Oven progress

This time last week we were all set to send the final oven design off to the fabricator, but a timely conversation with Peter Scott, led to some last minute changes. Peter Scott's site, Rocket Stove Design Base, has plans for a bread oven rocket stove. We saw these plans after many months of planning our own oven, having no idea if anyone had done something similar. It was very reassuring to know that someone had made an oven with a similar design to our own.

The internet is a fantastic resource for finding out about innovative designs, such as rocket stoves, but sometimes there's no substitute for a conversation with an actual person, and so it proved in this case. Matthew's conversation with Peter Scott has led to a number of critical improvements.

The plans are now revised and almost ready to go (again!).


This is the view of the internal metal structure of the oven looking from the front. You can see the open doors to the three decks. The previous iteration of the design had only two decks, so bread has definitely been the winner from the redesign!

Local Food Weekend

We've had a busy and exciting weekend full of local food adventures.

Saturday was the AGM of the Fife Diet. The Fife Diet aims to encourage people to source more of their food from their local area, and they've been a great support to us. The speaker was Phil Hanlon, whose AFTERnow project looks at the impact of the diseases of civilisation on today's society. What emerged strongly from Phil and those listening was the importance of community links and networks for dealing both with our current food situation - obesity, carbon emissions, loss of local foodways - and possible future senarios - peak oil, disruptions to food security.

We had a stall at the AGM, and it was great to hear lots of enthusiasm for our bread. We also got to chat with one of our long-time food heros, Joanna Blythman. The great value for us, as producers, in meetings like this one is, not only to hear about the work of the Fife Diet in the last year, but also to meet people with similar concerns and enthusiasms to our own. Academics like Phil Hanlon; writers and campaigners like Mike Small and Joanna Blythman; like-minded people living close by us we'd never met before; someone who might put us in contact with a source of local honey - all these links help to strengthen the community in which we live and work.

On Sunday we took our first trip to Muddy Boots, a farm, shop, cafe and source of varied outdoor fun. We were feeling pretty tired after our week baking followed by the Fife Diet stall so were hoping for good, simple food, not cooked by us! And Muddy Boots cafe were more than up to the job. We had a delicious pork stew with mashed potatoes. It's so rare that I eat a meal in a cafe or restaurant that is something I would have been really pleased to cook at home, but this stew and the mixed fruit crumble which followed it, did that job brilliantly.

I then picked up seven kilos of tomatoes to fuel my current food preserving obsession - filling the freezer with roast tomato passata while the Fife tomatoes are plentiful. Better get roasting . . .

Fabric

The artisan baker is pretty dependent on fabric. The proving clothes, the wiping clothes, the endless handwashing . . .

You can, of course, buy proving clothes. However, to me that seems a rather expensive way to get some heavy hemmed cloth. When we started out baking in our kitchen, I started making proving clothes for lining the baskets in which the round loaves rise, and in which the longer free-standing loaves rise. It's so little trouble to do I still make them as we need them. I use heavy artist's canvas, which seems to do the job just fine. We have long clothes which are folded up to support many rising loaves and square ones which line baskets.



We also use cloth for delivering bread to bread clubs. Each household's bread is popped into a cloth bag, labeled with their order for the week, the bags are then taken to the hub household and people pick up their loaves from there. We use bags from Bishopston Trading


All of Bishopston's stuff is organic and fairtrade. And I don't think you can have a sustainable bakery without that.

Sun falling on cedars

Our new oven will be wood-fired. The design is a rocket-type, which is substantially more fuel efficient than a traditional wood-fired bread oven.

We are fortunate to be close to the Scottish Wood sawmill at Inzievar Woods, an organisation working towards their aim of creating a sustainable, exciting, regenerative woodland culture in Fife. Sawmill offcuts will be perfect for feeding into the new oven. There's even a cycle path on the old Dunfermline to Alloa railway which connects the bakery with the sawmill, but I'm not certain how practical bicycle collection of wood would be. Perhaps it's time to invest in a donkey cart. Or a goat cart? Then we could have goat's milk too.

However it gets to us, we're going to need somewhere to store the wood. My brother has built us a beautiful wood shelter.


This is the view from the bakery door, you can see the wood store through our nascent perennial herb, fruit and vegetable garden. Next year I hope you won't be able to see the wood through the abundance of berries, rhubarb and asparagus, but at the moment only the comfrey is blocking the view.

Here's a close-up of the lovely cedar shingles on top

Perks of the Job: No. 3

Hotcakes

In the days when we were baking in our kitchen there was quite often the opportunity for using up some surplus starter from the day's bake in hotcakes for the next morning.

For the uninitiated, hotcakes are a kind of naturally yeasted pancake (think drop scone rather than crepe), traditionally done on a griddle. Sandor Katz in his excellent Wild Fermentation has a great recipe and description. His is an Alaskan Frontier recipe - the frontiers men would carry their sourdough starter with them so they could have bread or hotcakes wherever they found themselves.


I'm sure the life of an artisan baker is very cushy in comparison to that of an Alaskan Frontiersman, but when you're up at Baker O'clock, a couple of hotcakes with jam and creme fraiche are extremely welcome.



Even now when we don't bake in our kitchen I keep a jar of starter whose main function is the raising of weekend hotcakes. They are also great with a fried egg and salt pork.

Baker's Breakfast Hotcakes

The night before

140g starter
250ml water - lukewarm
200g fine wholemeal flour (I use Dove's Farm)

Mix these together, cover, and leave to ferment until the next morning.

In the morning -

Gently heat a cast iron pan or griddle, or other heavy frying pan. Then stir in to your hotcake mix

1 egg, beaten (if you need egg-free pancakes, you can leave this out, although the soft middle of the hotcakes will be a little squidgy)
1 tbspn olive oil, or melted lard or butter.
1/2 tspn salt
1/2 tspn bicarbonate of soda (this is not essential, but neutralises the slightly sour taste of the hotcakes, if you want).

Put a little lard or butter on a bit of kitchen roll or cloth and rub over the griddle.

Pour on sufficient batter to make the size of hotcake you require. When bubbles have formed and the top has firmed up a little, flip and cook the other side.

As they come off the griddle eat at once, or keep warm for a short while in a low oven wrapped in a tea towel.

Travelling Starter

A major consideration when packing for our holiday for the last few years has been 'how can we get our starter safely to Cornwall?'. With four of us going on the train over two days, this is no small matter. How can we seal the jar so the starter doesn't escape on the train, without pressure building up causing the jar to explode? (Yes, this has happened to me!) How to keep it cool enough? How to remember to put it in the fridge during our overnight stay in London, when all we want to do is eat my Mum's delicious supper and drink some wine? And again, how to remember to pop it straight in the fridge when we get there and not leave it in the sun while we run straight to the sea?

Important questions when you have a plan to try out beach bread!

The starter made it down to Cornwall without major incident, and the beach barbeque plans were hatched. Naturally leavened beach bread cannot be a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing. Not when you've got to make the starter the night before. So we had to gamble on the weather and ended up with a classic British beach day - grey with a threat of drizzle - each time with did it! However, as you can see, we found that it's much better to get out onto the beach in the drizzle and get on with it than kick around the cottage.

We chose a spot at the base of a rocky outcrop and built a small fire pit.


First up were some John Dorys, they cooked while the fire was hot, at the same time the stones under the fire, on which we planned to cook the bread, were heating.


When they were done we wrapped them up and buried them in warm sand while the bread cooked.


Matthew then stretched out bits of dough and placed them on the hot rocks where the fire had been.


Things got a little sandy and ashy . . .


. . . but nothing a quick brush down couldn't fix.


Barbequed fish, flat breads baked on the stones and some locally-grown cucumbers the shape and colour of lemons. Yum. Love holidays!

Summer

Wow, summer is not a great time for blogging. How did four months go by without attention to this poor neglected blog?

One reason is that the bakery work has been changing and keeping us on our toes - because we don't have a proving box (a massive fridge used in most bakeries to keep the speed of their dough proving constant) we adjust the amount of starter and water in the dough to make the loaves prove more slowly in hot weather. Doing this over the change of season for the first time has taken a bit of adjusting to. We made a couple of batches of 'barbeque loaves' when Sourdoughs got too flat in the heat.


And here is photographic evidence that in June it was even hot enough to make a barbeque to go with them. In Fife! Flat sourdough bread and herrings were a brilliant combination.

There have been so many things to keep us outside at this time of year that sitting in front of the computer has been a low priority. However, now it's August and the rainy season has begun! We are also finally starting the process of building our new oven. After much research, thought and conversations with architects, potters and materials manufacturers, it's time to actually do it!

First stop, order the materials . . .