No loafing around Baking bread in a wood-fired oven is serious business for one UM professor

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Outside the wind was blowing from the north. The constant drizzle added a raw quality to the air which seemed to chill to the bone. In the crowded kitchen, the antique Atlantic Queen cook stove threw off cheerful wood heat. We counted ourselves lucky to be inside most of that blustery grim Easter Day.

The atmosphere was relaxed but the concentration intense. At the center was the stocky, full-bearded figure of Harold Dowse, Ph.D. – “Dusty” to his friends. Seated at the kitchen table with two loose-leaf tablets, he flipped from the one containing recipes to the baking log which contained information and timelines from previous baking forays. He often glanced behind him to the slate clock hanging over the sink.

Dowse, a research scientist and professor at the University of Maine, has been and done a lot of things in his life. He’s a skilled carpenter, building his own small sailboat. He has expertly done home brewing and made an excellent blueberry wine to which this writer can personally attest. The Dowses also grow a large garden.

To be a successful gardener in rural Maine, you must also be a builder of fences. The reason, of course, is that the deer population in most rural towns outnumbers the humans. The resulting fence around the garden would do credit to the U.S. Navy’s Seabees. Tomatoes from the garden form the base for the pizza sauce gently bubbling on the Atlantic Queen stove.

The real queen of the day, however, was the wood-fired bake oven sitting in the Dowses’ backyard. This oven is the culmination of a love affair Dowse has had with bread baking that began 40 odd years ago when he was in graduate school in New York City. There he was seduced by the varieties of breads produced at the host of ethnic bakeries. He considers bread baking a “spiritual experience.”

“I loved the bread and I could see it disappearing at the time. Now, when I’m baking, I’m doing something people have done for thousands of years. Just think of that. Bread is something that has soul.”

Dowse figured the ultimate baking experience could only be attained with a wood-fired oven. Since space in the house was already at a premium and there was plenty of room outdoors, the choice was easy.

The fact that the state of Maine sometimes seems like such a small place is brought home once again in the tale of the oven. It began when his wife, Patti, met Albert Barden at the Common Ground Fair. It wasn’t their first meeting; they were classmates at Brown University. Now Albie Barden owns and operates the Maine Wood Heat Co., Inc. in Skowhegan. The company sells and installs a variety of stone and tile wood heaters and cookers.

In short order, Dowse was hooked on the whole concept of an outdoor oven in which to bake his beloved bread. He chose a Le Panyol model from France. The French company, Fayol, has been making white clay ovens since 1840. However, Fayol’s design and dimensions are all based on ratios recorded by Vitruvius, a Roman historian, who lived in the 1st century B.C. The fact that the basic dimensions are unchanged is due to the fact that someone back in antiquity stumbled upon the proper balance between oxygen going in and exhaust going out.

In a vague tip towards fiscal sanity, Barden just happened to find an oven core of the chosen size in Iowa that had “fallen off a truck” and had some damaged tiles. Soon the oven was on its way to Cambridge, where Barden and his crew began to repair the damage and install the core on top of an underpinning constructed of concrete blocks on a cement slab base. The entire installation gives new meaning to the term “solidly built.” The central core weighs 1,000 pounds. There is an equivalent amount of insulation over the central core made up of grog and other insulating materials. In case you’re from a naval tradition, it’s not that kind of grog. This stuff is made of pre-fired clay that has been put through a grinder and screened to a certain size.

Baking bread in an outdoor oven is very different from doing it in your kitchen stove. There your favorite bread recipe may bake at 400 degrees. Dowse heats his outdoor oven to 900 F and then lets it cool off, or temper, to about 800 F. He discovered that the secret is in tempering the oven for about an hour to get rid of hot spots. To check the temperature, he whips a pistol-shaped pyrometer out of a case. Pointing the pyrometer into the oven opening, a laser beam shows exactly where in the oven the temperature is being measured.

It doesn’t take as much wood as one might think to get this oven to temperature. Dowse sat down with a buddy from the UMaine Department of Mathematics and figured out exactly how much wood to burn. On Easter, at about 11 a.m., he started the fire with approximately 35 pounds of wood weighed on a baby scale that sits next to the oven. At about 2 p.m., he gave it a booster of 15 pounds. Of course, this is starting with a cold oven that hadn’t been used for a week.

“If I could bake every day, I’ll bet I could get by with 20 pounds of wood a day,” Dowse said.

After the second charge of wood has burned for a while, the remaining coals were scraped forward and through a metal opening in the floor at the front of the oven. Dowse is also an ace at recycling. The coals fall into a metal trash can he keeps nearby. Covering the trash can extinguishes the fire in the coals leaving wonderful hardwood charcoal on which to cook next weekend’s steaks.

After the coals were cleared, the oven was cleaned out with a cloth floor mop constantly being dipped in cold water. A quick check with the pyrometer showed that it was time to leave the wind and the rain for the warmth of the kitchen and final dough preparation.

One often hears about the “art” of baking bread. But sitting in the Dowses’ kitchen, listening to the ion channel biologist talk casually about how things happen in the dough, you realize that there is also a lot of science involved. Listeners learn new words that weren’t in their mother’s, or grandmother’s cookbooks.

Artisan bread is not a term found in those old cookbooks. What exactly is it? The dictionary says than an artisan is someone in a trade who is particularly skilled with his or her hands. Lots of us think that anyone who can make bread without the ubiquitous bread machine is an artisan. However compare the simplicity of preparing modern bread with that of artisan bread.

With a modern recipe, yeast is added to water and then flour and more water are added and – poof! – five or six hours later you have bread. The artisan baker may take a lump of “chef” which may be a piece of dough left from yesterday’s baking and add flour and water, in a process called ‘refreshing.’ Or he or she could start with “poolish,” a French word, that’s a mixture of 50-50 flour and water. Or they could use “biga,” Italian for poolish, which can be either the 50-50 mixture or more like a very firm dough. A resourceful artisan could add small amounts of flour and water to the biga for several days before ever making a batch of bread. Add a long proofing time to give the bread better texture and flavor and you could spend a week on the project.

As the time neared for the bread to go into the oven, Dowse explained the day’s choice of doughs to bystanders. There would be a Pane Francese. Dowse discovered the bread dough when he was on a recent sabbatical in the Boston area. It produces a dense, crusty loaf of bread with fairly large air holes. This batch will make four round loaves and one typical long baguette.

By this time, the bread was in its final rise. The round ones covered by linen dishcloths were allowed to rise in plastic roll servers discovered at a dollar store, while the baguette sat in a container made for that purpose.

Waiting for the bread dough to reach the perfect point, Dowse began work on the second course, homemade pizza. This has been waiting for the final addition of flour for some time. He added the flour, perhaps a half-cup at a time, methodically kneading it into the sticky dough. It is a mesmerizing process and one that is guaranteed to make the baker feel at one with his project. The kneading process completed, the dough was cut into pieces and put aside for the final rise or proof.

Toppings with which we would complete our personal pizzas were already in evidence around the kitchen. While the pizza dough was proofing, we once more plunged outside into the elements. The day’s weather had not improved in our absence. It was no use huddling around the stove in hopes of absorbing some of its warmth. The massive layer of insulation around the core effectively contained the heat inside. Dowse aimed the pyrometer at the outside and it registers 45 F. Our four loaves of Pane Francese looked lonely inside the oven. Our baker figured that he could bake 150 pounds of bread on one firing of the oven if he had the inclination and a regiment to feed.

Dowse watched the process carefully, occasionally adjusting the position of individual loafs with a long-handled paddle. In less than half the time it takes in an ordinary oven, the loaves were done, or so we thought. Conventional wisdom says that if you tap the bottom of the loaf with your knuckle, a hollow sound will tell you the bread is ready. This is about as dependable as rapping on a watermelon to tell if it’s a good one. The ever-scientific Dowse had a better method. He pulled out a small instrument that looked like a meat thermometer. He stuck it into the bottom of the loaf. If it registered a temperature of 205 degrees Celsius, the bread was done. Thankfully, it was.

Dowse added a handful of wood to the fire to raise the oven temperature for the main course of the afternoon. This time he wouldn’t bother to remove the ashes before baking, choosing instead to relegate the remaining coals to a back corner of the oven.

We quickly retired back inside where a loaf of the Pane Francese was cut into slices and distributed along with a slab of butter. The exquisitely tasting chewy bread with a crunchy crust disappeared in less time than you can write about it. The silence in the warm kitchen was palpable. Each person was chewing toward some quiet corner of contemplation. If it isn’t Heaven, we found, surely we would see the old sailor’s ideal spot of contentment, Fiddler’s Green, with the next swallow. It was that good!

Soon individual pizzas were rolled out of the clumps of dough. It is up to the participant how thin or thick the dough and which of the myriad toppings to add. After Dowse put our pizza into the oven, we stared transfixed at the cooking process. We saw the dough rise and the toppings melt. In scarcely more than a minute, it was done.

It was hard to believe that anything could taste better than the bread we had just finished, but in the warm kitchen, with wind-driven rain splashing on the window panes, some of us swore that we had approached Fiddler’s Green while finishing our last slices of that wood-fired oven-baked pizza.

Chuck Veeder can be reached at veederc@adelphia.net.

Outdoor wood-fire baking tips

. Albert Barden and Maine Wood Heat, Inc., 254 Fr. Rasle Rd., Norridgewock. Call 696-5442 or visit www.mainewoodheat.com

. The Pane Francese recipe comes from “Artisan Bread Baking Across America,” by Maggie Glezer

. “The Bread Builders,” by Daniel Wing and Alan Scott

. “Classic Sourdoughs: A Home Bakers Handbook,” by Ed Wood