I apologize for the slow start of this blog; library and archives school is stunting my baking education until April.
In the meantime, I'd like to start a series on ovens. The modern, North American oven is not ideal for baking, even with a baking stone. One day, I would like to construct an outdoor bread oven and experiment with a wood stove indoors, though this is not likely to happen anytime soon. I can still do some research in the meantime, so here I will post photos and videos of interesting and different ovens.
This is a video taken by tourists of an ancient Roman oven found in Pompeii. If you pause about the 1 minute mark, you'll get a good shot of the oven, which I'm guessing was a community oven, where people made their own bread, brought it to the oven for the person in charge to bake, and picked it up later. It looks quite large and seems to be part of a larger building: Pompeii Bakery
Enjoy!
(I do not own or have any rights to this video)
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Thursday, March 3, 2011
A House on Fire
This blog will explore ideas, techniques, and recipes of baking breads of all sorts from my (little apartment) kitchen. The Stoneyhouse Bakery doesn't exist anywhere that I know of, and probably doesn't exist anywhere else either (let me know if you know of one!).
I got the name from the street I was living on when I took my first (and to date only) baking job at a beautiful artisan bakery. Stoneyhouse is a quiet and quaint Street near the bottom of a valley with houses that actually look distinct from each other. I used to walk out of the valley at 4:45am to the crest of land into Georgestown, listening to Graham Wells play accordion on headphones to drag myself out of sleep. Later I moved into Georgestown, and decreased the commute to a 30 second walk.
I worked there for about a year, and now I'm learning library and archives work, and bread is my hobby. I am still an apprentice, so this is no source of authoritative knowledge. I have no expectations of this blog, and if you wish to contribute, you are more than welcome; bread is best enjoyed with a community. Really, I'm starting this blog to drive my learning process.
When deciding on the the name of this blog, as well as the look and feel of the "place," I was thinking about baking stones and the sight of an empty stone house with few windows (the likes of which does not exist on Stoneyhouse Street) ablaze on the inside. A few chair-sized loaves, maybe a few baguettes like couches; a long peel to keep out of the heat; a nice, clean stone floor to draw moisture away from the crust, and my idea house could become a huge oven. This wouldn't be the most practical bakery, but if one had to feed a crowd large enough...
In the meantime, I won't set my kitchen on fire, and I will continue to bake bread in small amounts, so I can bake and experiment as frequently as I can. This weekend, french bread!
I got the name from the street I was living on when I took my first (and to date only) baking job at a beautiful artisan bakery. Stoneyhouse is a quiet and quaint Street near the bottom of a valley with houses that actually look distinct from each other. I used to walk out of the valley at 4:45am to the crest of land into Georgestown, listening to Graham Wells play accordion on headphones to drag myself out of sleep. Later I moved into Georgestown, and decreased the commute to a 30 second walk.
I worked there for about a year, and now I'm learning library and archives work, and bread is my hobby. I am still an apprentice, so this is no source of authoritative knowledge. I have no expectations of this blog, and if you wish to contribute, you are more than welcome; bread is best enjoyed with a community. Really, I'm starting this blog to drive my learning process.
When deciding on the the name of this blog, as well as the look and feel of the "place," I was thinking about baking stones and the sight of an empty stone house with few windows (the likes of which does not exist on Stoneyhouse Street) ablaze on the inside. A few chair-sized loaves, maybe a few baguettes like couches; a long peel to keep out of the heat; a nice, clean stone floor to draw moisture away from the crust, and my idea house could become a huge oven. This wouldn't be the most practical bakery, but if one had to feed a crowd large enough...
In the meantime, I won't set my kitchen on fire, and I will continue to bake bread in small amounts, so I can bake and experiment as frequently as I can. This weekend, french bread!
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