The Bush Bakery Tour Down South

Tour Down South

Since my last post alluding to the upcoming trip through the southern states, I've had some great feedback, so I've been fleshing out details of how it's all going to work. So far, the dates and locations and confirmed venues, as well as links for booking, are as follows: (These are being updated each week, so if a venue is not yet confirmed, you will find out about it here. If there is a web page done, the workshop will be going ahead anyway, and people who book will receive an email with details.)

Weekend 2/3 June: Nowra/Berry NSW. Workshop to be held at Berry B&B on Saturday night and Sun morning. This one is now sold out. Keep an eye out for next year!

Weekend 9/10 June Braidwood area NSW. Workshop confirmed to be held at Murrumbateman, on one of our student's farms. Still a couple of spots available, but it's very close to being sold out, so get in quick!

Sunday 17 June: Harcourt/ Bendigo area VIC. One workshop confirmed at the historic and soon to re open Blumes Bakery, Harcourt. Still a few spots available, but word is out and it's filling fast.

Weekend 23/24 June: Melbourne area. Workshop to be held at Knoxfield, about 20 minutes out of the CBD in a really easy to access location. Still some places available, but bookings are coming in from groups so if you want to attend I recommend you get in soon.

Weekend 30/1 June/July: Adelaide. We are running our workshop from Brahma Lodge, in northern Adelaide - about 25 minutes from the city. Still some places available so book now.

Weekend 21/22 July: Wheat Belt, WA. Workshop confirmed for Pingelly on a fellow baker, Ed, The Breadwright's micro bakery. Camp sites available, so come on and make the trip!  

Weekend 28/29/30th July.  Esperance, WA. Two workshops and a demonstration bake confirmed. The first, by invitation only at my fellow baker and keen student's micro bakery, Tiff from Bread Local, and the second workshop at Yirri Grove Olive plantation. There are still places available for the Yirri Grove workshop, but it is almost sold out. Don't miss this one!

Weekend 11/12 August: Mildura area VIC. Workshop at Red Cliffs, just outside Mildura, on the 11th. 

Weekend 25/26 August: Bathurst area NSW. Choosing between a couple of venues. Link will be up soon.

Follow the links on the area near you to our shop, which will enable you to book in directly. If I'm in your area and you know of an event that is being held locally where we can run a demo bake or Community Bake In, please feel free to get in touch! 

The Bush Baking Workshop involves making bread the way it has been made for centuries - using two hands and some very simple tools to make the dough, which will be stored and proofed without electric heating or refrigeration. It's sourdough, unplugged; real bread for real people.

The Bush Bakery; Mark II

The story of the Bush Bakery has been told here, and in a vimeo story, and on the pages of various articles on the web. I won't repeat it here today. We are moving forward! 

This tour is what happens when you take what I named the Gypsy Bakery Trailer back on the road. Of course, those following the story would know that the original Gypsy Bakery Trailer ended up being far too heavy to tow around on a regular basis. It was parked at our premises at Ellalong, where it grew a 'lean to' off the side. This became my classroom, and soon after this grew again to become my Bush Bakery, Mk I. 

The Bush Bakery Mk II is being built as we speak. It comes from a hybridisation of the Gypsy trailer and the mobile shop you might have seen in the Vimeo link earlier.

The original Gypsy Bakery Trailer will be moved back to its birthplace of Wallarobba very soon, where it will undergo a big recycling process. As a prototype, the trailer was useful, and it has paid for itself. However, it also damn near wore me out every time I baked in it.

Craig and I have figured out how to recycle it into a completely new production unit, which indeed will be truly portable. It will also be easier to work. The working title for this project is The Bush Bakery Mk III. But more on that later. Let's roll back to the present - the Bush Bakery Mk II.

Reverse Technology in action

Those of you who have been following my stories for a while would know that I'm heavily into 'third world simple' technology. This phrase was coined when Craig Miller, my oven design partner and I were creating the first of our prototype woodfired baker's ovens, affectionately known collectively as 'the Berthas'. Anyone armed with a spanner, a crowbar and a basic set of tools could repair these ovens. The principle also meant that we were constantly trying to simplify, to remove stuff that wasn't necessary. Our ovens are designed not to break, in essence. Easy to say, of course, but hard to do. We are still diligently working at it, eight years later.

Extending that principle, I've arrived at what I'm calling 'Reverse Technology'. When you come to a Bush Baking workshop while I'm on the road, you will be seeing a lot of applied technologies from the past which are 'fit for purpose' today. My Bush Trailer will demonstrate some new twists on some of these technologies, as they can be applied to my slow fermentation sourdough baking techniques. Kind of a win/win, yes? 

The new trailer, which will have a working title of 'The Bush Bakery Mk II', will be truly 'off grid'. It needs no mains power, but I want to go further than that; there will be no gas either. It will need to plug in to water, and that's about it; I'll mention in my defence that carrying large volumes of water isn't possible on a small trailer.

The idea is it will be robust, super simple, adaptible and useful for life on the road. Some examples of these Reverse Technologies you are likely to see and use in the trailer are as follows:

The Baker's Trough

Making dough in bulk by hand

When I started out, I couldn't afford to buy a mixer, so I developed a kneading technique which enabled me to make good quality dough in 30 kg batches completely by hand. I utilised this technique again many years later in our Hunter Street co-op style bakery, and was able to quite easily make up to 180 kg of dough each day. It was slow work, but very easy once you got into the swing of it.

Recently, I discovered the Baker's Trough, which has been a revelation. This simple trough amplifies the baker's mechanical effort (two human arms) many times, thereby being able to create dough very efficiently by hand. Such a deceptively simple tool, and yet this is how bakers around the world made dough right up till the mid 20th Century. Gradually, electricity became more widely available and mixers began to be installed in most bakeries in the western world. I do remember seeing a bakery when I was a kid which still had a series of stone baker's troughs in use, alongside a huge two arm mixer. These troughs looked a lot like those old cement laundry sinks most houses had before the washing machine became a household appliance. Now I'm showing my age; my grandma had a pair of them, and they are remarkably similar to those used by the bakery I mentioned here. 

I'm in the process of building my own baker's trough from timber. It will form the backbone of my traveling doughmaking equipment. I'm currently experimenting with designs, but I'm attracted to using a tree trunk hollowed out with a small chainsaw, and then being carved, chiselled and sanded smooth. 

Note: At the beginning of the tour, the baker's trough is still unfinished. I plan on making time to build it somewhere along the way when the opportunity presents itself. Stay tuned!

The Bush Baker'sOven

The Bush Baker's Oven

The dough will be baked in a very basic woodfired oven which will be set up at each site. The oven should be able to bake about 16 loaves at a time, can be lifted by one person, and can be powered using a variety of fuels, including charcoal, sticks and twigs, briquettes or even biochar.

It's a revolutionary take on an old, old design I came across at a market stall a few years back. As usual, mine will be a prototype, and we will see what happens. Watch this blog for details as I write them.

Naked Refrigeration and Proofing

While there are perfectly workable off grid fridges available which are powered by gas, these didn't qualify as 'reverse technology'. Indeed, they have an ongoing dependency on gas, which in turn generates a dependency on exploration and mining and so on.

Solar fridges exist, and could become commonplace, but for this trip, I have been aiming for super simple and cheap - 'third world simple' has been my catch phrase, and so solar systems were just too elaborate and expensive for what I need. 

I have been looking into things which utilise evaporative cooling - things like 'Zeer pots' and 'Coolgardie safes'. Evaporation requires heat and/or airflow, both of which are available in abundance when you are outdoors in Australia. At Ellalong, I used ice filled PVC tubes and small fans to cool an insulated space. Eventually, I found that simply placing a bunch of large ice filled bottles in the coolroom space and blowing air at them cooled things by about 10 to 15 degrees below the ambient temperature. This was enough for my needs, most of the time - but on this trip, I wanted to go further with less.

Low Tech Cooler/Proofer

I liked the idea of using clay to keep things cold, but the problem with my trailer is weight and movement. Clay is relatively fragile, and to work well as a fridge, it needs a bit of weight.

I've arrived at the Coolgardie principle as a very good solution for mobile cooling. The evaporative power generated by slowly wetting hessian or calico or old towel is what cools a Coolgardie safe. You can bring the temperature of the 'safe' 10 to 15 degrees below the external temperature in the right conditions. 

So far. my version utilises two screens, filled with clay pellets from an old aquaponics setup, wrapped up with hessian and shade cloth. It is moistened by a drip feed hose, and evaporation is provided by a battery powered fan, as well as ambient ventilation while the trailer is moving. Early testing is providing reasonable cooling; it's still a work in progress, lets say. We are not there yet!

I'm also using candle power and terracotta pots to warm the same unit when I need to proof dough. So I have a super low tech version of what is known in bakery circles as a 'retarder / proofer'. I've used it a few times now, and I'm learning some tricks. I think eventually I will move to either a spirit burner type to get things really hot. 

So why not connect with me on the way?

For me, the trip will be something very special; I will finally get to meet many of you who I've spent much time with either on the phone or via email. I'll get to meet people who read what I write as well. It's a bit strange being a writer - lots of you know of me through my stories, yet I don't know you at all. It will be nice to actually meet you!

I will also be able to see some of the places in the Australian bush I've always wanted to see.

I'm totally fascinated by how Australian bakers managed to create the daily bread a hundred years ago, when there was no refrigeration, no electricity, very few vehicles, and often very little pure flour! On this trip, I want to drop in to a few bakeries still using Scotch ovens, and talk shop with bakers, learning as we do from each other. 

It's going to be a very full and hopefully rewarding trip. When I first wrote this post, there were 72 sleeps till I hit the road. At the time of this edit, there are only about 5 sleeps to go! Much is finished, but there is still so much to do!

The Bush Bakery Mk II

Times of change - the baker hits the road.

Taking Luna's Vital Signs as I prepare for a baking session at a 101 Workshop.

I've been working and teaching at the Bush Bakery for the past few years now. It's been an absolute revelation on so many levels. From thirty years of running numerous bakeries, lots of common issues emerge; big ones include energy usage, wastage, working civilised and family friendly hours, and the effects of long term baking on the body. Others have been how can one simplify the production of sourdough bread so that it is consistent; how to work with the seasons; how to create the most nutritious bread possible sustainably and ethically. There are more issues on this list as well, though the article will rapidly step beyond the subject of the title.

Anyway, I've had to assess them all, and re assess them, over time. The Bush Bakery, then, has been a test bed for the resolution of many aspects of being a baker, and about the practicalities of life in the baking trade. And I have to say it has been a total success as a means of coming to grips with many of these issues. As a bonus, I've also been able to bake some of the best bread I've ever made there, and have taught hundreds of you the basics of the baker's craft since being here.

Baking in the Elements

My past three bakery incarnations have involved semi outdoor baking; it seems to be a natural extension to the idea of working a wood fired oven. There are numerous benefits with this style of baking. The obvious one is avoiding baking the actual baker, which can occur by enclosing the baker in a box with a couple of tonnes of hot thermal mass standing right beside them. Every summer, bakers everywhere adapt to large volumes of sweat being emitted from their pores as they attempt to keep an oven filled with melting dough.  It's never pretty.

I've always considered a baker's summer as an opportunity to clear out the sweat glands and lose a bit of weight.  You sweat a lot, but you just embrace it. You learn to hydrate at levels only athletes can appreciate. Being close to the breeze really helps, though. The Bush Bakery has two open sides, and all I need is a decent fan to move the air around; thus, surviving in hot weather is achievable. 

On the other hand, winter here is delicious, with a couple of tonnes of hot brick on bake day to remove temperature fluctuations. It presents its own issues, of course; not the least of which is to attempt to get the bake done in a reasonable amount of time while the weather is cold. Things slow down in the baking world more and more as the mercury gradually disappears inside its little glass tube.

When you are semi outdoors, the cold is pretty influential. Granted, it doesn't get all that cold here in the lower Hunter Valley; though it's still cold enough for you to really know you are in the middle of winter. On a baking week, I work three days preparing dough, and I don't fire up the oven at all. My environment can be pretty harsh in the dead of winter, with the cold, the wind, and the work all being relatively relentless.  In addition, my techniques involve cooling down dough, so much of the time my extremities (fingers and hands) are being reduced to the temperature of the dough I am working, and it's usually somewhere below ten degrees C when it emerges from the fridge.

Baking strategies have to be devised which are almost diametrically opposed to those used in Summer.

(Having baked for about thirteen winters in the Blue Mountains,  the climate in the Lower Hunter Valley is a walk in the park by comparison. Up in those hills, it tends towards 'brass monkey weather' for the majority of every year; winter baking presents even more intense challenges.)

Overall, though, a cooler climate is better for slowly fermenting sourdough than a hot one. Bakers are nothing if not adaptive creatures, I hasten to add. Once you have survived half a dozen seasons in the same environment, you will learn how to cope with it, no matter what. Nonetheless, practitioners of my craft have always been acutely aware of the seasons; the elemental forces dictate the strategy the baker plans for each bake.  In this regard, bakers share a great deal with farmers, who are always learning to work with the elements.

A Zero Waste Approach

The Bush Bakery is about more than baking outdoors.  I've written on other forums about some of the other things I've been trying to come to grips with while I've been working here. Things like waste. The Bush Bakery is as close to a 'zero waste' bakery as I think it is possible to be. It is largely a closed loop system. On the input side, there are various forms of plastic packaging and so forth which are quite difficult to avoid in the first place, but pretty much every input and output have been thought about in the larger scheme of things. Everything has multiple uses on the way to its end point. I re-use semolina, for example, three times; first, it is sifted over and under the dough; then, overs are sifted and returned  to the container for next use, with any 'scarf', or moistened semolina sifted out and put in the ash bin. Finally, when the floor of the oven is swept clean after loading and emptying, the burnt semolina leftover is also put in the ash tin. This burnt semolina is used at the end of each firing cycle as fuel. It provides a quick burst of flame, and so is useful at various times of the bake when the firebox needs a kick along. 

Waste from re stocking days and workshops is sorted through into incenerables, recyclables and compost. My flour bags get used to establish the fire on bake days, as they are made of paper. I have also used them for various gardening applications as well. I've gradually refined the process of bringing unsold bread from my markets based retail operation into the production process as fuel. Thus, I have been able to refine my way of making 'organic coal', or biochar, using waste heat from the oven. This biochar is now an essential fuel to power the oven.

We discovered 'organic coal' by accident about seven years ago, with one of the first prototype woodfired ovens we made, Bertha. A tired baker would sometimes leave a loaf up the back of the oven without noticing. The following morning when the decks were swept clean for the day’s bake, a black, lightweight piece of coal was discovered. It was thrown in the firebox to dispose of. Wow! It burned like a bomb!

Organic coal has been fully incorporated into my baking practice now.

I also power the oven with sawmill offcuts, making the whole energy supply issue very easy and very cheap to resolve. By driving my oven entirely with waste, I estimate that my total baking setup costs a quarter of conventional commercial baking systems to operate, even when you take into account the extra time you need to devote to maintaining these energy sources. 

Flour dust gets up your nose (and later, everywhere else)

Long term bakers often tell me that flour dust is an issue for them. Some of them, when they combine it with other irritants like tobacco smoke and the like, end up with greatly reduced lung capacity, and even mild emphasema. Flour build up in the lungs is known as ‘white lung’. I didn’t think it was an issue for me. I haven't smoked in many, many years; but at Ellalong, with the bakery down the hill and the dough room up the hill, I was experiencing shortness of breath. I just put it down to my age, and that bloody big hill. By chance, I decided to move the dough room down to the Bush Bakery to make more space in the house. The Bush Bakery had open walls, lined with shade cloth. Suddenly, this shortness of breath decreased quite dramatically. I guess my lungs were filling up with flour from making dough in an enclosed space. In future bakeries, I intend to design a more sophisticated version of this indoor/ outdoor setup.

Change as a constant

Fundamentally, I think I love the elements. This 'hot and cold' thing is good for me. My soul isn't attuned to sameness, and I need change to keep it happy. The seasons provide this, particularly when one bakes outside. This constant change, I think, is also the reason I have continued to bake for the past thirty years.

Any one who knows me will attest to the fact that I am deeply attuned to total reinvention from time to time, and that I do it on a fairly regular basis.

For me to have been able to sustain myself as a baker for such a long period is testament to the fact that natural baking, in the elements, offers change, a kind of daily process of problem solving; in short, baking has a mental attraction that simply can't be replicated any other way that I know of.

Which brings me to the subject of the title.

I've been talking to people all around Australia over the past few years; plenty of you can't get to the Hunter Valley for a day or two, but you really want to learn sourdough in a hands on way. You know about what I do, and really just want to learn the basics of the craft, first hand, from someone who isn't full of hot air and limited experience.  Many of you have indicated that you are inspired not only by my methods, but also by my methodology; ways I am learning to remove waste from the baking business, simple and cheap ways to get 'off the grid' on every level; techniques to help people consider ALL the breadmaking inputs and outputs, and to make environmentally sensible decisions around each baking practice; and mostly just to bring baking proper bread back to the people.

It appears my ideology, my experiments, my successes and my failures over many years have all struck a chord; especially of late. The planets are aligning in all these endeavours. People want to investigate low tech solutions to all manner of enterprises. People want to build local networks and utilise what they have. They want to reduce food miles, make stuff from scratch at home, or to know the person who made it. They are fascinated by what can be done with 'third world' technologies, with collaboration, with an 'artisan' mindset.

People are needing to knead! The artisan baking community have been reinventing bread, one workshop, one loaf at a time, for many years now. I began my personal and professional journey almost three decades ago, and the recent embrace by 'the people' has been very encouraging.

Many of you have come to a 101 workshop and have ended up owning a bakery! (You know who you are, and I do wish all of you well!)

Hitting the road Punning

I have been encouraged by you to take the next step.  Most of you just want me to keep baking for you here in the Hunter Valley every week, and while it's been very difficult to 'peel' me away from the baking lifestyle, I gotta say the baker needs a ‘rest’ from ‘kneading’ to make his bread. He wants to make his dough while on the go.  While I know where my bread is buttered,  it's your bread I'm interested in. Specifically, how it's made, and where!

I want to come to your town and show off some tricks I've learned this last thirty years or so. I want to speak, to share my lifetime's passion directly with you. I want to come to where ever you are, and to show you the tricks of the trade, first hand. And I want to hear all about your place, your town, your region while I'm there. I definitely want to meet you. 

I've been looking into ways of baking that are so simple, so basic, that absolutely no electricity is required.  I'm creating a mobile, totally off the grid baking classroom, which can be brought to your town, your suburb, your area, your market, and which can practically demonstrate the baker's craft with minimal fuss. 

I can do demonstration workshops at your event.  I can run half day, semi 'hands on'  workshops where people get to bake some bread to take home. I can also run full day and multi day baking workshops where you get to make the dough completely from scratch and then bake it. With the trailer I'll be bringing, I can do this pretty much anywhere. I’m going to build a mobile, Bush Bakery MkII. It will be for teaching how to bake.

So, these workshops will be focused on Bush Baking, using techniques not dissimilar to Australia's original bakers. Minimal, low tech refrigeration, no electricity, no running water. Just beautiful, hand made woodfired sourdough bread. Baked in the elements, come what may. It's seat of the pants baking at it's finest, and I want you to come and be part of it, wherever you may be. There will be triumphs and there most certainly will be failures. But no matter, I guarantee you and I will both learn lot every time, and that neither of us will ever forget it!

The route so far:

I'm heading South from the Lower Hunter Valley of NSW in June this year. The plan is to head (initially) along the coast, with possible stops in Sydney, Wollongong, and Berry; then inland to Canberra, and the Bendigo area; then on to Melbourne, Adelaide, maybe a stop around Ceduna, then across the Nullabor to Esperance, Albany, Margaret River, Perth,  Kalgoorlie; and than back again with some diversions along the way. The idea is to run Bush Baking workshops for small, medium and large groups of people wherever I can. I want to tag into events which may suit this teaching format, and I want to use local knowledge along the way to really connect with each region. Things like local shows, field days and markets. If the idea works, I'll do a similar one next year, only this next time I'll head north. It's a big country! 

It would be great to hear from people in some of these places between now and then. If you would like me to teach your group, or in your town, or at your event, I'll be on the road from June to  September this year. There is still quite a bit of flexibility in the time and exact route of my journey, so if you reckon I really should hook into something you have planned, then talk to me! I'm all ears! In coming weeks I will be busily tieing down dates and locations, so  watch this space for developments. If you would like to discuss things with me my number is 0409 480 750. Please feel free to call. 

In defence of white squares...

Once upon a time, there was a boy in his back yard, kicking a soccer ball against the side fence. He was still too young for school, but probably too old to be still at home with his Mum. The boy's universe was beginning to stretch beyond the back yard, into the street. 

From his vantage point of the front gate, the boy could see the white Holden EH panel van. The driver would park just a couple of houses back from his, open the rear swing up window, and remove a large square wicker basket with a tea towel neatly folded over the handle. He would carefully load the basket up with white squares of bread - these were actually rectangular in shape, but the cross section was totally square. He would cover his load with said tea towel, and would walk from house to house, chatting with any one at home on his way. He dropped off a loaf or two to each residence; he knew where to leave the bread if the owner wasn't home. Money rarely changed hands, except on a Friday, when he would deliver the weekly account, along with the bread.

Eventually, he would get to the boy's house. With a wink, the baker, basket in hand and surprisingly nimble of foot, could lightly direct the boy's soccer ball expertly up the drive, and pass it across to the boy. Without missing a beat, he would hand the boy's mum a loaf, and divide one expertly in half for the boy. The squares had a seam, which tore neatly. This exposed the 'crumb', the absolutely best part of the bread. The boy would sit, soccer ball beside him, and proceed to remove the internals of the crusty, warm 'white square', absorbing the dough with a kind of primal relish. 

These memories provided the boy (me) with some indelible lessons; and these lessons are ones which I'd like to share with you in this post.

The first, and most important lesson was generosity. The baker gave me some bread. A simple gesture, but coupled with the baker taking the time to play with me, made it all the more generous. Giving is not something we see as an everyday thing now. It's reserved for occasions - birthday, Christmas etc. And then, it's overdone - we make a theatre of the whole event. Or, we are given something in order to sell us something else - a ‘free gift’. Yet I remember being given not one, but many loaves; it was just something a kid came to appreciate, simply by virtue of being a kid. People looked after you. My world has been forever shaped by this act; my default position has always been one of generosity. My default position is to look after kids. It's in deep. 

The next lesson was trust. The boy saw that the baker left everybody their bread each day; there was no question, no payment. The baker knew everybody would look after their bill, and he would never have to think about it. He knew how much bread they needed too - there was no ordering system. It's just the way things were. All our groceries were delivered, because many people didn't have cars (yet - though this would rapidly change). And everyone had a 'bill'. Each week, or whenever it needed to occur, there would be a cup of tea in the kitchen while Mum counted out the exact sum for each person - the grocer, the baker and so on.  It was a social thing, more than a financial one. Yes, there were no cards. Cash was currency, and that’s all there was.

Another, more primal lesson, was how good a thing really fresh bread is. I understood it by dipping my hand into it, and tearing out what was inside the crust. The crust was a wrapping for this magical, doughy substance. It wasn't sliced - that was the part you did yourself. We saw it as the ultimate convenience, simply having fresh bread every day - slicing it wasn't even something we thought about - one just sliced ones own bread. I'll hasten to add that this particular bread was tasty. It wasn't overly white - more sort of creamy than white - but it tasted like, well, real bread. 

Every meal involved bread. Breakfast was toast and Vegemite. Lunch was a ham sandwich. Dinner was meat, veg and buttered bread on the side. Bread was affordable, staple food. It was a stomach filler.  Everyone ate it, and no one complained about their various stomach issues.

Years later, my Dad would take me on his own rounds. He wasn't a baker - he was an accountant. We would jump in our own red and white Holden station wagon (FB, I think; Dad’s pride and joy), with Dad's 'portable' adding machine in the back, along with his 'ledgers' (whatever they were; green hard covered journals in a big box), and head off to the inner west of Sydney. 

In those days, the heart of Australia's thriving Italian community began in Croydon, and extended as far as possibly Auburn or Strathfield. Leichhardt was not yet settled - it was more of an industrial outpost back then. It would have been a Sunday mission - Saturdays were usually spent attending soccer games; soccer was considered a 'safe' game, compared to the rugged rugby league. I presume my mother would have been guided in this decision by many Italian mummas. 

Dad was a trusted go between; a member of the Anglo world who was also accepted by the Italians. Many of these people had done work for Dad at different times - Dad used to have a grocery store in Croydon, which was in the epicenter of Sydney's first 'little Italy', back in the 1950's. Some of them supplied Dad with vegetables from their market gardens in Auburn; others painted the shop, or did repairs for him. Dad and Mum and I would be invited to Italian weddings, which would last for days at a time.

Dad continued these relationships long after the shop was sold (to one of them - beginning a long tradition of Italian fruit and veg shops in the inner city - but that's another story). Dad had, by this stage, started working a day job, as a company accountant. He still managed to keep all these long time immigrant friends on the right side of the tax man - they didn't understand Australia, or our complex tax system, but Dad did. Again, this was an act of generosity; money was not a primary motivation - at least that’s not how it looked to me, as a kid. Money was only used where other commodities were unsuitable, in the Italian scheme of things. Even then, they would paint your house at the drop of a hat, if they thought it needed doing. Or a mysterious box of vegetables would appear on the front door step, whether you wanted them or not. If all else failed, and there was simply no other way to show the necessary gratitude, a tidy wad of notes would emerge from the back pocket. The commonly accepted technique involved peeling off one note at a time, and gathering each together in an untidy bouquet before handing them over; the standard facial expression offered during this process looked a bit like when removing a thorn from one's foot; unpleasant, but necessary. So very Italian.

These people taught me about respect, about loyalty.  This was the underpinning of their world, and it simply would not run without it.

I learned about the 'other' from these people - first hand. Young Italian girls pelted overripe tomatoes at me from a distance, giggling; simultaneously teaching me about survival and lust. And, scraping tomato from my face, I learned about tomatoes. Tomatoes were a very important thing. Dangerous, yet delicious. Ripeness is everything.

Onwards Dad and I would go, until our rounds ended up in Parramatta, at the Fielders Bakery. He would perch me on top of huge hessian bags of grain, and leave me to whoever was working in the bake house at the time to keep an eye on me. Dad would go into the office, and set up his adding machine on the table. For many hours, I would hear the mechanical whirring of the machine as he pulled the handle after each entry.  I would pop my head into the office from time to time as Dad worked - and I'd be gone again, into the wilds of the factory with my pump up scooter (something my Dad never forgot to bring when we did our rounds) underneath me.

My memories from this time are a bit muddled - I think the bakery also milled flour, because I distinctly remember these hessian bags full of wheat. I also remember watching the bakers at work, hand turning dough in many large, stone troughs; they would work from one dough to another, using a kind of rotation system. Some of the bakers would squeeze off a little ball of dough between their fingers, and hand it to me. At that age, I had no idea of what was going on in front of me - indeed, it wasn't until many years of running bakeries myself that I was able to piece together these random fragments of memory to make some production sense of them.

These days, the Fielders bakery, which was its name, is long gone - though I think the brand has been absorbed into the conglomerated company that Fielders eventually became. Holden cars are no longer, with the current government ensuring that any automotive industry we may have left is well and truly second or third tier industry, entirely subsumed by the Chinese manufacturing juggernaut.

The Italian community is so well integrated into our own that it is often almost invisible, having newer emigres in ever bigger numbers landing in our old stomping grounds of the inner west of 1960s Sydney.

Change is our only constant, inevitably. 

White bread, and in particular the white square, is deeply unfashionable these days - it has become symbolic of all that is wrong with our food system. I hasten to add the white square remains the backbone of the bakery business - it's just that the machines are bigger now; bakers in factories wear white lab coats and monitor systems on a screen. The packers do the dirty work of stacking tins and moving bread crates around. The manufacturing time, per unit of bread, has gone from minutes to seconds. 

On the other end of the scale, the franchised retail bakery continues to thrive, while trading on the image of the village baker - which to a certain extent is true, as the bakery is part of the 'shopping village'. The product is uniform, coming from uniform chemistry; the chemistry itself is controlled by the corporation. The franchised baker gets their product range from a series of bags, supplied by the corporation.

These bakeries are little more than a modern form of servitude for all that work in them. Strangely, while many franchisees feel this way, others thrive in a controlled environment. Certainly, these operations are not about skill, or tradition, or quality, and do very little to bond a community - but the illusion is enough, it seems.

I have known many 'died in the wool' bakers who have purchased one of these franchises in the mistaken belief that it would be more profitable than their existing operation. These people will tell you that a profitable franchise is also an illusion; compared to their previous businesses. However, I digress... 

It seems to me that the idea of a bakery is powerful in our psyche - but for more reasons than simply to make bread. A bakery is a force for stability, for daily nutrition, for reminding us of our connectedness. It's a place of exchange - ideas, gossip, conversation. For some reason, people feel comfortable around a bakery. They get their daily renewal there. It symbolises constant change, yet also constancy. What is yesterday is gone, like the unsold bread; and today is fresh, and still full of promise. The community square, if you like - though it certainly doesn't have to be white.

Cicadas ate my bellbirds!

It's mid summer here in the Watagans. I can barely hear myself under the din of cicadas. It's so loud that it causes the internal cavities inside my ear to rattle when I go outside.

Right now, there are literally millions of cicadas surrounding my house. I know this, because they are all churping at full throttle as I write.  The sound comes in waves, reaching a deafening crescendo before subsiding somewhat, but without end. All day long. Inside the house, it's bearable if I close all the windows, turn on the air conditioning, and do something noisy. Unfortunately, it's really difficult to listen to music, as the pitch of the cicadas removes a certain frequency from one's hearing, like white noise does. Right now it's early morning and not so hot, so I have all the windows open, and fresh air is flooding through the house.  Accompanying the din, there is nothing. Most of the birds have vacated - I think that's what the cicadas are doing, by singing at the top of their lungs - they are driving away potential predators while they emerge, mate, lay their eggs and die. Even the dogs have fled to escape the noise. My pack of  canine cuties essentially follow me around wherever I am, so if I'm in the house, they are on the verandah. But not today. They are hiding in the cavernous garage with the door half closed to give them a break from the noise. Dogs are such ear driven creatures. It freaks them out when they can't hear properly. 

For those of you who have not yet attended a workshop here, the house is surrounded on three sides by dense bush - eucalypt forest, broadly speaking, with quite a steep rise behind us. The rise leads up to an access road, which verges this place. To get up there through the bush almost involves climbing gear, it's so steep.  This eucalypt scrub/forest goes on in some directions literally for fifty or more kilometres, as you enter the Watagan mountain wilderness. There aren't too many people  up behind us - I would estimate maybe a dozen cars regularly use the access road - and some of them you wouldn't see more than a couple of times a year.  It's the first time since I've had the bush bakery here - which is about three and a half years now - that there has been such a cicada onslaught.  Pretty sure there have been some cicadas each year, but nothing beyond curiosity was aroused in me. Certainly nothing to remember. I definitely remember the super hot weeks (average 45C for three weeks straight last year), the super wet ones (a couple of years back the rains were so heavy we had to dig trenches around the house so the holding dam wouldn't flood), the super dry and hot ones (last year, again, there were bushfires on the horizon or closer pretty much every day). This place, in a nutshell, seems to attract extremes of climate/environmental conditions. Today, as it has been all summer so far, is no exception.

The bush bakery, of course, is an outdoor affair. It's pretty much a lean-to, pitched on the end of a trailer/bake off unit unit.  The bake off unit has a 3 tonne wood fired oven, a  tray chiller, a proofer, a make up bench, sinks and dumpout racks.  It's open on one side, and has an insulated roof, with your classic corrugated iron deflector above it, installed later to provide a couple of hours' longer protection from the heat when working in 'the box', as I like to call it. It also has a stainless water tank on the roof for its own self contained plumbing system.

I've designed it for a few reasons, which I've discussed in other blog posts (have a look at sourdoughbaker.com.au for the full story about the trailer). Since parking it in its current position, I have made it a more permanent affair, attaching a demountable roof beside it, and a floor built from recycled pallet racking. I've built a very lightweight kitchen around my dough mixer, with shade mesh sides for maximum ventilation. The classroom is beside this, with mesh surrounding a large gazebo. There are blackboards everywhere, and a couple of work benches.

It's been used for baking, consulting and teaching, this space. In the main, it has been an experiment, with an aim of discovering just how little you need to make a few hundred loaves of bread. I think, to that end, it has achieved its purpose. Essentially, you don't need much at all. Indeed, at a future incarnation, I would very much like to strip things down even more. However, there are consequences in choosing to do this. One of them, as has been pointed out at the start of this post, is that for six to eight weeks a year, we are pretty much out of business. It's hard, nigh on impossible, to run a bake in mid summer. The temperatures inside the baking box get up to 50 degrees or more on pretty much every surface - this video is an example of this - and at those temperatures, dough, no matter how cold you keep it - melts. Then, when it rains heavily, you are likely to lose power as the lines gradually become saturated. Over the years I've been able to resolve power issues quite quickly, but when you have over fifty metres to travel to the nearest junction box down the side of a rocky mountain, well, short of investing large amounts of cash, you just constantly try to improve your setup. It's always a work in progress, to put it simply.

So now, in my off season, I get to reassess. It's definitely time to consider this outdoor bakery business. Those of you who have met me at a market or at a workshop know that baking is in my blood. It's very deep in, particularly in recent years when wood fired, third world simple, outdoor sessions were involved. I've been loving it. Right down to my bones.

There's the issue right there. My bones. Over the years, I've managed to stop a couple of cars using mostly my body as the initial deflector. I can tell you, it hurts like hell and I wouldn't advise it. Trouble is, while at the time you don't feel much, the ensuing years and decades make up for it - we are talking, especially, when there has been a considerable amount of time spent on one's feet - as is typical when you embark on baking off a few hundred loaves in a woodfired oven.

The process of pain management these days involves drinking warm water and movement, mainly - but I've used various substances over the years, and somehow one becomes blase about it all. I tend to keep doing the same old thing anyway. I mean, after some of the huge bakes I've done up here at the bush bakery, I'm pretty much incapable of walking more than about ten steps at a time the next day. At times, I've been able to work my way through these periods of extreme pain and stiffness, but as I get older I can see I'll need to really do some proper work on my own body, rather than on my bakery all the time. 

So this coming year, I've decided to make some changes. Broadly speaking, I'll be teaching and writing and consulting more, but baking less. I can feel your pain as you discover that there will be less bread around for a while. But hear me out. In the medium term, when I've finished some infrastructural changes (which involve moving the bakery to a more hospitable environment), my aim is to establish a permanent teaching facility which can operate year round. In addition, my new full time school will bake small amounts more regularly, thereby making better use of the resources I have while not destroying my body too much more than necessary.

The idea is to have a bake each week, which students (particularly 300 series students) can run, under supervision at first, until eventually a complete student run bakery emerges. The facility will be used to manufacture a variety of products, with a semi constant production run. 

In running the 300 Series workshops, I've become aware of the need for a practical facility where students can hone their skills while they are developing their individual business plan. In many cases, students are at the very beginning phase of their dream bakery, so it is often some years before their own situation evolves sufficiently to be commercially viable for them to fully dive in. The School of Sourdough can provide a venue for their professional development. At the same time, the facility can be a regular bakery, in that a small product range of great breads and cakes can be baked onsite each week for distribution and sale locally.

As far as I am aware, no such facility exists here in Australia. As yet, I have not tied down a suitable venue, though there are a few possibilities which I am chewing over. I want to remain here in the Hunter Valley, as its proximity to Newcastle, the airport, the relative proximity to both the Central Coast and Sydney make the lower Hunter ideal for this purpose. In addition, accommodation here in the Hunter Valley is both plentiful and cheap during the mid week, which is when the production run will take place.

I have already been discussing my vision with a couple of local operators in the accommodation business, but I foresee a need for medium term, budget priced, self contained accommodation for visitors - particularly close by the School, so that students can get around without car hire costs. At this point, I'm focusing on Cessnock and surrounding villages. I feel this town is ripe for something like this, and I'm very open to ideas people might have to make it all happen.

Post Script: It’s a year or so after I wrote this blog post. Since then, I’ve crossed the country and back with my Tour Down South, a traveling sourdough workshop on a specially built, recycled trailer which I tagged The Bush Bakery MkII. I’ve packed up the house/ bakery/ school at Ellalong, and I’ve relocated to a mate’s farm at Wallarobba, about an hour from there. I have begun setting up my school and bakery in a disused dairy shed here. It’s about 3/4 finished as I write this, and in a few weeks I’ll be running my first workshop from this new setup. It’s taken a while to get things done, as we are all just doing the renovations to the dairy in between other jobs. But it will be the School of Sourdough’s permanent home, and I would love to show it off to you! More details about the new bakery in another blog post soon, but if you would like to attend any upcoming workshop, you can follow this link to book.

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.

School is in!

Welcome to the School of Sourdough! 

Making natural bread has been my life's work. I've been committed to it for three decades now. I didn't go to bread school, or even do an apprenticeship. For what I wanted to do, at that time, there was no school. I didn't miraculously discover that I was born to be a baker, or to be in the kitchen at all, for that matter.

I became a baker to answer needs. Needs led to kneading, and the rest is the story I intend to tell through this school I've set up.

The School of Sourdough is, in a way, the legacy of a life spent making bread. I can confidently say that over these thirty years, I have made pretty much every mistake it's possible to make in the name of making great bread. If it's possible to get it wrong in any way at all, I have probably done it - and usually more than once. I am a living crash test dummy for what not to do in the bakery, and indeed in the bakery business.

Which is why you need to be here. I want everyone to be happy with their lot, in general. So if for some reason you choose to make natural bread,  I'm here to help. Otherwise, you stand a very real chance of hurting your soul, through the endless process of failure. You don't want that. Your soul needs to sing, and when you get the sourdough process right, it certainly does this - particularly if you also choose to bake with natural fire, like I do.

If you are here due to the natural process of internet rabbit holes, I congratulate you in getting this far.  If this rabbit hole has passed through some of my territory, for example my long time website sourdoughbaker.com.au, then you will be familiar with some of the content I have tried to offer. Never before in history has there been so much information available to us, and yet, despite the best efforts of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, aka; the founders of Google, we remain forever unenlightened. So many people come to my website, and my workshops, completely and utterly confused. I used to spend quite a bit of time trying to answer their numerous confusions, but these days I just work through my process of making sourdough bread with them, and eventually they begin to understand. All the guff they have been endlessly absorbing via innumerable sources gradually falls into place through the kind of understanding I teach here at the School of Sourdough. I'm more interested in helping students to understand 'why to' rather than 'how to'. 

Life is short. I could spend days and years learning, and then documenting, what I have learnt to you. I could travel the world, shopping for this or that authentic method, and faithfully report my findings so that you could make intelligent decisions, based on your own judgements and quite possibly prejudices. In this way, you could try various different techniques, and safely and dispassionately assess them, according to my learned recommendations.

Unfortunately, I don't have the years for this. Nor am I a proper journalist. I am a baker, as well as a perennial student. I have been able to refine my technique, over many incarnations, to be very flexible and indeed useable from a variety of perspectives. The methods I instruct, from experience, work well. My techniques are quite different to many, but because they have been developed over many years in a fairly scientific fashion,  they tend to stand up to pretty rigorous analysis. At the School of Sourdough, you can be certain you are starting from a solid base. Experience.

If you like what you see on these pages, or in my various social media feeds, why not come to a real, live workshop? You’ll get to see, smell, feel and taste the processes involved with true sourdough bread making. You might end up joining some dots from the various snippets of information you have already picked up from the internet, and in the end it may all make sense to you. If you’ve read this far, here’s a link to guide you to more. There’s all the current workshops there, as well as sourdough starter for sale, and various other bits and pieces. Enjoy!