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.