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.

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!

Show me the bread!

If anyone had told me 30 years ago that one day, you could walk into any cafe and order sourdough in any manner of menu items, I'd have asked to have some of whatever it was you were smoking.

Back then, I was struggling to figure out how to make a decent loaf of naturally leavened bread. It simply didn't exist beyond very special niches. There was no internet, and sourcing even the most basic information was excruciatingly difficult.

I pretty much had to figure it out for myself. Once I had, I was on a roller coaster ride between success and failure every time I baked. Good old trial and error got me to where I needed to be, eventually, but it really took some years before I could actually make a decent loaf of bread. Of course, each new batch was delicious, and eagerly consumed by an ever growing legion of friends and relatives - and for good reason. I used all the best organic and bio dynamic ingredients, coupled with some deeply esoteric beliefs that guided my process. For a long time, I only baked in heatproof glass bowls, for example - so every loaf was, to my mind anyway, deeply nutritious and environmentally positive. 

At a certain point I was convinced by everyone around me to start baking commercially, simply because people craved yummy bread, and apparently mine was yummy. The roller coaster ride continued for many more years to come, as I slowly learned the bakery business from scratch. More trial and error - not just in baking, but in business too. I learned about the three C's of baking - Consistency, Consistency and Consistency. You could be consistently bad, or good; as long as you were consistent. 

I dived right in, and within about seven or eight years, my little bakery (by this time I had relocated a number of times, from home kitchens to a fully professional bread factory in the Blue Mountains of NSW) was pumping out many tonnes of sourdough artisan bread each week. It seemed to just keep growing and growing, I thought this pattern would continue forever, and as a result I would eventually become hugely wealthy.

By this time, the bread we were making was pretty good, but I had no one to really compare my product to, because I was the only game in town. Over time, this changed, and some pretty decent competition started to emerge. In my woolly eyed naivete, I saw this competition as a good thing. I still didn't really have my head around business. I was partly right - the more artisan bread there was, the better, as eventually the market for this bread would grow. But as any first year business student will tell you, growing a market requires lots of time and money. Initially, each new player meant a decent erosion of my customer base. I had to grow new business constantly, so as to keep paying for the infrastructure my bakery had invested in. 

I was very much on the hamster wheel. My bakery machine never stopped. At least, not until the hamster (me) did. And I did stop, eventually. Gravity kicked in, and I found myself wondering where all the fun had gone. I had worked my little backside into what was rapidly becoming a life sentence: I was making more bread but not making more money.  And, I had worn out all my equipment because I had worked it too hard. I was endlessly trying to get more money so I could maintain my output. Bakery life is brutal on not only the baker.

It should be pretty obvious by now that I wasn't doing it for the money. I was doing it, I thought, because somebody had to do it. It seemed to me to be pretty important. So for all this time, I just kept keeping my bread machine rolling until it couldn't roll any more.

Somebody needed to show me the bread! About that time I coined the famous phrase: If I wasn't making so much bread, I would probably be making some bread.

(You can substitute the word 'dough' for 'bread' and it means exactly the same thing.)

Needless to say, making naturally leavened bread, and especially in that bakery, presented me with a steep learning curve. And since then, I have had plenty of opportunity to think about what I did, and what I would do differently if I had another go at it. I'll say that when I started out, I had a house. I no longer had one at the end of that bakery. All because I thought the world needed good bread, and therefore I should be the one to knead it for them. Eventually, one has to pay the piper.

My baking practice today represents what I have learned from this, and quite a few other bakeries and cafes I have operated in my thirty years as a baker. It is also still a work in progress. I have chosen to continue baking, but I have gone through a very thorough process to 're make' my bread.

In short, I have removed anything I don't need from my breadmaking practice. That comes right down to the micro level - flour, water, salt, fire. Only four things. No refined yeast, no bread improvers, no fat, no sugar. And the flour itself is chosen for lots of reasons - not just because the mill is good at what they do, but because the company milling it have a similar ethic to me, so I support them through my flour purchases.

This relentless editing process I have done is also on the level of equipment. I have a wood fired oven which I designed to be 'third world simple', in that if it ever breaks, I can fix it with simple tools. You don't need to ring up the oven repair company in the middle of the night with your first born child at the ready as a down payment for the repair bill.

All my equipment has been purchased very carefully, so I don't have an overdraft at all. This means it has been chosen for its robustness and price. I don't have many bread tins, for example; they take up space, get really dirty, and contain the 'bloom' in the oven - bread tins are like training wheels. I use wooden boards to hold dough instead. I make them myself, and can be replaced with a trip to the hardware store. I bake on the sole of the oven. The bread isn't constrained by a tin and the crust on the bread is another level of amazing.

I choose to retail at the weekend local markets in my region, rather than have a bricks and mortar shop. I’ve also had some success at supplying my customers directly though a subscription model, and lately I’ve returned to this as a means of dealing with the various issues which come and go around selling through growers’ markets.

I haven’t supplied restaurants and cafes for many years because I don't want another overdraft. Why would supplying wholesale lead to an overdraft? New players in the bakery business often provide their wholesale customers with 7 day accounts. This is all well and good at first, but down the track things can get tricky for many reasons. One of them is the fact that the more wholesale customers you have, the more 7 day accounts you have. You have to pay for all your costs pretty much up front - flour, electricity, phone, fuel etc - but when you carry lots of wholesale accounts, even for 7 days, you are effectively providing your customers with credit. I’m not a bank, I’m a baker! There are lots of other good reasons why I don’t do accounts, based on experience; these are numerous and possibly the subject of another blog post down the track.

My bakery business these days is very straightforward and simple. I know where I stand after I’ve counted the cash from every bake, and I like it much better than not knowing where the earth beneath me is at any given time of day or night.

One thing I have added to my pared back bakery model, though, is time. I take a lot longer to make a loaf of bread these days. Somewhere between 72 and 96 hours is my current comfort zone. I like the flavour you get when the process of fermentation is slowed right down. It's stronger, and the bread keeps better too. My customers regularly inform me that 'they can eat this bread'; to my amusement, as one would expect one can eat the bread you buy. I mean, it's food, isn't it? But apparently, these people are not used to actually being able to eat bread. The bread they usually experience is filled with yeast foods and caramelising agents and watnot. Turns out, this type of bread has been killing them slowly, and their bodies have become so attuned to their poisonous effects that to actually eat bread that doesn't produce them is, for them, almost a miracle which needs to be spoken out loud.

I find this very satisfying. Needless to say, I teach people to go slowly when they return to bread. That way, their digestive systems have time to adapt to change. It’s probably not necessary, but at least if the bread does effect them negatively, they can identify the issue and make adjustments.

Another good thing is the technique I use allows for quite a bit of flexibility - so the baker can arrange their breadmaking practice around their life, and not the other way around. I never start work before the sun comes up, for example - to do so is kind of romantic at first, but the romance wears off after a decade or so of sleep deprivation. Nowadays I work in the late evenings and send my bread out after it has been packed and cooled for sale the very next morning.

All these things are also woven into the techniques I teach today. Home bakers get the thrill of sole baking, and the endlessly fascinating process of fermentation and proofing , which provides not only food for the tummy, but also the mind. Professional bakers and others who come to learn how to make a living from baking great bread get the benefits of my flexible technique, and low capital infrastructure, so they aren't pushing that overdraft as hard as I once did. Everybody eats well, as this food is arguably one of human kind's most precious, sustainable and health giving meals, no matter how you slice things. 

I guess the School of Sourdough should have the slogan 'How to make bread for not much bread'.  If you are interested in making the tree change to a professional micro baking lifestyle, why not come to a 300 Series Master Baker Workshop? These four day intensive workshops walk you through the entire baking process from a commercial perspective, as well as the bakery business itself. The Masterbaker workshops, held every few months at my own micro bakery, have assisted many home bakers to transition to a business model. My set up is relatively cheap to copy, and I cover all the basics to get you started. I also offer Bakery Support once you are up and running, so you don’t ever have to feel like it’s all too hard. And if you already have a bakery and want to transition into Artisan products, I can help here too, with training and consultation services.

Why not get in touch to discuss your plans with me? It’s free, and I’ll be happy to help in any way I can. I can be contacted on 0409 480 750 during daylight hours (AEST) any time you like.