Well, it all began a long time ago really, baking bread at home which rose so much in the oven it would reach the top of it, and smelt and tasted great, and toasted nicely, but was too crumbly for sandwiches and went dry almost immediately. I halved the yeast, and the bread was better. Then someone asked me, had I made sourdough before? I hadn’t, but had been reading up on it, and this prompted me to start my first starter. A couple of weeks later, the resultant sourdough loaf was far from perfect, but it was very good, and toasted with butter and apricot jam from our own tree, it is memorable. So followed more sourdough, and new starters, and a move to organic grain which I milled in a small Retsel mill. The loaves, which I proved in cane baskets from the $2 shop and baked in our conventional oven, varied widely, but tasted great, kept well and slowly improved. Soon I was not buying any bread at all for our young family and felt it later if I did eat conventional bread anywhere.
When my husband Greg, and I and our three children aged 5, 4, and 2, moved to our farm nearly a year ago, we did so with the clear vision of beginning a small wood fired organic bakery and baking sourdough to sell at markets and through local shops. I had attended a workshop with Thomas and Gabi Moritz of Boonderoo Farm in Cheshunt who bake sourdough in a wood fired oven with grain they mill fresh every week. They are wonderful people who make great bread in a beautiful setting, and run fantastic workshops twice a year.
In June and July, Thomas came down and built our oven for us, a forty loaf Alan Scott designed wood fired oven. It was a big project, with bricks and blocks, sand, stone, cement, and insulation arriving first, and was then built in stages, over six or seven days. It is a work of art, and the centre piece of the bakery. It has a mass of masonry surrounding the low, 4″ by 6″ oven which takes a good 24 hours of firing to heat through and get hot enough to heat the oven for long enough to bake multiple batches of bread, and other goods as the heat drops slowly.
It has been amazing and exciting to bake in it, and see the loaves respond to the heat of the oven as they cook directly on the hearth. It is exciting and fulfilling to pull bread from the oven and eat it and share it, and I must say, emotional too. The residual heat of the oven is just fantastic, and to have bread, or lamb, sorrel tart, or muesli from the oven is a great thing.
So, with our fantastic slumbering beauty of an oven, our grain mill arriving from Austria in the next few weeks, our lovely old spiral mixer in place, boxes of bannetons in the kitchen, peels made from local cypress by my dad and hours and days and nights and weeks and months of hard work by Greg, myself, and many others, we are at the beginning of Oak and Swan Sourdough.