oven

Hello Fresh Loaf Friends,

My name is Tara Jensen and I'm the baker/owner behind Smoke Signals. We're a micro bakery located just outside of Asheville, North Carolina specializing in honest bread and rustic pastries. All our work is done by hand we source our flour exclusively from Carolina Ground, a local mill devoted to milling grains from the Carolinas. We've been doing all our baking for our first year up & running at our town's local pizza shop. Without the generosity of this shared hearth we wouldn't be were we are today, however, our bread is gaining popularity and we need to purchase our oven to meet the demands. So, we've launched a Kickstarter. If you are unfamilliar with Kickstarter, it's a fundrasing platform whereby you make a pledge towards a monetary goal and recive various rewards and recognition. We are raising $5,000 to purchase a gently used gas, deck oven and have a number of different rewards. Give us a look and share with your baking community!

Click here to go to our Kickstarter, learn more, watch our video & share:  Smoke Signals Kickstarter

And click here for our website: Smoke Signals Website

The oven that was in our new house was pretty much the cheapest exposed-element electric that they could find when they did the kitchen remodel pre-sale. We replaced it with a Frigidaire FPEF3081MF, from their 'professional' range. It's my first glass-topped unit, and my first convection oven (sadly, no steam). While I still can't find the (in a box somewhere) stuff I need for breadmaking, I used it last night to roast some potatoes and carrots and a pork tenderloin. 

I am now in love with convection. I wish I'd gotten some picture (camera -- in a box somewhere).  These were - by far - the best roasts I've ever produced. The potatoes were well-browned and slightly crunchy on the outside. The carrots were sweet and caramalized. The roast had a perfect crust.

I don't know how much use it will be for bread, but I'm in love with the feature so far...

Every year, in the beginning of summer, my three brothers and I gather for a weekend at our parents' summer cottage to eat, relax, and create something together. As we all love to create things and try out new ideas, we usually end up creating something out of the ordinary.

This year, I suggested creating an oven using materials found in the nature and bake some bread in the oven. Although I have been reading The Bread Builders by Alan Scott and Dan Wing, I can't say I know much about ovens. Just that we need to collect heat in it and then try to keep that heat as well as the steam from the breads inside. That didn't stop us.

We dug a hole in the ground (had to stop when it started filling with water—we were too close to the lake). Then, we used small rocks  to build a small oven inside. Then we heated the oven.

As we were ready to put the bread in, we realized we hadn't planned for an oven door. There was an old wheelbarrow standing next to our oven, so we put it on top of the oven door to keep the heat inside. Not the best of choices, but it does look fun in the photo!

The first version lead to a loaf of bread that baked a bit unevenly, but rose nonetheless and tasted very good. 

I wasn't very happy with the big holes in the crumb, but I suspect this didn't have anything to do with the oven but rather the fact that I was a bit sloppy with the dough as most of my attention was in creating the oven. My 

Last weekend, we went back to the summer cottage, this time taking all of our families with us.

My son, Oiva, was excited about the oven and wanted to bake some bread in the oven, so we heated it up again. But before that, we did some improvements based on the previous weekend's results: we added another big rock on top of the oven to distribute more heat on every side of the bread being baked and changed the structure to be more oven-like with a door and all. After three loads of wood, we baked the first loaf.

This time, the results were very good, and the loaf of bread disappeared from the kitchen table in less than five minutes! The oven was really hot at the beginning, as you can see from the bottom of the loaf.

Right after taking the loaf out of the oven, I put in another. The heat left in the oven wasn't very strong, but after baking the second loaf for about two hours, out came a loaf that was well worth the effort. It didn't have much crust and it didn't rise quite as much as the first loaf, but tasted good, and everyone liked it too.

What more can a baker ask for? ...except, maybe, a real masonry oven...