I’m currently working with a farmer-baker in the southwest of France.
I’ll also be spending time with a few other wood-fired bakers here: everything is organic, wood-fired, and naturally fermented.
What surprised me is how much the whole system shapes the bread.
Not just ingredients, but how everything interacts day to day.
I’ll be moving to Colorado in a couple of months, so I’m trying to understand what actually matters before starting anything there.
Curious if others here have worked in similar setups in Colorado, and also:
What kind of crust color do people generally prefer in the US ?
Lighter bake, or more caramelized ?
by Many-Back3783
16 Comments
I’ve never done wood fired, but everytime I got a new piece of equipment I’ve had to change the baking process quite a bit. Also when the weather changes.
Natural leavening is more about process than ingredients, and flexibility rather than rigidity. I cringe everytime I see someone post about a “perfect” loaf or process.
As far as crust color, the US is way too big of a population to get a general feel for crust color. Anyone into wood fired oven bread will be ok with darker crusts I imagine, though.
> What surprised me is how much the whole system shapes the bread. Not just ingredients, but how everything interacts day to day.
I’m really interested about this, can you elaborate?
I was reading about early cooking and baking in France. There are monasteries that were essentially built around the oven with elaborate chimneys. This was essential for its time.
Since pollution, and resources management are a thing, baking is more focused on efficiency and eco friendly baking. Unloading wood smoke into the air for a process is possible, but that’s usually bbq for the flavor profiles. I guess it’s all in preference and your feeling about the environment 🤷🏻♀️
coming from a pottery background, doing both gas and wood high-fire, I would say one thing that you may or may not have noticed is temperature swings during diurnal shifts when atmospheric pressure changes. Happens with kilns too, but at least it’s a predictable effect. Same with stormy weather etc. Gotta know how to fly the plane!
Everything affects everything.
Put me down for dark caramelized.
Yall should check out at https://www.commongrainalliance.org/ if this is interesting to you. Building a community of bakers, brewes, millers, and farmers for a more connected system.
Im fr jealous that you got to do proper old world artisinal baking *in* the old world. That is so very cool. Im finally about to move back into a scratch baking job here in Denver, but nothing like *waves hand at post* this.
If you take a trip down 70 to Lawrence KS, there is an excellent wood-fired bakery there (Wheatfields). IIRC, they had a crew from Spain build their oven.
There is also another bakery (1900 Barker) that makes some excellent croissants. Not wood fired, though. 😉
I need this life, how did you get to where you are now?
Anyone else see Gypsy from Mystery Science Theater 3000?
In commercial baking, typically every new manufacturing location has to trial a formula and often tweaks are required even within a small geographic area. From France to Colorado, the wheat will make a big difference. And that’s not say either European wheat or North American wheat is better. They are just different wheat grown in different climates. Even if you take identically specced flour, they can behave differently. I participated in helping a European company set up a US commercial bakery for pizza crust and in that instance they found that not only does North American wheat typically have higher protein, the flour’s behavior would have suggested an even greater difference than there actually was. Altitude and water composition can also have measurable effects. So be ready to play around with your formulas.
I live in Colorado. I really hope I can find where you end up and try some of your bread!
“What kind of crust color do people generally prefer in the US ? Lighter bake, or more caramelized ?”
I really like a darker loaf. I learned mostly from Ken Forkish’s and Maurizio’s books and they like to push the color. But someone will always say something like “oh whoops! well that’s okay I’m sure it’ll still taste good” as if I burned it. I.e., I think a darker loaf is fashionable among bakers but lots of people aren’t used to it.
I think on average Americans prefer lighter crusted bread. I’ve been working at it for a year and I’m still struggling to get my family to accept anything cooked further than I would consider “par-baked”. People want something different than wonder bread, but there’s a reason wonder bread but everyone out of business. I think if you over brioche or milk bread type options too, you’ll be fine.
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I had a wood fire oven at a restaurant in colorado that closed durring covid. We didn’t use it for baking, but it was where we cooked most of our proteins. It was really fun learning how to properly cook in it and the food tasted amazing. Man, I miss that place.