Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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During my first week at SFBI, I learned the fundamentals of bread baking and realized this was something
I wanted to do professionally. The class was taught by
Lionel Vatinet, a French baker who had gone through
the Compagnon du Devoir apprenticeship training and
was one of the first French bakers to bring Old World
techniques to the American Bread Movement. On the
first day of class he found out I was staying with friends
just a few blocks from where he lived. After that, he gave
me a ride from Hayes Street to South San Francisco and
back again in the eveningan extra hour and a half to
learn about baking from a French Compagnon!
Before I traveled out to San Francisco, I found out
about a man named Alan Scott who built brick ovens,
taught workshops, and lived an easy drive north of the
city. There wasnt a workshop on the weekend between
my two SFBI classes, but when he returned my call he
said I was welcome to visit and see his oven in action.
When I met Alan at his beautiful Victorian home in
the rolling hills of Petaluma, he gave me a somewhat
stern lecture about the importance of a whole-grain
diet before he took me out back and showed me his
oven. This was the first time Id seen a wood-fired oven
in action; it was unforgettable! This was also the first
time Id smelled bread-infused steam rolling off bricks
heated by a fire of oak and eucalyptus, and felt the oily
wholesomeness of fresh flour falling from the grain
mill. Alan also explained that wheat can be grown in a
small golden plot by a houseit doesnt have to be
monocultivated on 1,000-acre plots somewhere in the
Preface
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Oven building was just as stimulating as bread baking! I wondered if maybe I should become a professional
mason. I had surreal dreams where the universe was made
of bricks and masonry, thrust lines extended into space,
dough transubstantiated into mortar and mortar into
dough. It took over a year of weekends and several periods of focused, intense work to finish Magdalena.
And then came the bread. Suddenly my life had two
new-to-me (yet ancient) schools of thought to explore:
making European-style hearth breads, and baking them
in wood-fired ovens.
I started with Pain au Levain, a traditional French
sourdough based on Lionels formula. The crust was
dark, the fins of bread created by the quick pull of a
razor baked into a dark but not quite burntcrust.
The crumb inside was fragrant, unbelievably so, a
fragrance I had never smelled before, like caramel,
wheat, and ancient temple walls. (The crumb is the
body of the breadeverything inside the crust, not
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Preface
bread that transcends age, gender, race, socioeconomic
stratum, and any other category you can think of. I was
humbled to realize in class one day that I was teaching
handmade bread techniques to a woman who had been
baking bread longer than I had been alive.
The teaching continued to draw me in, just as bread
baking had. So it was hard to turn down the opportunity to make the move to full-time teaching at Johnson
& Wales in Providence, Rhode Island. Although we
were sorry to leave our sweet cabin in the Vermont
woods and our good King Arthur friends, it was a great
chance to gain experience in another part of the baking
world. Plus, it provided a summer teaching break and
the chance to go back and bake in Magdalena again!
It was a perfect time to get back into small-scale
brick oven baking. I had learned a lot about baking by
that time, and the organic, local food scene had gone
mainstream. The greater awareness of, and demand for,
high-quality local food increased the acreage of organic
wheat, and this greater supply allowed millers to draw
and blend from more sources and create flours with
more consistency. My old customer base remembered
my role as village baker, and word got around that
once again there was bread on Golden Farm Road. The
tourist industry was perfectly in sync with my summer
teaching break, and Kyle Swains Blue Moon Bistro,
my favorite restaurant, was happy to serve my bread
alongside his delicious coastal cuisine.
The larger wood-fired oven world continuedand
continuesto grow. King Arthur installed a woodfired oven in the Baking Education Center, and I
started regularly guest teaching classes there. I met
people who installed similar oven kits, built clay ovens
or masonry ovens based on Alan Scott plans. Some students wanted input on what type of oven to build. And
still I heard the common questions Id been aware of
since that first class with Dan Wing about firing times,
steam, and open crumb. The tips Tom Trout gave me
when I was building Magdalena began to filter into the
amateur wood-fired oven world.
By this time the wood-fired oven scene was populated by many different styles, shapes, and designs.
Domed brick Pompeii ovens. Clay bread ovens
from Quebec. Backyard bread ovens. Commercial
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production ovens. Scandinavian ovens, necessarily efficient in a land where wood has long been scarce and
precious. Colonial beehive ovens unearthed from
plaster walls during renovations in old homes across the
northeastern United States. But the Alan Scott oven
design became a reference point by which other woodfired bread ovens are described. Chances are a North
America stonemason and oven builder knows the Alan
Scott oven. The Bread Builders spawned countless
micro-bakeries across the country, because it showed
aspiring bakers how to build an economical brick oven
that could turn out artisan hearth loaves earmarked
with the seal of Old World artisanship.
In addition to Alans inspirationand under the
guidance of professional masonsthe possibility of
building or having a wood-fired oven has become pretty
accessible to everyone. You do not have to be a mason
to build an Alan Scott oven, and many people came to
the endeavor through their journey as bread bakers or
piazzalos, very often with no prior masonry experience
at all. Like me, for example. I followed Alans plans,
built this magic thing, and became enchanted by the
primal essence of the fire.
Alans design and The Bread Builders still inspire and
encourage many segments of society: folks living off the
grid, affluent foodies, entrepreneurs, budding masons,
community builders, bread heads, fifth-generation
immigrants reconnecting with their Nonnas food
traditions. All these folks, helped along by input from
professional masons and combustion experts through
online chatgroups and construction site epiphanies,
have led us to this exciting time in wood-fired ovens,
fueled by a sense of community focused on fire.
Not only is there excitement for baking and oven
construction, but were also seeing the resurgence in
regional, small-scale grain production and milling. The
rise and almost obsessive interest in handmade bread,
surge of community farmers markets, and availability
of local, small-scale artisan food is helping recalibrate
our culture and economy. Not to mention a food-truck
phenomenon that includes mobile wood-fired pizza
ovens! Alans vision of communities gathering around
wood-fired bread ovens has caught on, big time, and
momentum continues to grow nearly 15 years after The
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