven warm over multiple days doing various tasks - slow roasting on one day and baking pizza on another. Luna can hold baking temperature without fire for a couple of hours at the moment. In fact, the top decks increase in temperature for the first six hours of firing, and continue to increase without fire for the next three hours. On some nights I have finished the bake and checked the baking chambers about 10 hours later, and they still held over 120 C. I think I can improve on this by a significant amount by just beefing up the thermal mass and adding strategic insulation in some places.

I’ve done the big stuff, now I will do the little things. Watch this space.

If you would like to experience Luna first hand, I run workshops for the general public each month. Professional baking workshops are held four times a year. Check out what’s on offer.

Post script:

Just a little update regarding Luna’s thermal performance. Since writing this article, I’ve filled in all the besser bricks with rubble, bits of brick and crusher dust. I’ve also enclosed a sleeve of air surrounding the baking chambers with brick. I’ve bagged the outer shell with mortar, and I’m half way through adding a layer of bottles covered in mortar over the top. Once this is done, I’ll paint the top section in black bituminous paint. At this point, the oven holds an average 100 degrees C some 12 hours after a full bake of about 80 or so loaves. It takes just a bit less than 3 hours to reach baking temperature from cold, though if I really want the oven to be fully ‘soaked’, I’ll pre heat for about 5 hours. I’m yet to gather data on how long the oven takes to heat from 100 degrees, but I think it should re heat in just a couple of hours. All the little bits I’ve done to make it hold heat longer are making a difference; and I can see I’ll be doing more as the need to use the oven more often grows with demand for bread. I’m also noticing that to heat the oven takes less fuel now. This is a bit unscientific, because I’m using different wood from around the farm, but the effect is still noticeable. I still don’t have enough demand to fill 2 days baking, but this will gradually build as I get out and gather more subscribers.

Reinventing the Reinvented

So here I was, camped on the farm in my caravan, waiting for things to happen with the dairy shed, which will become my classroom and bakery when it’s finished. I had all my bakery gear packed up. I didn’t have a bakery to put it in, but I did have the trailer, and a space in the shed where I could temporarily set up some of my equipment - the mixer, a fridge, a bench, and some ingredient storage shelves.

All I had to do, I figured, was to permanently install the traveling oven I took with me on the Tour Down South into the trailer, get the Coolgardie Cooler working better, and create a proofer on the trailer. Then I could bake at least a few dozen loaves at a time. This would be enough to make ‘a bit of dough’ while I was waiting for my new home to be built.

So I’m reinventing the reinvented, repurposed and recycled trailer. First it was a six by four, then it became my bakery shop and bread transporter, and then it became a mobile classroom and boudoir while I traveled the country, and now it was to become my semi mobile temporary bakery. I’m calling it the Bush Bakery II.1.

Getting the Cooler cooler

I figured that the issue with the Coolgardie Cooler was ventilation - it simply didn’t move air around inside enough for there to be any evaporative cooling effect. I decided to improve the ‘Coolgardie Coolroom’ by adding solar driven frictionless computer fans to the coolgardie screens, so that air would circulate quickly and constantly through them, and then inside the box. I installed a couple of vents to the outside of the trailer to assist with taking in air.

I had used a similar fan system in the Bush Bakery Mk I, which was adequate for holding dough cool for a day or so. Tried and tested technology, even less than perfect technology, is always a good option for me.

I purchased a 5V battery which could invert to 12 volts, and a solar panel which could be attached to the roof. I was aware that I was moving away from my ‘third world simple’ approach, which had guided me throughout the build of the Bush Bakery Mk II. Frankly, this approach had failed me with regard to the Coolgardie Cooler, so it was time to enlist some slightly more sophisticated solutions. Despite my extremely limited ability with regard to electrical wiring, the fans work very well. They will run for about 3 days without wearing out the battery. When the battery is plugged into the solar panel, running the fans rarely lowers the charge of the battery. It can be raining and cloudy for days on end and there will be no interruption to the ventilation inside the cooler.

Putting some vents into the Coolgardie Cooler

The screens in the side of the cooler were made from recycled exploded clay pellets wrapped in shade cloth, chicken mesh and hessian. I ran bleeder hoses through them so the clay could be moistened. There are hose outlets fitted so I can just plug in a regular garden hose to refill the screens with moisture. Once the screens are moistened, the fans can achieve about 5 degrees cooler than the outside ambient temperature. This isn’t enough to keep dough cool, but it shows there is an evaporative cooling effect. In future possible versions of this technology, I think I would make a lot more air move through the screens, as well as create a better plumbing system to hold water evenly through the vertical surface of the screen. For now, I have to add ice to the system to really make it work properly, particularly in summer. When there is ice in the cooler, as well as moisture in the screens, the Coolgardie Coolroom can bring the ambient temperature down by as much as 20 degrees below ambient. This is enough to keep dough cool for many hours at a time. I use repurposed plastic bottles filled with water and frozen as my ice supply. As long as there is a freezer to supply ice, I can run the cooler continuously.

Interestingly, making ice uses very little energy. If you have a domestic fridge and fill the freezer section with bottles of water, the thermal mass created as the bottles freeze actually reduces the amount of time the motor needs to run to keep it cool. I wonder if fridges harvest the cold from the freezer section to cool the fridge section - and if they don’t, why don’t they?

I gotta say, I reckon I’ve now got a ‘cool’ cooler. I’d given up on it during the Tour Down South, but with this new tweak it has become a useful piece of equipment. I can see myself modifying it a bit more down the track with the addition of more fans and more fins (timber fins to rest transit boards full of dough). Its capacity is currently just a trifle small, but I have plenty of space which I can use.

The Bush Oven installed on the trailer.

The Bush Oven becomes a weapon

Setting the oven up on the trailer in a permanent fashion was something I had been wanting to do since I was in WA on the Tour Down South. On the road, despite having all my tools on board at the time, it was just too difficult to do from a practical perspective. Now I was parked here in a paddock, it was easier. I designed the space for the oven to be postioned on the trailer to have an adjoining insulated box, similar in shape and size to the Coolgardie Cooler on the other side of the trailer. This would be warmed to become a proofer via a galvanised sheet of steel attached to the side of the oven.

The oven itself became wrapped in brick on five sides when I put it on the trailer. This was about a 400% improvement on the level of insulation I had when I set the oven up on its stand. This was the primary reason for putting it on the trailer. Theoretically, the oven would now become a very fast, well insulated baking weapon.

The first attempt at mounting the oven on the trailer was partially successful - it certainly baked a whole lot better than it did when I used it on the Tour Down South. The adjoining proofer was also a success. While it couldn’t create moisture within the box, it heated it very gently as the oven warmed up. I soon added a spirit burner stove with a saucepan of water to create steam. The proofer was very well insulated, and one load of water boiled at the start of a bake was enough to keep the proofer moist for a whole bake.

A Woodfired trailer?

My first serious bake using this setup was for a massive 90 loaves, which was during a 300 series workshop. While the oven held up to a continuous bake environment, a few hours after the bake was done I noticed a bit of smoke coming out of the trailer. The trailer actually had caught fire, and was well alight by the time I could get a hose to it!

Fortunately, I was able to put the fire out (thankfully I had a student, Jerome, hanging around after the workshop, who had a lot of patience and common sense - without him being around, I reckon I would have lost the trailer to that fire. Thanks Jerome!). It took a few hours of hose work to get to the seat of the fire, and to totally drench the trailer so it wouldn’t start again.

Adding a bit of fire blanket…

The next day I took the oven out of the trailer, and found that it had burned through the timber ‘floor’ below it. There was already 3 inches of brick under the oven, so I wasn’t expecting this brick to get so hot! I re installed the oven, this time with lots of fireproof insulation and more brick.

At the time of writing, I have re installed the oven a few more times, as I’ve built up my baking practice again. Each time I’ve refined the thermal setup. It’s now wrapped in lightweight concrete, brick and thermal blanket. And it is truly a baking weapon. It holds six loaves at a time, and can pretty much continuously bake an average of ten loaves per hour for as long as there is dough to bake. I rate this oven highly in my history of bakers’ ovens. I’ve probably baked in a dozen different types of oven over the years, and while this one doesn’t have the capacity of some others, it is great fun to use. The baker is working pretty constantly while using it, but for some reason it’s just very pleasant work. I’ve worked bigger ovens with much bigger throughput, and sometimes these ovens seem sluggish by comparison. This one is a little racing car! It requires constant attention, and can easily burn off the track, but if you keep an eye on things it goes very fast. It’s my pocket rocket.

The entire setup, the Bush Bakery Mk II.1, is also a baking weapon now. It’s very easy to control the bake, with a solar coolroom, a proofer powered by the oven, a dough area and ingredient storage all on board. I haven’t mentioned my new dough box, which is finally finished as well. It’s only used in classes, but it’s a great tool for making up to ten kilos of dough at a time. This piece of kit qualifies for another blog post! I truly now have an off grid bakery.

And now?

I’m currently in the process of doubling the output of the Bread Subscription Service. The subscription model is great because I can control growth. I take on new subscribers in a fairly planned way, in lockstep with the production capability of the bakery. The Bush Bakery Mk II.1 can comfortably bake 60 or so loaves in a session. This will be enough to keep things cashflow positive while my proper oven, Luna, gets refurbished.

My aim is to have a comfortable capacity of 100 loaves a day when the Steady State Bakery (see previous blog post) is properly functioning. This will be once again utilising my big girl, Luna. She’s currently having a rebuild by my erstwhile oven collaborator, Craig Miller of Aromatic Embers. Our expectation is that Luna will be a faster, steadier oven than she was. We’re adding a lot more thermal mass to her, as well as redoing the baffle system, the doors, and we are installing a bunch of cleaning access tubes to easily de soot her. I’m pretty excited about all this, and getting more excited as she nears completion.

As I write this entry, the dairy shed has internal walls built, some of the new ceiling done, a couple of doorways ready to have big glass doors put in, a new verandah roof over the back. The plumbing is half done, the wiring in place, and some of the insulation installed. There are soon to be two tradies working on the job, so it’s expected progress will hasten.

I do look forward to having my proper oven back, when the classroom and bakery in the dairy shed is finished. My life has felt like it’s on pause for the past six months, if I’m honest. The classroom section is getting done first, so should at least be ready in time for the next pro Sourdough 300 series workshops in May.

Subscribe, survive and thrive!

For now, I’m quite happy to bake a little bread each week for subscribers. The number of loaves baked and sold holds nice and steady. There is very little wastage. There will be growth, but in a very controlled way. Eventually 100 subscribers will be on board, as I believe the Steady State Bakery can handle these people’s total bread requirements fairly easily when it is finished. Currently I’m baking once a week, but I believe there could well be demand for another baking session or two in the schedule in the not too distant future.

Beyond this, I’m anticipating the dairy shed will be workable. Hopefully the growth of the subscription system will coincide with the work on the bakery and classroom here.

Watch this space for more about the new dairy shed, which will soon by my bakery and classroom, as it develops.

If you live in the Newcastle/lower Hunter region and would like to learn more about the subscription service I’ve now set up, here’s the link!

The birth of ANOTHER bakery - among other things.

The foothills of the Great Divide

Crossing the country and having this past year as a ‘sabbatical’ from baking commercially has led me to a number of realisations. The whole time, I’ve baked for myself and my students; I’ve had good bread to eat. Since I returned, though, something has been missing.

I’m addicted to my bread.

Addicted to bakeries?

Lets face it. I’m addicted to baking, and I’m especially addicted to my bread.

This extends into building actual bakeries so that I can make lots of the bread I really like to bake.

Like all addictions, it is multi leveled.

Firstly, I need to eat this bread. It’s like my medicine as well as food. As long as I have this bread to eat, the world, in my eyes, is okay. Even if I have very little money, I have nutrition - all I require is a piece of bread, maybe some cheese and tomato, and I am nourished. Other breads just don’t do it for me in the way mine does. Not to say there aren’t other great breads - it’s just that I’ve arrived at a very specific bread and I would like to keep having it for breakfast. And lunch, if possible. Occasionally dinner is okay as well.

Then, the addiction to the process of baking it kicks in. Baking provides a weekly rhythm, something to structure your day around. The process is its own reward - a good bake, and you are on top of the world. Of course, a bad one is somewhat less than ideal, and a number of bad ones in a row can be soul destroying. Luckily, there are more good bakes than bad ones.

Finally, the addiction to the financial reward can’t be ignored. When I bake each week, even just 30 loaves or so, there is cashflow. When you are a micro business, regular cashflow is everything. Before I moved from Ellalong, I was baking a few hundred loaves at a time, and this provided the bulk of my regular income. Now the weekly bake makes up a small but important part; teaching, consulting and training make up the rest.

Oh for a ‘Steady State’…and I don’t mean politics!

Some ideas pass naturally, while others persist - or more correctly they mutate in my mind.

I’ve been in the food business now for over 30 years - and for the past 29 I’ve been involved with bakeries and cafes. I’ve been wondering about energy use that whole time. I’ve experienced, lamented and deeply pondered food waste. Another issue to fill my grey matter has been wear and tear on bakery equipment.

After a while these three categories of problem morphed into a single simple solution. I want to establish what I call a ‘steady state bakery’. The idea is a bakery which produces the same basic amount every day. It doesn’t grade up production on one day to wind it down on others. It won’t be ‘market driven’ - like most bakeries are, as they surf the highs and lows of bakery production life.

I’ve written about this subject in earlier blog posts right here. Scroll backward and you’ll pick up multiple references.

All machines, and I’m including a bakery as a machine, are designed for optimal conditions of use. Then they are tweaked to extend the conditions to make them operate in real world conditions. When a machine is dynamic, it wears out more quickly.

A stable machine wears less, and consumes less energy. When a machine operates at the same pace all the time, stresses and strains are minimised on the componentry. They last longer and consume less energy.

Humans are different. They don’t mind work, but they need rest. And they need rhythm. Humans do well with a combination of routine and rest. Any human centered machine has to factor in humans.

My past two production setups have been specifically designed to supply weekend markets. This means that they bake large volumes on just one or two days a week. The rest of the time, they are either dormant, or being used for teaching, consulting or pre production work. So each week the machine gets wound up, stretched beyond capacity, and then wound down again.

A baker commits to the market each week, whether it is on or not. They work days in advance as they go about their routine, and by market day they are simply loading their freshly baked bread into their vans to meet their customers and to get paid for their work. If it rains and the market is cancelled; their payday just disappears. Then, the word wastage takes on a whole new meaning!

Every bakery has a lot of production variables; the seasons, new customers, wholesale business orders, local trading conditions, bakery competition, weekend markets and much more. Thus, all these variables inevitably lead to bread waste, and volatility.

A bakery, then, is usually a highly dynamic machine. Dynamic machines are prone to failure.

The ‘steady state’ bakery is different; it’s meant to produce the same amount of bread each bake - each day, week or month. It’s a machine with a daily rhythm based around repetition. It’s designed for a particular volume - nothing more. It doesn’t get ‘pushed’.

By doing this, there are many benefits. The machine doesn’t have to work hard - it just works the same amount each time to get the job done. Thus, the machine lasts longer and uses less energy. The more often it works, the less energy it requires in proportion to the output. The machine can be scaled up or down according to requirements, but in a planned way.

With a daily and weekly rhythm in a Steady State Bakery (SSB), there is a curious bi product; learning happens through repetition. The bake is a series of processes which are done at specific times, each with its own set of KPI. The only person who needs an overview is the baker. Through working with the processes, helpers gradually understand the overview; through learning all of the processes involved in a hands on way, humans involved piece together the whole picture, little by little. So a SSB is also a great environment for learning processes.

Another advantage of an SSB is being able to properly plan for the bakery’s resource use. Things like fuel, ingredient supply and freight all are best delivered in steady amounts, not only from the bakery’s perspective, but also from a logistics point of view.

Still another benefit is to be able to concentrate on reducing the environmental damage which a bakery can create. A SSB makes it easier to have a cause and effect solution put in place as there are no extremities to take into account.

Subscription baking - bread as a service

Every baker loves to set production levels to suit ourselves and our equipment. These levels should also enable us to make a crust. (:))

We have to find homes for all that bread we are baking - we definitely don’t want waste. As mentioned earlier, supplying markets leads to waste, one way or another.

To achieve steady production and sale of bread, with as close as possible to zero waste, I decided to set up a subscription system. Customers ‘subscribe’ to my baking and delivery service. By purchasing multiple loaves in advance, subscribers save money. They are bulk buying, with the convenience of having just a loaf or two delivered when they want it.

The bakery gets the benefit of steady customers and cash flow every week. And ‘planned by demand’ baking, so that only the amount ordered is supplied. The bakery works by the batch, the size of which is determined by the number of subscribers at any given time. There is always a degree of guesswork in determining the batch size each week, but the risk of wastage is reduced dramatically when compared to baking for a market which could be cancelled at the last minute.

My first attempt at subscription baking was about 8 years ago when the bakery was in Newcastle West. The model worked really well, but I moved into opening that bakery for retail business, and just outgrew the subscription model.

This time, the plan is to stick with subscriber based retail and incorporate it into the fabric of the School of Sourdough. A Steady State Bakery which is also a school, driven by subscribers.

In a bit of a departure from the original plan, I’ve included the possibility of resellers or ‘value adders’ being able to access the service. This means if you have a cafe or a shop or a food co-op, you can also subscribe. At the time of writing, we have two retail outlets on board, allowing the general public to buy bread on a whim. There is space in the system for more businesses to subscribe to the service, so those of you who want next level bread locally can get it without actually subscribing - all you need to do is to convince your local cafe or health food store to subscribe for you!

I’ll go into the new range of services in a separate blog post very soon. If you’re interested in becoming one of our Newcastle and Hunter Valley region subscribers, here’s the link!

Another Nullabor Crossing - and time to analyse the 'Erratics'.

The west had entered my veins. I was a long way from the Hunter Valley. Yet I felt at home. I understand now why Western Australians have a different presence, a kind of WA attitude. They understand how damn big this country is, because they experience it more often than maybe us East Coast folk do.

I decided to head back to Perth for a few more days. I had a bit more free time before I was due to embark on the return Nullabor crossing, on my way to Mildura, and then on to the central west of NSW. After that, home sweet home - which is actually not even built yet, so I guess I could look forward to more ‘glamping’ in my caravan when I got back. That’s a story for another blog post.

Perth is an interesting place. It’s like a kind of ‘tiny city’ - you know, in the same way that you can have a ‘tiny house’. It’s not quite a city, but all the props are in place. There are not that many people there - and they are really spread out. Perth is a collection of suburbs. A quick visit to the ABS website verifies this; while Western Australia has about a person per square kilometer or less in most places. Perth’s population density is going up. Drilling a bit deeper, the city population density is not that much less than Sydney’s per square kilometer, but the actual ‘city hub’ of Perth is about three blocks in area. You could crawl it from one side to the other and still have workable knees. While Perth has been growing, it is a captive of the mining economy - it’s a kind of ‘boom and bust’ town. The fortunes of the place are intricately tied up with the fortunes of the mining business. When I was there, the mining business was on the wane, so property prices were also on the wane. Nonetheless, the place looked and felt prosperous and on the whole, positive.

I was pretty enamoured with Fremantle. It feels a bit ‘make believe’, but it was a kind of make believe I could buy into. There was a thriving city ‘market’ economy - the whole place seemed to revolve around the Freo market, which operates four days a week; the town kind of spills out from the market and onto the marina and foreshore; or if you go the other way, into past millenia, a foot friendly village with a plethora of things like bookshops and curiosity stuff to explore. Cars were clearly not invented when they built this place.

So Freo was funky; a place where they have taken tourism seriously from a brand point of view. It’s has a working harbour, like Newcastle in the Hunter region (where I’ve spent the last decade or so). It felt familiar, but with the sun coming up and going down on the wrong side of the harbour. A great place to visit. Not sure how it would be to live there; more research will be needed. Not planning on relocating any time soon, but this side of the country has certain attractions.

After a few days relaxing and hanging out, I ventured back towards the Nullabor. I think I got a bit freaked out by the vastness of the journey - literally crossing the country again, with that bloody enormous plain at the beginning. Now I knew the distances involved, and was better prepared. Nonetheless, the journey home still daunted me. I hadn’t considered the final leg of the trip very much - bookings and venues for workshops were flowing in slowly for this part of the Tour Down South, but a fair bit of the organising was still not complete, as I was doing it on the fly, waiting for people to get back to me in many cases. Thus, I decided to cancel any workshops that didn’t have people booked into them as yet. This meant that I had plenty of time to get all the way from Perth to Mildura in NSW.

Perth campsite after a spot of rain - we got hammered!

One thing the Nullabor provides is headspace. Whether this is a good thing or not I’m not sure. On those long, grinding stretches of flat earth, my mind wandered around the cosmos of flickering thoughts in my head, looking for a thought to grab a hold of, and pull apart. Like the ubiquitous crows on the side of the tarmac, picking away at the recently deceased victims of the road, my mind struggled to stay with one thought long enough to get a proper feed.

It’s believed by those folk who gave us Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, that on any given day, we have somewhere in the vicinity of 50,000 individual thoughts - though many overlap with others. The thoughts we grab a hold of are the ones that set the tone for our mood - so if you grab a hold of the hard things, the things that aren’t resolved, or the things that can’t be resolved, you can end up in a bad mood, or even depressed. On the other hand, if we simply watch our thoughts go by, without attaching to any one of them, we remain productive and positive.

I tried to employ this technique, but found myself returning to the ‘too hard basket’ over and over again. I was that crow who finds a carcass on a busy stretch of highway. Every time he (or she) goes to get a decent peck of it, a car comes and he (or she) has to get out of the way, or risk being flattened. One of the things in this particular basket was the Erratic Bread Syndrome I’ve been documenting for the past few posts. Try as I might, I seemed to be unable to isolate any single variable. Was it the WA water? Was it my starter? Was it the flour? Was it my oven? Was it the firewood?

The analysis of variables wasn’t helping at all - there were too many moving parts to this particular issue for me to be able to confidently isolate any one part to have a proper look at it. So I began to compare what I was working with at present to what I usually worked with at my own bakery in the Hunter Valley. There were a number of things which were different. At home, I had refrigeration. I had rainwater. I had the same flour all the time. I had the same fuel for the oven (I purchased sawmill offcuts in large amounts, which gradually seasoned as the year progressed). In short, I had a pretty consistent setup. This meant that I could change one thing and see the effect straight away. Or, if something like the weather changed, I had the ability to mitigate the effects via refrigeration and timing.

Timing. I hadn’t really looked at timing. I have all sorts of charts which I’ve gradually developed over the years at the bakery. These charts gave me a pretty good idea of how long dough takes to ripen at different temperatures, and at different stages of the proofing process. They weren’t super accurate, but in constant conditions they worked well. I didn’t have constant conditions now. I had ambient temperatures, and these varied quite a bit. I could knock five or maybe ten degrees off the ambient temp using ice and fans in my Coolgardie Coolroom, but this wasn’t enough to really get control of the leavening process.

I was aware of an issue with regard to the time I made the dough for the classes. In order to get some fresh bread out of the oven by the end of the workshop (in winter), I needed longer than 8 hours for the whole process, yet the workshop was only 8 hours long. I hadn’t been able to make dough a few hours before the class began, because this would mean making dough before first light. While this was achievable sometimes, more often than not on the road it wasn’t. I often didn’t have anything more than torchlight to work with; I also had to fully set up the bakery to make dough - water, benches, flour and so forth. When camping in caravan parks, cheek by jowl with a neighbour, the sound of me banging around at sparrows fart wasn’t something the neighbours took kindly to.

In addition, usually I would have to tow my trailer into the venue just before the workshop and set up. I then had to assemble the portable oven and generally work fast to get it all done before people arrived. I rarely had access to venues the day before; if I did, I would make the dough in the evening before I went to bed, The plan was to keep it cool overnight so that it would be optimally ripe for the class the next day. If it was a cold night, the dough kept. If it wasn’t, the dough would be on the edge of being over ripe by the time we would get into it with the group. So here was something I hadn’t properly thought through in my planning, and it wasn’t something I could easily fix.

Another bloody variable! Timing! I was kinda hoping to get to some resolution of the issue as I crossed the Nullabor, but instead I was adding in more complexity.

It was easier to angst over other things. It really was. So my mind went through all sorts of stuff - you name it, I thought around it; relationships, the state of my vehicle, the health of the animals, my kids, my family, the weather, my own health, reviewing the trip, money, what I will do when I get back, and on it went. Fifty thousand thoughts each day.

It takes at least three days to cross the Nullabor. It takes another three days to traverse the rest of South Australia, and then another day or two to cross into NSW. I considered doing a quick trip up to Broken Hill, but I had a full group at the Mildura workshop, so I decided to save that for next time.

Red Cliffs farming on very dry land. These are Joanne’s pistachio crop. Pistachios grow for 100 years!

Crossing the Murray river provided me with my first actual desert experience. The Nullabor is a plain, not a desert. Life is everywhere, intensely, on the Nullabor. But crossing back into South Australia, right next to the Murray river, I got a taste of actual desert. This surprised me. I was heading into Berri, the fruit and wine capital of the country. I was looking at vast areas of flat land, which once grew fruit or grapes. Not any more. Now it’s a vast empty place. I was confronted by a dust storm so thick that vehicles had to pull over till it passed. It was a struggle to see further than the bonnet of the car. It was intense. I got the feeling that this was a desert made by man. It was brutal.

Some of the team at Red Cliffs Community Centre. That’s Joanne on the left.

My next workshop was at Red Cliffs, just outside Mildura. A lovely little town, with civic pride flowing through its veins. I was meeting up with Joanne Farrel, who ran the local community centre, along with many other community ventures. She was a tonic after the journey I had just survived - down to earth, practical and clearly a community asset. We had me all set up and sorted out in her back shed within a few hours, and I was keen to get some preparation happening for my next workshop, after thinking about it for the past week or two amongst the fifty thousand other thoughts I had been observing per day as I traveled.

The Bush Bakery, out in the shed at Red Cliffs

It was a great workshop, with keen locals picking my brain in every direction. The bread was better - I had purchased some block ice locally, which meant that I could keep my dough sufficiently cold to get it through the workshop without breaking down. So this was an improvement. Perhaps thinking about timing was helping - either that, or that bloody big block of ice!

This flour mill in Temorah no longer operates, but they’ve kept the lettering fresh!

I had a bit of time up my sleeve before the workshop in Bathurst, so I decided to swing through Temorah on the way. I had been there only once before, some 40 years earlier. Back then, it was a tiny outpost ‘hanging on’, as best it could. I was surprised to see how the town had changed and adapted - if anything, it was a thriving small town now.

As the trip wound its way through lots of small and medium sized country towns right across the country, I started to get a sense of how different towns and regions cope with change. Many of them have given over to the relentless shopping mall - these towns seem to have lost a bit of their soul as a result. The mall sucks the life out of the main drag, and these places look and feel like every other place. Uniform, featureless. Samey.

Not Temorah though. It has embraced its history, and resisted the urge to allow the corporates to reinvent the place. You can see it in the way the town still has a viable main street. Lots of old buildings, remnants of the town’s history, not only still stand, but have been tarted up a bit, despite their function no longer being required. For this reason, Temorah still feels ‘real’. I felt heartened by this.

It was late August. The weather had been gradually warming up, and I thought the worst of winter was behind me now. I was wrong. When I got to Bathurst, I set my ‘boudoir’ up at a mate’s little farmlet at Dunkeld. I chose a spot out the back overlooking the rolling hills. I hadn’t expected to be brutalised by cold, but one night there and I had my tail between my legs. The temperature dropped to below zero overnight, and in the morning I stepped out to find the ground was covered in sleet. The creatures, particularly Mishka, were not impressed.

This is what a frozen tarpaulin looks like.

It was a bit of a surprise, as I’d already rolled up the extra blankets, thinking I wouldn’t be needing them. Me and the creatures had spent the night huddling together for warmth. Lesson: never take the weather for granted.

Bathurst is a larger regional town - quite spread out these days - but somehow, despite the aforementioned ‘corporate mall sprawl’, it has retained its character. The main streets are wide and interconnected, and the city seems to have retained its heart. I went to school there back in the 70s. My memory of the place back then isn’t all that positive - it was smaller, but kind of disjointed. It still is, in a way, but it retains its unique character, and that’s nice.

They have a great wholefoods co op there, and there seems to be a bit of an ‘alternate’ community growing along nicely in the town. I had originally planned to run two workshops there - one at the food co op, and the other at a place called the Rahamim Ecology Centre. I hadn’t seen the food co op before I visited this time, but upon inspecting the venue, I could see it was going to be difficult to set up there, due to my lengthy set up process. The food co op was inside a small shopping mall, and getting the Bush Bakery and Boudoir in there with my animals, my trailer and me was going to be a stretch. I wanted to avoid setting up before dawn, so I needed to camp there to have enough time to set up. I decided to combine the two workshops at the Rahamim Centre instead.

The Bush Bakery at the Rahamim Centre.

The Rahamim Centre was just out of town, at a church sanctuary. It had a working permaculture community garden, a lovely outdoor BBQ and pizza area, and it was really easy to access with my trailer.

Prior to the workshop, I made a small batch of dough at my friend’s house and baked it. Very ordinary bread resulted, leaving me less than confident that all my analysis was getting me anywhere at all. I was feeling incredibly disheartened, and still confused as to what was going wrong!

The workshop proceeded well despite my feelings. The bitter cold, though, crept in as the day progressed. We were outside, and despite a ferocious fire in the Bush Oven, keeping warm proved to be quite difficult. It took me straight back to school days, and memories of Bathurst’s brutal winters. Baking in this weather brought challenges that I hadn’t had to worry about for a while, but everything seemed to run smoothly, and we got reasonably good bread out of the Bush Oven, well ahead of the finish of the workshop. Once again I was unable to really get a good ‘bloom’ out of the dough - despite my best efforts at timing the whole process correctly.

By now, though, the jigsaw puzzle of variables was slowly starting to make sense. Just as well, too, as it was the last workshop of the Tour Down South!

I looked at the list of variables so far. The starter was good. The flour was consistent. The water was fine. The timber for the oven was well seasoned and flamed well.

On the other hand, timing was difficult here, as the cold weather meant that dough ripened slowly. I had made dough the night before, and this dough ended up being at least twelve hours old by the time we processed it. While I couldn’t accurately record the temperature over the entirety of the first proof, it was somewhere in the vicinity of 15 to 20 degrees on average for the time it was stored.

The sponge, or pre ferment, was made with very cold water (hot water was a hassle from a camping point of view) and while it was partially active when I made the dough, it could have had significantly more time.

And in the extreme cold, the oven’s lack of insulation showed quite dramatically. The shape of the loaves wasn’t ‘even’ - a problem I hadn’t encountered since Tiff’s place at Esperance. This could only mean that certain parts of the oven weren’t getting as hot as others. They were higher at the back of the oven than they were nearest the door.

My take home message from this bake, and from the last section of the Tour Down South, was the Bush Bakery needed to have better temperature control. The Coolgardie Coolroom was, at this time, a failure; it couldn’t bring the dough down to ten degrees C or less, and I think this would have been optimal for timing things to work in a one day workshop setting. Had I been able to make the dough at 3am, for example, things may have been different - but when your baking day starts at 3 in the morning and finishes at 6pm in the evening, it’s a bloody long day! I refused to destroy myself for the sake of a few loaves of bread! Been there, done that!

The night lights of Bathurst from the Bush Bakery.

Temperature control would also have solved the starter ripeness issue too. While I believe the starter didn’t suffer as badly as a result of being held at between 15 and 20 degrees C most of the time when compared to how dough fared at the same temps, it still meant that I had to feed it more often than was ideal. Dough starter keeps fantastically well at cooler temps - below 15 at the very least - and performs best when it’s nicely ripe. I’m forever telling my students NOT to overfeed the starter! Without proper cooling, feeds had to be more frequent, and this in turn caused the ‘bed’ of ripe starter to vary in size quite a bit. As a result, the starter tends to become a bit less acid than ideal.

The Coolgardie Coolroom couldn’t bring dough temperatures down enough for overnight storage. Why was this important? Well, at 20 degrees, a dough will ripen in about 6 hours or so. My dough, on this occasion, had gone for 12 to 15 hours - way too long. Because of the cold ambient temperatures, it didn’t actually ‘break down’, as it might have done in summer, but nonetheless it was pretty much spent by the time we cut it.

Another important take away from all of this is to keep a proper Baker’s Diary, particularly when you are experiencing changes to your baking routine. I teach this all the time, but it seems I hadn’t been heeding my own lesson on this trip. Had I kept detailed records of everything that was happening, I think I could have got to the bottom of the problem much sooner than I did.

In the diary, one needs to record the time when different stages in the process take place, from pre ferment to finished loaf of bread. You also need some temperature data - ambient temperatures (approximate) as well as internal dough temperatures. You need to keep details like general observations as you work through the process. How does the dough feel? Did it feel ripe when you cut it? Was it stiff? Did the flour hold more water than usual? What type of flour are you using? Details. Keep it brief, and keep it in a format that’s easy to reference later. Record things like the date, season, flour types, and if you use different formulations, record which ones you are using. It’s hard to do this stuff when your hands are covered in dough, and it’s inconvenient sometimes. If your process is sorted, and you rarely change it, make sure you have a templated version of your process written down. You don’t have to make diary entries every time, especially if little changes between batches - but if there are changes, it is especially important to note them. Otherwise, like me, you might spend a lot of mental energy trying to figure stuff out. The brain is faulty, from a memory perspective, which is why you need to make sure you have written it down! In my case, I waited until I was thoroughly confused before I began to break things into bits and pieces - and as someone who has done this for 30 years, well, I should have simply assumed that with all the changes I was making, there was going to be a problem or three.

Another thing for me to work on was my oven. It did work quite well on the trip, but because of the need for it to be lightweight, a lack of insulation and thermal mass made the oven perform differently in different weather conditions. I would never have expected this to have as big an effect as it did, but now I’m looking at it again with the benefit of hindsight, this was a factor in the Erratic Bread Syndrome.

Now that I had crossed the country and returned in one piece, and the Tour Down South was pretty much done and dusted, I could assess things more carefully. As Rob from Perth said, it was a ballsy (foolhardy?) thing to do. Most of the ‘completely off the grid’ technology I chose to work with in my setup - the bakery trailer with its Coolgardie Coolroom/ spirit burner proofer, the wood fired Bush Oven and the rest of it - was completely untested. Add to that the double function of the trailer as my ‘boudoir’ along the way, being towed by an 18 year old Toyota Landcruiser, and you have a recipe for, at the very least, adventure. Most of my inventions worked reasonably well, with the exception of the Coolgardie Coolroom (and I have since redesigned this with a degree of success).

On the Tour Down South, I had traveled some 14,000 kilometers across some pretty harsh and unforgiving country; I ran 13 sourdough workshops for a total of about a hundred people; I did a demonstration bake, and two bakery consultations: I took my animals along for the ride, and camped in a totally self sufficient way the whole time. I made running repairs and improvements to everything as I went, and by the time the tour was done I had ironed out the functional issues around the setup I had designed and built.Oh, and along the way I baked a couple of hundred loaves of bread as well!

I set myself a particularly tricky brief, especially when you add the extra challenge of the Bush Bakery being made almost entirely from recycled or repurposed equipment. My animals and I survived. We all ate, slept and played well. I got to hang out with some dear friends all over the country, and there are a whole bunch of new home bakers now who have begun to make great bread themselves. The ideas which drove me to do this have been tested, reassessed, and passed on. I learned a lot about my craft, and about myself. I saw parts of the country I probably wouldn’t have in other circumstances, and I did it all on an absolute shoestring.

The Tour Down South, and the story about it, is now ‘a wrap’. If you’ve just picked up on the story, please take the time to wind back a few posts and read the whole thing - it’ll make more sense. In future posts, I’ll show you what I’ve now done to the Bush Bakery to make it a fully functioning off grid mobile bakery. I’ve been using it this past coupe of months since I returned as my micro bakery, while I await the finished construction of my new (stationary) bakery and classroom here in an old dairy in the hills of Wallarobba.

Thanks for hanging in to the end! I hope this story has inspired you to do something crazy as well!

Coming to grips with 'Erratic Bread Syndrome' at Yirri Grove

The Nullabor, twisted by me, in a camera.

The final workshop for the Esperance leg of the trip was held at Yirri Grove Olive plantation, out on the other side of good old Esperance.

I love the twist and turns of this journey; how they continue to surprise me. Plain sailing was never the objective of this trip. Nor was it expected, with an eighteen year old car and a recycled bakery shop being towed about fourteen thousand kilometers while crossing the seventh largest continent on earth. Not to mention a Kelpie canine and a Burmese feline who both ‘volunteered’ to ride with me. Esperance

We’re going WHERE?

(It was an open discussion between us. I did the talking and they did the listening.)

The Tour Down South was to dive in a deep pool of unknowns; and to have a go at something I hadn’t done before.

I often delude myself that I have been the inventor of lots of things in the bread world, or that I was the first one to do a particular thing. Pretty much every time I begin to think this, somebody from the other side of either the world or Australia lets me know that in fact this thing has been done centuries ago. Nonetheless, I’m still pretty sure I’m the first person to take a wood fired bakery across Australia and back on a six by four trailer. Please, prove me wrong!

One of my clients in Perth called my idea to do this trip ‘ballsy’. At the time, I wondered how he could see it that way. I mean, a coolroom powered by the breeze, and a wood fired oven, some flour, some firewood. No water. What could possibly go wrong? And if something did go wrong, well, I could turn to YouTube for help, like everyone else does. Or Instagram. Or Facebook.

We are never alone, even when we are in the middle of the Nullabor.

(Except, of course, there is no internet in the middle of the Nullabor. ‘Null’ means ‘none’. We are not talking a little ‘none’ here either. We are talking a big ‘none’. You have no idea how big ‘big’ is, but I’ll return to that idea later.)

Now I was on my way to Yirri Grove Olives, where Anne O’Neill ran a small plantation and pressing facility. They also have a cafe there, just past the wetlands of Esperance.

This is a place where there is a sign on the side of the road which keeps drivers updated daily as to the condition of the roads in the area. It’s not uncommon to lose a road or track due to various reasons - the tides, the changeable (and very windy) weather and so forth. The sign at the edge of it helps locals and visitors keep up to date on daily conditions.

I’m ushered into a large awning behind the cafe, plenty of space for the Bush Bakery MkII and my coterie of creatures. Being protected from the elements in this elemental place was a relief.

We are immediately accosted by a noisy crew of guinea fowl, who come charging down to the fence beside the awning to let us know they were on the job, and not to try anything stupid. Immediately, my kelpie Pippa is fascinated. She’s a cattle dog, and these are like cattle fowl. I think she was impressed. Or confused. Or both.

Here’s Anne, looking blurry. That’s because I’M blurry.

Anne and her husband are truly the most welcoming folk I think I have ever met. From the moment I arrived to the moment I left three days later, I was embraced like family. This experience of ‘welcoming the stranger’ has proved to be a profound one for me. Everywhere I stayed across the continent, I felt like a stranger; and yet, was welcomed almost universally. There were exceptions, which may well be expanded upon in some other blog at some other time. On this night, me and my family of furry friends were made welcome. We rested well.

The time gap between workshops was minimal. It took me back to ‘working’ as a musician back in the day. Pack it up, and set it up again somewhere else. Do it fast, and do it efficiently, so you can do it again. Breakfast hospitality was new, and welcome - so much so that before I knew it I had another dozen keen bread makers waiting on me to finish setting up!

At this workshop, I stumbled on another clue which would eventually lead me to solve the riddle of the ‘Erratic Bread Syndrome’ which had been plaguing me of late. For the past few workshops and bake offs, I had mixed results - which have been discussed in this blog on numerous occasions. Some breads I had baked along the way were okay, some were pretty good, and some were atrocious. I just couldn’t seem to get it consistently right. It would have been easier to solve the problem if the bread had been consistently bad - but the mixed results made it harder to work out where the issues were.

Thus far, I had observed that my list of variables was huge - variable flour, variable water, variable temperature and variable weather. Indeed, the entire trip had been one variable after another. So my breads were simply following suit. But how could I grab this thing by the tail and get control of it?

I was pursueing this process of ‘reducing variables’ when it occurred to me that the age of my starter between feeds was also a variable. I would sometimes go a couple of weeks between bakes, and as such I would simply keep the desem (dough starter) cool as best I could - but feeds were fairly irregular, and temperatures varied quite a lot as well. My ‘coolgardie’ style evaporative cooler was next to useless.

The first incarnation of the ‘Coolgardie Coolroom’.

(As you might not have been following this story, I’ll explain. I designed the Bush Bakery MkII to be as ‘off the grid’ as possible. I reasoned that a simple evaporative cooler, a la the ‘Coolgardie Safe’ crossed with a ‘zeer pot’ would work well enough to store dough and sourdough starter in the middle of Winter crossing the desert.)

I went through lots of evolutions in thinking about this idea of an ‘evaporative coolroom’, until I ended up with something that was capable of being both a cooler and a proofer. It had expanded clay balls from an aquaculture setup contained in screens along the walls, which were filled with water via a bleed hose. The water, theoretically, evaporated from the clay pellets via airflow, which came through the walls as the trailer moved through the air. It was like an automatic evaporator, which was supposed to reduce the temperature of the air.

When I wanted to 'proof’ (warm) the dough just prior to baking, I simply added a spirit burner (a ‘trangia’ alcohol burner) and a plate of water mounted on top, which warmed up the box and created steam. As far as this side of the equation was concerned, the proofer worked a treat. The cooler, on the other hand, could at the very best remove 5 degrees c from the air temp. I concluded that there wasn’t enough air flow to really circulate the air. My plumber’s skills were also lacking, as I couldn’t get the bleed hoses to work properly in the screens.

THe ‘Coolgardie Coolroom’ in proofer mode.

As I write this blog post some months later, and I can tell you that I’ve now made the cooler work via a small solar powered battery and some low friction computer fans mounted in the walls. These work pretty well, but when I was on the road the ‘coolgardie coolroom’ side of things was an impediment. I had resorted to purchasing ice on a regular basis to keep starter and food cool on the road. This meant that the starter could swing from under ripe to overripe quite quickly.

As I traveled, there was not always the facility (decent water, relatively enclosed space and good weather) to set up the mobile bakery and feed the starter.

The starter had been fed just before the last bake at Bread Local. It had been getting quite a bit of a workout, actually, with three bakes in just a few days. So that eliminated another variable.

In the workshop, we made dough as a group, using a few techniques which enable people to be able to make dough cleanly almost anywhere, including out in the bush where there might not even be any table! Our doughs worked really well, though were not ripe in time to bake in the wood fired oven.

Because I had been experiencing ‘Erratic Bread Syndrome’, I pre made some dough the day before the workshop so the students could bake it on the day. This was like a kind of insurance policy; the dough may go off too quickly, or not at all, so ‘here’s one I prepared earlier’ came to be my primary backup. I also shaped some dough ready to bake; I really didn’t expect it to last in the faulty cooler. When I checked it in the morning, it had skinned, and, miraculously, somehow it seemed to be in good condition, beyond the skin that it had formed. The ‘skin’ is normally a negative, but in this case it was holding the batards together in the cooler.

As I mentioned earlier, there were lots of layers of preparation for this class - I was determined to remove baking risk. We baked various stages of dough that day, fresh dough, overnight proofed dough, and pre formed dough - unsurprisingly, with mixed results. Some were okay, but there were also some flat ones.

The mystery deepened. It didn’t seem to matter how much preparation I did - how many ‘insurance policies’ I made to ensure I had some decent bread for my students. I still was having failures, and that meant I was still struggling to figure out which of my variables was causing the problem.

I had removed another variable as well - I had returned to using Wholegrain Milling flour, thanks to Tiff using it at her bakery. I knew wholegrain milling’s flour, so I bought a bag from Tiff’s supply (thanks Tiff!) before I left. Prior to this I used whatever I could get at the local supermarket. I was confident I could work with many different types of flour, but this was proving to add a variable.

So two variables eliminated now.

Water, temperature and weather remained variables to be dealt with. I may never get on top of the last one; but if I do, there’s an excellent subject for another blog post!

It seemed like I had still had numerous problems, all at the same time. It never rains, as they say. Until it pours.

The Bush Oven, insulated by the use of some firebricks and terracotta pots placed on top.

I was becoming more aware of the limitations of my Bush Oven. It had very little insulation, and so was dependent on constant fire to achieve good results. In a workshop situation, this is a hard ask, as it can become a full time job just keeping the fire at the right pitch. I can rarely do both things - keep a fire running well and teach a group of people - simultaneously. Often, a compromise involving intense fire activity interspersed with none whatsoever, was reached. Not what the scientist in me would call ‘consistent’. So add this to the ever growing list of variables in my current baking practice. Occasionally I would delegate a member of the group to this task of ‘keeping the flame that never will die’, but the finesse involved ends up becoming too much for the student. They too struggle to attend the class and run the fire at the same time. This technique was also flawed, but it did help when I had a good firekeeper.

Just another variable to absorb in the problem solving process - firewood!

To add to this, different locations offered up different timbers. This place had a legendary fuel, mallee root, which many people rave about. I used to have access to it in the Blue Mountains from time to time - we had a firewood fetcher fella who would bring it down every year for us, and with my slow combustion fuel stove (which warmed the house at Medlow Bath back in the day), Mallee root burned as hot as coal, and as long lasting. I thought it was amazing, and got it whenever our wood fetcher had it. This time around, though, my little baker’s oven didn’t like it at all, as it generated lots of hot coal. The Bush Oven (in fact all of the ovens I’ve designed), prefers flame. The flame pushes the flue gas more efficiently all the way around the baking chamber. Hot coals, on the other hand, tend to make the bottom deck too hot, and the top deck gets too cold.

Some timbers are better at delivering flame than others, and these were not always plentiful. As they say; ‘You pays your money and you takes your chances’. So yes, firewood quality was another variable I had to deal with.

Reduce two variables, Starter and Flour; and discover another two, the Oven and Firewood. Two steps forward, and two steps back. Could it be that I have discovered the ‘Bakery Two step’ ?

After the workshop, I decided to process some of the leftover dough we had made that day - I had a hot oven; why waste the heat? I asked Anne and her husband to swing by later for an extended bake off. The oven had been running for many hours by now. I processed the dough through the second proof, and shaped some dough the students had left as well. By the time Anne and her husband came with wine and cheese and, of course, olives, all the dough had been shaped and was proofing nicely. I baked off some mini baguettes and some batards. All were sensational. The shape held, and the crust and crumb were both very acceptable. It had been the best bake I had done since before Perth. So what was I doing right?

Mini Baguettes and some batards.

We already established I had fresher starter. So one variable didn’t play into the results of the day. Secondly, I was now using consistent flour, rather than whatever I could get at the supermarket along the way. Another variable under control. Third thing: the water had changed. Some of it had been filtered and treated with light, which was how it worked here at Anne’s orchard, and this tasted pretty clear. The water I had used throughout the west had tasted like clay, almost without exception. Some of the dough made at this workshop was made using ‘clear’ water; but some of it had been made a day earlier, which hadn’t been filtered in the same way.

Thus, the quality of water wasn’t necessarily part of the solution here. Nonethless, if I was going to solve problems, understanding all the variables was essential - it was a large list, and getting larger and more complex as I went along. Changes in water quality were still a potential contributor. So I filled all my tanks with this clear water. I had about 60 litres all up, so this would have to last me until the next time I could load up with good water. I had a trip across the Nullabor, and my next workshop a full two weeks away, near Mildura back in Victoria. So I was most likely to use most of this water before I would make dough again. At least this time, I would have nice water on board to cross the desert!

(Last Nullabor crossing, the water I drank was ‘whatever was available’, - hadn’t allowed for enough storage capacity on the trailer - local water was often undrinkable. I had since added more water storage.)

I still managed to reserve about 10 litres of clean water for dough in Victoria, so that keeps that variable at bay for a little while!

So at Yirri Grove workshop it was back to Great bread. Since I’ve crossed the border into WA, it’s been Crap bread, Great bread, Crap bread, Mediocre bread, Great bread. The Erratic Bread Syndrome continues.

With two variables removed, another mitigated against, and quite a few more identified, I was actually feeling like I was making forward progress. Onward across the Nullabor one more time. I had the mental strength necessary to do it this time. I was getting used to life on the road. It was making me stronger.

Esperance with BreadLocal - and I'm all mixed up!

So it was off to Esperance. I’d been averaging a workshop every couple of weeks so far. Suddenly I was flat out. In Esperance I had a busy itinerary, with two Bush Baking workshops and a demonstration bake to do; all in the space of about a week. In addition, I had to cast an eye over BreadLocal’s home based microbakery.

BreadLocal is the brainchild of Tiff Brown, who came to study with me some years back. She has continued her study of bread and pastry production processes in multiple countries over the whole time, and now creates sourdough loaves and croissants which are second to none. I was looking forward to catching up and seeing what was going on for her production wise. She had a few questions and things to try while I was there. It was going to be a fun week!

Tiff runs her bakery on a Market Master woodfired oven which was designed by Craig Miller and myself. Hers was a late ‘pre production’ prototype, but you wouldn’t know it. It is a very well thought through piece of wood fired cooking equipment. My own oven, Luna, was the third generation prototype which, via a couple of other ovens, led to this one. Campared to mine, Tiff’s oven is streets ahead.

The Market Master firebox blazes!

This was the first time I had ever seen her oven in the flesh, though Craig always sends me plans and fabrication pictures. There in Tiff’s nearly complete bakery, the Market Master looks formidable. I’m immediately jealous.

Tiff had been having some issues with steam generation in her oven. The system Craig developed has evolved from the one I have in my oven. Hers is certainly a better looking setup, with nice stainless water cylinders and proper plumbing. Tiff, however, wasn’t happy with it. She needed substantially more than the oven was generating.

Tiff loads from bannetons ready for scoring.

We gave the oven a run the following day, and I was going to have a look at this issue. Tiff was also interested in exploring ways to make her baking more child friendly.

Tiff’s setup is at her home. It’s a converted garage, with two kitchen spaces - an oven room and a dough room. It’s been really well thought out, and built to a high standard by local tradespeople. When I arrived, the place was a flurry of activity, as these tradies were flat out getting the dough room finished in time for the upcoming workshop. To make matters a bit more complex, Tiff had also organised a rather large catering gig at her family’s farm just out of town on the weekend.

Oh, and did I mention that Tiff was also about 6 months pregnant; with a small (but delightful) boy (Ned) who was heading towards eighteen months when I was there? Yep. (Or, as Ned would put it, ‘No way!’)

Tiffany isn’t your normal baker. Indeed, she’s in a league of her own. Over the coming week I observed her super human powers gradually emerge.

Part of the mission for us while I was there was to explore ways she could make her baking session each week more ‘family friendly’. Her one full day each baking week had become a bit long, and Tiff wanted to work out a way of alleviating this issue before she had two little people to hang with very soon. I’ve been an advocate of the retardation process for many years, and Tiff had seen it in action at my place, so the plan was to see if it could be worked into her routine.

While I was there, we were also going to experiment with her oven. Tiff had been mainly using the top deck, as the bottom was too hot. The idea here was to figure out if using the bottom deck was at all workable in her typical bakery routine.

Meanwhile, I was prepping for my two workshops and demonstration bake (which was at the catering event I mentioned earlier). Part of Tiff’s idea was to make sure I had plenty of gigs to help pay for my trip there. For that I was eternally grateful, as this trip was expensive to do. The distances involved are enormous, no matter how you travel - by air or land, there is a cost.

Esperance, for anyone who is not familiar with the area, is on a remote piece of coastline in Western Australia. It’s a minimum of four hours’ drive from Esperance to the nearest proper town. It’s 3420 kilometers to my place from there. It’s a pretty place, with pink salt lakes, coastal wetlands, beaches, and large swathes of wheat country all around. Beyond that, you are going to be crossing the desert to get there. But wait; there’s more! It’s also a busy little tourist hub, and a grain focused port is a vital part of the town’s mixed economy.

I love port towns.

Esperance is a most unusual, diverse place. Farming, salt lakes, wetlands, coastline, tourism, the port, and I’m sure there is more in the mix I haven’t been able to touch on.

Tiff is a very accomplished organiser, and she had decided to have a go at catering for a hundred people in an old wool shed on her parent’s farm while I was in town. It became increasingly clear to both of us that she had a bit on her plate. I did too - though for entirely different reasons.

We busily worked our way through the week; her extended family all converged on the house and attended to an enormous list of coordinated activities painstakingly worked and re worked by Tiff as the week unfolded. We worked our way through her bake, and were successfully able to use the bottom deck. However, surprisingly, using both decks actually slowed her down. Tiff believed she was able to bake faster with only the top deck. This amazed me, but I could see what was happening, and she was definitely right.

Loaves after ‘shuffling’.

Large double deck wood fired ovens are worked like conveyor belts. The baker ‘sets’ the formed dough on the hot bottom deck, and then transfers the ‘set’ loaves to the top deck for ‘crusting’. Once the dough is crusted, it is taken out or rotated, and at the same time the next load is put in for setting. This process works with the natural ambience of the oven; the fire is baffled away, underneath the bottom deck, sending flue gases all the way around the deck to the top. The heat is captured by stones on the roof, and radiated back down for the crusting part of the bake. In order to achieve the ‘conveyor belt’ effect, and to maximise the extra labour involved in ‘shuffling’ the bread from bottom to top, the baker needs quite a bit of dough to ‘work’ through the decks. Then, the heat in the bottom deck is gradually absorbed by the ongoing loading of cold dough. Basically, the longer the baking process is maintained, the faster the oven gets. This is, of course, only works when you can fire the oven continuously.

Tiff’s bake, at this stage, was relatively small. From time to time she did larger volumes, but to efficiently make the oven work to the conveyer effect, we really needed a bigger volume of dough. Thus, for now, the top deck would be the most efficient way for Tiff to use the oven.

It turned out the oven’s steam was adequate - but it wasn’t enough for her needs. Tiff’s workaround involved a garden hose and a spray gun, and her crusts were amazing using this technique. She’d simply spray the walls of the oven just before loading with the spray gun.

My feeling was that more moisture in the final proof would eliminate the need to spray down the decks - and the oven’s steam system would then be adequate. Moist dough, fresh out of the proofer, always gets better oven spring - but if the baker can’t achieve this due to not having a proofer, steam in the baking deck will do a similar thing. The drier the bakery environment, the more steam you need! Not sure what the annual rainfall of Esperance was, but apart from it’s coastal orientation, around it on three sides was desert. Dry air would be the norm.

As yet, Tiff hadn’t invested in any proofing gear so we looked at ideas which would work for her. Without getting any more technical than I already have, there are some really inexpensive ways for a craft baker to proof their dough, and Tiff and I discussed ways she might do this in her bakery. Once she’s set these things up, I suspect she won’t need to blast her oven with a garden hose for steam!

I made a batch of dough in her mixer for the event Tiff was catering for, as well as a batch by hand for the workshop. I also made a batch for running through Tiff’s oven, just to see if a slower proofing routine would work for her.

It was about now that the chickens of my ‘constant change’ methodolgy (from being on the road without proper refrigeration, consistent flour or water) came home to roost. I had been (over) confident in my process up to now. But recent issues with the bread we baked at the last Bush Baking workshop had highlighted to me that something wasn’t right - and I had no idea what it was! I was about to find out over the coming few batches of dough just what a mess my ‘system’ was in!

The first batch of dough for Tiff’s oven just sat still - I left it overnight, out of the fridge, and nothing much happened. When it came time to cut it, the dough felt strange - not ripe, not over ripe. Time, however, was moving on, and I was keen to process the dough so I could squeeze it in the oven after Tiff’s bake was done. I cut it, rounded it, and allowed the dough to rest and re gas. Normally, this might take a couple of hours - but after the right amount of time, not much happened at all. My dough was inching along, and it was a relatively warm day. Nothing made sense. I ended up baking it in two separate lots, and while it was acceptable, it was hardly to the standard I am used to baking. Tiff’s dough, done with a short bulk proof, was far better. She had worked with the temperature, using a ‘build’ technique, refreshing and establishing a fairly quick dough overnight.

Ten kilos of hand made dough.

My hand made dough, which I built the next day, did something completely different. It began to break down, almost straight away. I managed to make another hand dough, and this time I put it in the fridge as soon as I made it. I also made another dough in the mixer, which was for the event the following day - and this went straight into the fridge also.

My sourdough technique is based around super slow fermentation. Allowing the dough to proof at less than ten degrees is pretty normal for me. Why was this happening?

It was at this point that I arrived at my first harsh discovery; I couldn’t diagnose what was going on for my dough until I had removed all the variables. The issue was even more challenging, you see, as almost EVERYTHING was a variable.

The flour, the water, the starter, the temperature; I had not been able to manage consistency with any of these things on my gypsy journey. How the heck would I be able to figure out what was going wrong until everything was consistent again?

Secondly, how could I control temperature, with my third world evaporative cooler (which wasn’t even working properly?) It was clear I had a bad case of Erratic Bread Syndrome.

Faced with chaos, I had to return to basics. I fed the starter, and refrigerated it in Tiff’s fridge. I purchased a bag of Wholegrain Milling baker’s flour from Tiff, a flour I was very familiar with. I decanted a tankful of Tiff’s water - though later I purchased spring water from the supermarket. I could taste the clay in the local water, and I was certain it wasn’t reacting well with my process. From that point forth, I began feeding my starter more often, as temperatures in the trailer could not be kept below 15 degrees consistently.

It wasn’t until three bakes later, at a workshop at Yirri Grove Olive plantation, that things began to work again. In the mean time, I had been witness to varying levels of failure at every bake - from ‘lumpy’ dough, to ‘flat’ dough, to ‘mediocre bread’ at best. It was soul destroying stuff; especially when you are trying to teach others how to make great sourdough!

Tiff’s event at the wool shed was a total success. The locals came out in force and enjoyed the day immensely. Tiff and her crew of helpers presented a damn fine spread of wholesome country fare, while outside the Bush Bakery MkII and I worked the dough and baked it for an audience of keen home bakers.

I used the dough which had been made in the mixer and kept cold. It survived till baking, but still didn’t really elevate as I have been used to. Nonetheless, everybody who came had so much fun kneading and rough rounding, it didn’t seem to matter.

Having made some mitigation steps for my next bake, which just down the road the next day, I was hopeful that the Erratic Bread Syndrome was not actually a thing. I was prepared for Yirri Grove on lots of levels. Stay tuned for the beginning of the solution, as well as for me discovering new parts of the problem.

Perth and the enormous west

I had never been across the country before. Everybody tells you how big this country is, but somehow it just doesn’t compute until you get down on the ground and drive it.

Western Australia typifies what people mean when they talk about ‘big’. After a few weeks I began to get just a bit blase about covering 700 plus kilometers a day - it became like popping into town for the groceries. The expanses of sheer flatness do something to one’s sense of perspective. I kept staring off into the distance, unsure why the distance seemed so very much further away than I had ever imagined possible. I’ve spent pleny of time way out west of NSW and Queensland, where wheat extends as far as the eye can see in every direction, but somehow that didn’t compare to this. This country is somehow bigger and flatter and further than anything I had experienced before. It was mind bendingly big.

The bottom left hand corner of the country.

After traversing the continent, I had arranged to have a couple of weeks of free time so I could explore the west coast a bit and catch up with a good friend and long time collaborator from back east who had relocated to Perth this last year. We headed down the coast, all the way around to Albany, camping and cooking and scouring each town for whatever seemed worth scouring for.

There were some pretty decent bakeries on route - Margaret River Bakery was booming, and it was great to see what’s happening in the west, bakery - wise. On a separate stop earlier though, at a place called Riverside Roadhouse at Bannister (out in the desert) I walked into a full sourdough bakery. You could have blown me over. Their bread was exceptional, especially when one took into account that here was a proper sourdough bakery at an ordinary roadhouse in the middle of the desert!

After covering the bottom corner of the state, we headed back to Perth for a few days’ urban exploration. I set up camp at a caravan park not far from Perth CBD (where else in Oz do you get a caravan park not far from the CBD?) and was introduced to some of the things that make the place liveable; the greek deli and bulk foods store Kakulas Brothers in Northbridge, Fremantle’s markets and bookstores, Subiaco grower’s market, and some of the community gardens which pop up here and there.

While country WA was bigger than I expected, Perth was smaller. It’s like it really WANTS to be a city, but just hasn’t quite figured out how to actually be one yet. Nonetheless, it was a place I found pretty easy on the eye, in general, with some nice little pockets of specialness thrown in. Not sure if I could live there longer term - there was just this almost overwhelming feeling of ‘suburbanness’ about the place. I ran away from the same sort of feeling when I was a teenager and have never really gone back.

Back into wheat country

Having soaked up all my free time, I headed east again, back into the wheat country not far from Perth. I dropped in on my old friend Arnaud, from York Olive Oil in York. Arnaud studied with me a few years back, and has created a micro bakery at his olive pressing facility there. He has built his own Alan Scott wood fired oven, as well as assembled one he had specially imported from France. Arnaud is a fascinating character, and his breads are absolutely bang on.

While we were chatting, Arnaud, at about 70 years of age, bounds up a couple of huge tractor tyres strategically positioned behind an enourmous flying fox that he has made for kids (and brave adults) at his olive plantation. He jumps on his flying fox and whizzes off down the hill. My own fearlessness was strangely absent on that day, and all I could do was watch and hope that by the time I was Arnaud’s age my body would be as agile as his. It certainly isn’t right now - but I’m allowing some room for possibility on that front.

Next day I arrived at another baker buddy’s micro bakery at Pingelly, just down the road. The Bread Wright, as Ed is known locally, supplies lovely loaves to local business and markets. He works with the locally sourced Eden Valley flour, and will soon be building himself a small wood fired oven. He and his family live in a straw bale home he and his partner Lou built over many years. They really do live well, with much of their food coming from their own gardens. The workshop gathered keen bread folk from many miles away (people think nothing of driving a couple of hundred kilometers around here). Keeping up my record of having rain follow me everywhere, it rained on and off all day. Our little group managed to keep ourselves mainly dry, and the workshop was heaps of fun. The bread we baked was less than amazing though, and so began my introduction to the mysteries of ambient baking.

Ambient baking is a thing, you see. There are schools of thought which believe that whatever temperature we have as bakers should dictate what we do with our dough. This in turn means that if it’s hot, we get a nice short baking shift because everything goes faster in hot weather, while when it’s cold our shifts will take much longer as things slow down in winter. Some bakers who adhere to this principle also adjust their formulations to try to mitigate.

My process is the opposite. I usually work with constant formulations and times. I use refrigeration to control dough temperatures - but on the Bush Bakery my refrigeration was sub standard at this point. I didn’t realise just how much it was affecting things.

Too many variables

When I was planning this trip, I knew the safest time of year to make bread without much in the way of cooling was winter. I was optimistic that my own version of a Coolgardie Safe would be cool enough to hold my starter and my dough for long enough to be workable in a teaching setting.

This workshop was the beginning of a slowly dawning truth - and only now that I’m sitting here, back on my home turf on the East of the continent, can I see what was happening in some form of entirety.

The bread we made at the workshop rose, in parts. And in parts, it did not. So it was like a kind of roller coaster bread. Instead of having a nice, curved upper surface, it was like up hill and down dale. Some of the loaves also began to break down - as they do when the dough becomes over ripe. This meant they were too far along the fermentation path. Acids excreted as the dough ferments gradually become stronger, and they break the gluten bubbles created during prefermentation.

I had been counting on cool weather as my means of controlling what happens with my dough to this point. This cool weather had provided me with the ability to make dough the night before the workshop, safe in the knowledge that the dough would keep until we were ready to process it at the workshop. Or so I thought. My attempt at cooling via evaporation (my ‘coolgardie’ fridge - I’ve written about it on this blog numerous times) had thus far failed to make much of a dint on the outside temperature, so all I had left was the weather. Which changes, hourly.

I was also trying to get my head around the very alkali water there was in WA. Everywhere I went, I would taste the water just to get an idea of what was happening. In WA, the water table is largely set on top of clay, so the water tastes very different to the more neutral water back east. I had to put this fact into my leavening mix, as I knew alkalinity would affect the way my dough fermented. The water was ‘hard’. It was very mineralised, and I think this fact was playing into how my usual process of fermentation worked.

So I had two issues to deal with that I had identified so far. Like anyone who has attended a sourdough workshop with me knows, when you have things going badly with your bake, you have to change one thing at a time in your efforts to solve a problem. If you try to apply multiple solutions at once, you will never know which one may or may not have worked.

The scope of my problem emerged slowly. I had numerous possible issues, and because of my general state of movement, I actually had no consistency in my baking practice at all. I was using local flour, local water and local weather. All these things changed wherever I was, so assessing what might be the problem was going to be difficult. To make matters worse, I was having mixed results each time I baked. The issues I was experiencing were numerous and they were not consistent - I either had lumpy bread, porous bread, or great bread from bake to bake, and there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the results I had been getting.

By the time I got to Esperance, my next port of call, all these things were mulling around in my head. I was, it turned out, still quite a way off solving my problems with dough, water, refrigeration and flour. So while parts of this trip were proving to be a revelation to me, other parts were confounding. The tale unfolds over the next couple of posts…

Melbourne to Perth - more tales from the Tour Down South

Those hand made doughs, with the breath of the Antarctic in them, found their way to Knoxfield, a 'light industrial' suburb in Melbourne's sprawling urban network. There, I found Southern Biological, the warehouse site of my next Bush Baking workshop. 

Heather, an owner of the business, contacted me some time back when I was planning this journey. She had previously made the trip to the Hunter Valley to attend one of my Sourdough 101 workshops. She convinced me that her space was well suited to running a Bush Baking Workshop, despite the fact that it was a warehouse in the middle of an industrial area of Melbourne, the second largest city in Australia. 

She was, of course, totally correct. Her business supplies schools around the country with the essential materials they need to teach the Biological Sciences. This means, among other things, she cultivates various organisms, including algae, ampicillin, 'pond life' (seriously) and even cockroaches, for distribution to science labs around this wide brown land. As such, Heather is well versed with natural processes; but after reading prodigious volumes of sourdough recipes and techniques, and after having attended one of my workshops, she really was struggling with her sourdough game. She was willing to host a workshop so that she could attend and hopefully figure out what was happening in her own sourdough practice. 

Lo and behold, on the day, we found ourselves with a brains trust of sourdough geeks who were all well versed in the complexities and intrigues of baking sourdough at home. Heather was totally at home amongst these experienced bakers (from all walks of life). Was there a happy ending for Heather? Yes, jumping forward a month or so, she sent me pictures of her first 'sole baked sourdough success', and I gotta say my heart was very proud - not only for her success, but also for her sheer tenacity in getting the thing that had eluded her for so long to behave. 

The Melbourne workshop was a heap of fun, and I really enjoyed camping with Pippa and Mishka in a warehouse/laboratory. 

Next on the sourdough workshop trail was Adelaide. This meant that I got to drive the Great Ocean Road in its entirety - stopping at will to set up 'the Boudoir' (my travelling bedroom on the opposite side of the trailer to the classroom) in lots of random places along the way. I will write about this 'journey within a journey' in a separate post - but let's just say this part of the world is not short on scenic spectacularity, and where you find the views, you also find the caravan parks. Some mighty fine places to rest along this route, I gotta say.

The Adelaide workshop was to be held at Brahma Lodge, hosted by some amazing women who had been following my Facebook page for some time, eager to get more into it all. Leanne and Sue have, for many years, built a productive urban food resource (among other things) on their suburban plot on the north side of Adelaide. Venturing into the backyard at their place involves a collision of art, farming and culture, as you begin to experience what can be done with a suburban back yard in a suburb on the outskirts of a city. Mind you, these days Brahma Lodge is positively inner urban, as Adelaide has spread out. In this context, what Leanne and Sue have achieved with not much more than 250 sq metres of backyard is nothing short of amazing.

Our workshop was also amazing, with some serious baking talent showing up - including two of my best long term bread customers, who had recently moved from Newcastle to Adelaide. Quite a surprise - apparently their bread fix hadn`t been satisfied of late, so they decided to make it themselves. 

I guess my business model is working.

After the workshop I did a bit of a map from where I was to Perth, where I had arranged to meet an old friend in five days` time. For some reason I had been thinking I could just coast across the Nullabor and make it to Perth with time to spare. Then I added up the distance - 2700 kilometres - the Nullabor only really being a bit less than half of the distance in total. Doing the sums, I quickly worked out I had to cover about 550 k per day.

I had a few last minute bits to sort out before I left - to fix a tyre on the trailer (a slow leak which I had been living with for months), and apparently my air filter also needed replacing. I had to make sure I had something in case of flat tyres, and some basic things like lots of water, batteries, tarps, metho, propane and ice for the long distance camping realities. I had been flat out setting up and running the workshop, so hadn`t yet got to these chores.

The Nullabor, for me, was just a little bit scary. Everyone told me about how big it is, and how prepared one had to be. I felt totally underprepared, and I guess I faffed around for the first day making sure that I was indeed properly prepared for my long solo journey in my 16 year old Toyota and Bush Baking trailer, with two animals on board. I was not exactly cashed up either - I had just enough money for a few days` fuel, with a bit of money floating across to me in drips and drabs from various jobs I had been working on before I left. Thus, cashflow came into play. Nothing like living in the moment, I like to say.

All this `preparation` took the better part of a day, so I ended up having to make the remaining 2500 ks left to Perth in just four days. My daily average distance now had to be over 600 ks. I was starting to panic just a little bit. I hadn`t even begun the Nullabor - I was still on the edge of it after the second day of driving. And the entire Nullabor Plain was not as far to cross as the eastern part of WA was to Perth.

The animals had not yet experienced long days in the car, so I chose to stop every few hours so they could get out and stretch their legs. The sight of the three of us hopping out of the car in the middle of nowhere, with Pippa immediately dashing off into the scrub chasing her ball, and while there stopping for a good old sniff, thereby losing her ball; simultaneously with arthritic Mishka delicately traversing the dry clay ground, like someone walking over broken glass, and me in my stiff old baker`s body, gradually unwinding from the seated position I`d been in for hours, was at times comical to the outside observer. Once or twice Mishka decided to make his feelings about long car trips known by disappearing into the scrub and not answering my increasingly frantic calls until he was good and ready. Cat time doesn`t relate to human time - a fact that I now appreciate better. Of course, he was never more than a few paces away from me - but he was just making himself invisible; primarily, I`m sure, to piss me off. He`s very good at this. I`ve been getting pissed off with him now for 16 years; he had just found a new way to do it, and I`m pretty sure he was as excited about this new weapon as I was annoyed and a bit anxious about the crazy idea of taking a cat in a car across the country.

There are lots of places where travellers can pull up and camp right the way across the Nullabor, and I came to appreciate them more and more as the trip went on. Some campspots were utterly spectacular - perched just high enough the low scrub to be able to take in the full immensity of the plain and the night stars. Despite these welcome respites, days driving alone, with no radio reception and no internet, kind of sent me a little troppo. I recorded lots of voice memos, sang acapella badly, and managed to invent numerous bakery related devices with all that free mental space. I guess it was productive - stay tuned for the podcast!

I found the feel and look of the Nullabor to be constantly surprising. While there were a few salt pans, I gotta say I didn`t see any actual desert. The earth was covered the whole way with life - low scrubby plants, acacia bushes and even forested regions.  Judging by the amount of roadkill, there are plenty of kangaroos there as well.

I concentrated on conserving fuel all the way across - the enormous road trains could be tagged behind, and if you got the distance between the truck and the car right, you missed out on losing your windscreen while still being able to get maximum fuel efficiency. I did try to get right up close behind them to see how big the drafting effect was, but found myself dodging rocks and stones more often than was comfy, so I hung about 50 metres back and just allowed these huge trucks to cover some of the fuel cost instead of me. Over the years I`ve done a heap of cycling, and learned how effective the `peleton` is at reducing wind resistence. The same applies here.

Day 3 or 4 and I was beginning to catch up on time, though today the wind was huge and scary. I found myself getting blown all over the road, with the Bush Bakery acting like a sail catching strong cross winds. I tried to sit on the tail of the road trains again, but the wind was making the task feel very scary indeed. I judged my fuel badly - partly due to the fact that servos now were charging over $2.30 a litre, making my 140 litre capacity very expensive to fill; I kept hoping that the price would begin to drop as I got closer to Perth - but at every roadhouse, the price just kept going up. I figured I could just make it to the next town - I think I was actually across the Nullabor by now, and was in WA - but still, the gaps between fuel stations were often in the hundreds of kilometers. I arrived at my chosen destination (Calguna? I'm crap at journalism, but I think this is the general area) bone dry, but grateful to have made it. A big BP roadhouse on the edge of a patch of `desert` can be a welcome sight at these times, until one approaches the door and reads a hand written note (looking not exactly freshly written) apologising for closing due to a `family emergency`.  Judging by the aging paper, I concluded that the family emergency was sustained. This servo had shut down, and I had about three drops of fuel and sixty more kilometers to the next town. Joy. 

I have a relationship with the Muse, from time to time. On this day I must have been singing to Her and She could well have enjoyed my efforts. I don`t really know what happened, but at that time I was beyond believing in luck.

Nonetheless, I decided to drive as fuel efficiently as possible as far as I could get, and just camp there. It was mid winter - darkness began a bit after five, so I only had an hour till I had to stop anyway. Mostly, people don`t drive at night in these areas unless they have to. There will be animals, and some of them are pretty hard to miss. Better to park and rest. Much more civilised, as well.

I really didn`t think I could get 60 kilometers on the amount of fuel I had. Let tomorrow happen tomorrow, I thought. Just get as far as you can today.

I accelerated very slowly, working to keep the revs as low as possible while I allowed momentum to do its job. Eventually I got to 80ks. I have two tanks in the Toyota, and they were both getting close to empty (and I mean well below the line at the bottom - I mean EMPTY). I decided to run the reserve tank until it gasped, and then flip over to the main tank for as far as it would get me. The rest of the day had been a struggle with a constant side wind, which frequently became a headwind. I fully expected the final part of the journey to be the same.

Lo and behold! The Muse must have had a whisper to the powers that be at the Weather Bureau! The wind swung around behind me and literally propelled me down the road as if I was sitting behind a road train. I found that a fairly constant 90 kph gave me the lowest revs per kilometer with these conditions, and with the wind at my back for the first time in days, I covered the 60 kilometers to the next town well before dark. I think this may have been Belladonia, but I've been wrong before. Safely ensconsed in the caravan park in the first actual town I had seen since back in SA, me and the Creatures (Pippa and Mishka, as they shall become known from this point forward) stretched our legs and set up the Boudoir for the night. 

I was left to ponder. Was it the Muse, or just Dumb Luck? Or was it actually extremely high levels of driving skill coupled with superb mathematical ability?

Perth was only a stone`s throw away now - maybe a day and a bit. I had actually volunteered to pick up my friend at the airport, so time was pretty crucial in the equation. These last couple of days saw me ramping up the daily averages significantly. I had been making a point of hitting the road as early as possible each day, and staying out on the highway as long as was workable with the Creatures. Inevitably, it was a war of attrition, and despite my poor start, I seemed to be winning it. The distance remaining was finally looking manageable in the time I had left.

And how did I go with the cashflow? Well, the same night I made the town (name?) with the wind at my back, I also had a record day for bookings to my other series of workshops, the Soursough 300 series (being held in October back in the Hunter Valley). Suddenly the Gods, or Dumb Luck, seemed to be smiling on me. 

PS. I arrived at the airport ahead of time. My friend`s flight, however, was running four hours late.

Wallarobba to Werribee - the tour so far

The daily routine on the road has kept me away from the keys this past few weeks. And before that, well, I was building the trailer. Not to mention putting the bakery and household into storage for a while whilst I go on this mad adventure. Time, it seems, has been spent on these things, rather than 'telling the story' of these things.

Now I'm settling into life as a traveller, the time to write has become a bit more possible, so here's an update. It's too daunting to play too much catchup at once; so much has happened already, so expect a few chapters of this story to appear over coming months.

While I was working on the Bush Bakery Mk II, the weather was fine most days. The trailer was safely housed in an old shed at Wallarobba; it had a roof over its head, and while cold nights were beginning to set in, the days were hot, particularly under the dairy shed's tin roof. There was a smidgin of rain at the farm while I was building the trailer, but I was able to ignore it, due to the dry shed the trailer was housed in. Thus, water and cold were not so much in my face. I managed to waterproof the roof of the trailer; it was a token effort at best - and I barely considered the fact that I was heading south, towards the polar winds driven from the Antarctic, in the middle of winter.  

But, as I hit the road, so too did two weeks of heavy rain; the rain swept the entire east of the continent right at the start of my journey. I was taught a lesson in planning and design in the most awkward of circumstances. After the first three Bush Baking workshops being held in pouring rain, I began to sell my wares as the 'Bringer of Rain'. There had to be a positive spin for this, I reasoned.

The Bush Bakery had some major design flaws - it was barely waterproof, and after a couple of weeks of receiving the worst of the elements, the entire thing (made mostly of wood) began to look like it would fall apart at the first decent blast of sub artic wind (which came, soon afterwards). 

There were 17 people at the Berry workshop, who braved the weather for an overnight bake. Somehow, we managed to get some half decent bread out of the oven, but afterwards I had to spend a couple of days dealing with emergency waterproofing while still parked in what was rapidly becoming a muddy quagmire at Berry B & B. I was able to do some running repairs to the wooden structure in the pouring rain, but it was pretty dodgy.

Somehow, I got the Bush Bakery to Murrumbateman in one piece, though I have to say it was extremely waterlogged, and could well have come apart with a decent bump. In addition, all my bedding and clothes got completely soaked. Before I left Berry, I spent a couple of days tucked into one of the cabins at the B & B, drying stuff in front of the open fire. Happy days. Thanks Peter and Mandy, the owners and friends of mine; without your generosity I may well have been forced to call the whole trip off!

Fortunately, I had reluctantly invested in some decent tarpaulins while at Berry; I dried out much of my gear, and could at least prevent more rain from finding its way into the very delicate wet underbelly of the Bush Bakery Mk II.

The workshop at Murrumbateman ran more smoothly, though Bev (a past student and keen baker and oven builder herself) helped me get through the workshop with a degree of dignity still intact. Another trip to Bunnings before I left, and the trailer was ready to travel again - albeit still vulnerable to the ravages of rain. Cold had been temporarily abated by the loan of Bev's serious doona - thanx Bev!

Next, I arrived in Harcourt, at the Blumes Historic Bakery site. Jodie and Dave have been ultra busy, resurrecting the old Scotch oven and bakery, over the past 9 months since they attended a Masterbaker session at my old place in the Hunter Valley last year.

These guys describe themselves as 'serial renovators', and this became apparent very quickly, as their setup was nothing short of incredible. The scotch oven, almost exactly 100 years old, had been refloored and reflued; Dave had the good sense to add some under floor temperature sensors to the 72 tonne beast as well. The bakery itself had been refurbished beautifully, as well as the grounds and various buildings.

They found a space in the large woodshed for me and the Bush Bakery, so while it rained regularly, I was dry and had a chance to work on my cold weather setup while we worked on the various pre production processes in anticipation of the Blumes bakery re- opening - only months away. Their efforts inspired me to improve the trailer, which took the form of the addition of some old corrugatred iron on the wings. Dave donated some old iron, and helped me put it on. Gotta say, the trailer feels so much more solid now that it's coated in a layer of (recycled) steel!

The workshop went fabulously well, with a bunch of locals coming along for the day, making some great bread in the Bush Oven.  The proofer worked well too, powered by my butane gas burner and some terracotta 'heat amplifiers' which I've been using lately. These 'heat amplifiers' work to consolidate the diffusion of small amounts of heat in a small space. Thus, they are like mini 'mass heaters'; perfect for heating a bedroom or small kitchen, and I intend to cover their design and use in a future article. 

Jodie and Dave are 'heart' people - like me, I guess - and observing their process was illuminating. I can tell you that when these two get their bakery up and running over the coming months, it will be worth checking them out. I can see that it will be extraordinary, and that they will quickly make a name for themselves, as they approach things with a degree of thoroughness that is essential when you are trying to do something special. In short, I see them as 'up for the task'. We worked on their strategic vision, and then got stuck into the detail of how the proposed bakery would actually operate at a certain scale.

This is an exercise I really enjoy doing with first time bakeries - it means they get a handle on exactly what they need to get for their setup, as well as which suppliers they need to be talking to, what their production schedule might look like, and so on. We decided also to run a couple of trial bakes through the heated Scotch oven as well. These were pretty woeful affairs - just working out the variables in a virgin bakery is a pretty tricky undertaking, let alone actually get everything through an untried woodfired oven! By the second attempt, though, we had figured out lots, and had a markedly better result. Still not to commercial standard, but not far off. The oven itself is a gem - totally even, and very easy to work - once you get the hang of using a twelve foot long peel.

So Harcourt was a powerful experience for me. Here was a 100 year old piece of simple technology which was both efficient and accurate. The heat the oven was achieving was amazing - totally even, and totally strong. The bread which will soon be coming out of that oven will be nothing short of amazing - and I will be part of it, which makes me very proud!

My journey continued - Melbourne beckoned, and my youngest daughter was having a birthday. She's been southside for a good many years now, and visiting has always been tricky. This time, I had my whole kit and kaboodle - my dog, Pippa, my cat Mishka, and the Bush Bakery. No more airline mentality - this time we could check out her world properly, without the constraints of airline schedules to limit us. In addition, the Melbourne workshop was fast approaching. 

Finding a dog friendly caravan park was tricky - I ended up in Werribee South, on the edge of the bay, getting blasted by sub zero Arctic winds and a kind of feral stench created by the sewage plant at Cocoroc, where all Melbourne city's shit gets dealt with. Despite this, it was a really good spot to be. I was amazed by the size of the market gardens surrounding the suburb - it seemed like the cabbage capital of the southern hemisphere!

My organic brain was thinking of the natural synergy here. I know human excrement should not be used to grow human food - but hey, cabbages and poo both stink. Poo is basically nitrogen, and that's exactly what is needed to grow cabbages!

Being in zero degree nights near the bay also refined my camping set up - my trailer is half classroom/bakery, half 'boudoir' - so I spent a bit of time sorting out living with really cold weather.  By the time I left there I had created double insulated canvas walled sections under the wing of the boudoir - and had figured out the basic tarp system to keep me dry. 

I even prepped dough by hand in the trailer while the chill winds from the Antarctic were at my back. Really felt like I was starting to get the hang of this mobile baking routine. I haven't managed to build the bakers' trough, so I'm using my plastic tubs from the bakery. These are proving to be perfect for the task. I haven't 'kneaded' the baker's trough as yet...but this will happen, as I eventually will 'knead' more capacity. At this time, it isn't really required - the dough tubs work with 10 kg each, and I find them very easy to use in the existing technique. This will change, but for now, it doesn't knead fixing (there I go again).

Thus prepped, I headed off to the Melbourne Workshop. Which will be the next chapter. Keep you posted!

The reinvention of the Bush Bakery

The workshop

Nothing excites me more than a new project. I've been holed up here about 15 minutes out of Dungog, at my mate Craig Miller's Mum's farm; I've set up my work space in the old dairy shed. My base resource is what used to be my markets shop trailer. 

Your Challenge, should you choose to accept it...

For this project, I've set myself some really tricky challenges - not the least of which is to build the Bush Bakery Mk II almost entirely from existing materials - a kind of re purposing/recycling process. Essentially, I'm stripping out the inside of what was the shop trailer, and then turning it into a mobile baking classroom-cum-sleeping quarters for the Tour Down South.

I gotta say, I'm learning so much about recycling building materials, and how to work in this manner. It's about the third or fourth carpentry project I've done this way, and I feel as though I'm finally getting the hang of it. I've been working on it day and night for the past week in order to test it out before hitting the road properly in June. So far, I have spent a grand total of $100 on the refit; everything that came out of the old shop trailer has been broken down and reused in the new classroom trailer. My carefully laid out pile of timber, hardware, assorted building materials and baking equipment which came from both this trailer and my old classroom at Ellalong has been utilised well. Indeed, towards the deadline (Friday for Saturday's workshop) I was actually starting to run out of materials. Luckily, I managed to improvise well enough to get the new trailer ready for a trial run.

I took the newly repurposed Bush Bakery Mk II out yesterday for the first time to conduct an outdoor 101 class yesterday. I have been in a state of high anxienty all week, as I've been working on the trailer. There is nothing worse than equipment failure in the middle of a workshop, and so many things can go wrong when you are making bread from scratch with very little actual bakery equipment. Thankfully, everything worked quite well, and my students seemed pretty happy with the bread we baked, as well as the day in general. This feedback nourishes me and allows me to keep going on the project, knowing I'm on the right track.

One of the highlights of the day was just how good the oven I'm using works. This oven was made in 1924 in Massachusetts, USA. It weighs virtually nothing - maybe 5kg - and it can bake a few loaves at once. It was the inspiration for the Bush Oven which Craig and I are currently designing for the Tour, and yesterday was the first time I have actually used this beautiful antique oven. Wow! What a clever little thing it is. I've been reflecting once again on how we think we are currently really technologically savvy, and yet back in 1924 they made a super efficient oven which can do a lot of baking from not much at all. We fired the oven up with lightweight firewood, and managed to bake a baker's dozen worth of loaves in a just a few hours. The oven spring we were getting was nothing short of amazing. Crust colour wasn't great, but the crust itself was brilliant. Leathery, crisp and thin. Colour can be addressed in other ways - but black ovens like this one are notoriously difficult to put steam into. Nonetheless, Craig and I are now working with this idea for our new Bush Oven. Stay tuned for progress here.

The trailer currently is barely functional. I got the basics done for the workbench, but I had to improvise a way to hold wooden transit boards for final proofing which was barely adequate. The idea I am working towards is a kind of third world retarder/proofer, based around the same technology utilised in the Coolgardie Safes of last century - essentially coolers which worked by evaporating water. My version will have walls made of expanded clay pellets, which were used in an aquaculture setup here on the farm, and which will be wrapped in wire mesh. These pellets hold a lot of water, and the way I'm going to build it will allow air to pass around the pellets, causing evaporation as well as turbulation. Airflow will be provided by vents which are on the front of the trailer, so when I'm moving the Coolgardie will cool things down. When I'm stationary, the cooler can convert to a proofer by wrapping it up in calico and placing a water bath warmed by hot coals from the oven. If I build it right, it will seal well, and in theory will satisfy my hard core off grid requirements.

Plumbing for the Bush Bakery will be very simple. There will be hot and cold water, as you would expect; I've salvaged a stainless steel water tank from the Bush Bakery Mk I, and this will sit on the roof and be heated by the sun. I've used this incredibly basic technology before, and it heats water well, even on cool days. The tank will connect with a tap inside the trailer, and will also provide the water for the Coolgardie unit via a trickle feed system. This will have a valve fitted to regulate the water flow so that the cooler will have the right amount of water for evaporation. Cold water will simply come from a hose connection. Weight is an issue with this small trailer, so I won't be carrying much water when on the road.

I've written about the mixing tools here already - I'll be making a Baker's trough for this purpose. More about this when I've made it. Again, I'll be playing around with my version with a view to optimise it for weight, volume and mechanical advantage. By the time it's ready, I'll have most of the rest of the trailer's infrastructure complete, so there will be some trials to do before I roll on down the road with the Bush Bakery Mk II.

For the sleeping quarters, I'm going to have a simple fold out bed on the opposite side of the trailer to the kitchen. I've insulated the roof, and will be insulating the wings which fold out to provide shelter. I'm still deciding how to create walls and windows for my fold out bed - I'm tossing up between some sort of canvas/shade cloth roll down wall system, or something a bit more sophisticated made of wood. It will be the middle of winter, so it is going to have to be able to keep me and my dog Pippa warm and dry every night. Pippa's bedroom will be on the ground under the fold down bed. I'll be adding a mesh section under it to keep her contained while the moon is out.

I've got six weeks to finish and test my Bush Bakery Mk II. As usual, I am confident I will have it all good to go by then - but anyone who saw me a few nights ago before Saturday's workshop would know, sometimes I tend to be a bit more ambitious with my projects and the deadlines I set for them than is humanly possible. That's just the way it is. I can only plug away, and hope that I get a good run with things. Sometimes jobs like this can go smoothly and without too many hitches. Other times, stuff just eats up time, and progress is slow. This is a real risk with a project of this type - particularly when one is working with 'inventions' which one hasn't ever done before. There are many unknowns. In addition, my choice of re using and recycling as much as possible means I have to make do largely with what I've got. This is not simply an idealogical position - here at Wallarobba, it's a forty five minute drive to the nearest large hardware store, so you really can't just nip down and grab things on the spur of the moment. Buying hardware in this case involves planning, lists, and a flexible brain. Luckily, when we dismantled the Bush Bakery Mk I, materials were sorted and carefully dismantled because I knew they would be used again. Thus, my supplies are already waiting for me to use them - though I have no idea what things I will actually need as yet!

I do love a challenge. Keep an eye out for future posts right here to see how it's all going. If you would like to book for a Bush Baking Workshop, and see and use the new setup, you can book for any of the workshops here. Keep an eye out for new venues via our facebook page as well. I'm coming your way soon!