If you don’t live in my house, you probably don’t recognize the title of this post. It’s a song we used to sing when the children were little; it was from the soundtrack of a video we watched (over and over again) about bread and how it’s made.
We love bread. Flour, water, salt, yeast–just those few ingredients come together in a miraculous alchemy to make the centerpiece of most of our meals. And yes, I bake almost all of the bread we eat.
So, in pursuit of my passion, I spent this past weekend (with Delaney as my sidekick) at the Asheville Bread Festival. It was exactly what it sounds like: a celebration of all things yeasty and floury. Bread nerds hanging out, waxing eloquent about starters and ferments and the glories of the long, cool rise. Passionate debates about flour’s optimal protein content. And, as is always the case when bread-disciples gather, long treatises comparing baking methods.
It was the baking methods that really got me excited–specifically, a workshop about building and using a backyard wood-fired oven.
I WANT ONE. BADLY.
We spent Saturday afternoon gathered around the hearth you see above; the bread that came out of that oven was . . . phenomenal. The inside was perfect–just moist enough, with a relaxed crumb–but the crust was revelatory: crispy, crackly, with a hint of smoke. And pizza–you know the kind, with the chewy crust, charred just so? I NEED to be able to get that crust at home. NEED, I tell you.
The oven in the photo (the centerpiece of the beautiful backyard of Mark Rosenstein, former owner of The Marketplace restaurant in Asheville) is a bit large for my narrow suburban backyard. He can bake 12 loaves at a time; I don’t really need to work on that scale (as much as we love bread, there’s not room in our freezer for those quantities). But a smaller model, perhaps without the decorative stonework, would fit nicely–I already have the spot picked out.
Don’t ask how I’m going to make it happen. I’ve never actually built anything myself. But I have a couple of books (this is not a new idea–I’ve been researching it for a couple of years), and now that I’ve seen an oven in action, I’m inspired.
But if you get the urge to, you know, haul stones or learn about fireboxes, give me a call. I could use some help. I might even share some bread with you.
