Warwick Quinton 04/09/2022 Warwick Quinton 04/09/2022

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.

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.

Intensive workshops at the School of sourdough

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.

Warwick Quinton 08/09/2021 Warwick Quinton 08/09/2021

Barrel Oven Build

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.

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.

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.

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!