New Bread Baker, Ancient Technique

Mark Bourne, owner of Highfield Bread Oven, stands at an empty table beneath an unadorned market canopy. It’s the height of the Saturday farmers’ market with people hovering over produce-laden stands, filling grocery bags, and handing over fistfuls of cash to the venders. But Bourne’s just standing there, smiling. It looks a little incongruous, the empty table coupled with the big smile. And then it hits you: he’s sold out. His bread, baked in a wood-fired oven, is a big hit! Small wonder.

“The dough has been fermenting for at least 12 hours, which gives the flour a distinct flavor and is a natural dough conditioner,” he says.  “And it helps the dough become what you want it to in terms of quality and crumb and crust.”

Bourne’s wares – — flat breads, the rustic French, cracked grain, and fruit-and-nut- loaves, traditional fougasse with olives or anchovies and its intricate pattern that produces an impressive crust-to-crumb ratio — are familiar to many of Chestertown’s market-goers since Bourne, a native Kent Countian, has been a feature there on and off for several years. But until now, he’s baked and sold his breads periodically, between semesters, between jobs, between moves to Chicago, or the West Coast.

Now he’s back full time and building – literally, with his own two hands — his business.   The way he bakes stands a modern, stainless steel kitchen on its head. Bourne makes his breads as bakers have done for over 3000 years — in a wood-fired masonry oven that he built himself.

Mark Bourne graduated from Grinnell College in Iowa with a degree in theater design that he realized he didn’t actually want to use.  For the next several years, he went to culinary school, worked in restaurant kitchens, and drove a long-distance rig to keep himself afloat and put a little by. At one point while home for a stint and working at Echo Hill Outdoor School, he picked up a book that would change his life.

“I read The Bread Builders by Alan Scott,” he says. “He designs these ovens and uses them as a way to make a sustainable living.”

The Bread Builders: Hearth Loaves and Masonry Ovens by Daniel Wing and Alan Scott (Chelsea Green, 1999) is part masonry tutorial, part historiography, part chemistry. It describes not only how to build the masonry oven and use it, but ‘details natural fermentation, bread grains and flours, leavens, dough and dough development.’ For Bourne, who had begun baking bread as a hobby in high school, it was also a way to structure his life.

“I wanted to be my own boss and I wanted something in food,” he says, but he didn’t want his own restaurant. “I’ve worked in restaurants and it was too crazy and there’s a quality of interaction in a commercial kitchen that was not what I wanted.”

He wanted something more meditative that would also enable him to earn a ‘sustainable’ living without working himself to death.

“The book was presenting an idea that didn’t require a huge amount of capital [provided] it’s a one-person operation,” he explains, “and you build the oven yourself.”

He constructed the oven at his parents’ Chestertown home, then went back to work to earn enough to build the bakery – which he began in April and finished in August of this year — around it.

The oven itself is a brick chamber with a blanket of concrete 1.5 feet thick. The baker burns a fire for 6-8 hours, which heats up all that brick and concrete. Once that’s done, he sweeps out all the ash, mops the floor clean, and then bakes the bread. It’s a lot of work – different from preheating a commercial oven – and of course timing’s a big issue. It’s not an on-off proposition. But there are definite advantages.

“When you put a lot of bread in a commercial oven, the heat can drop quickly,” Bourne explains. “But there’s so much mass in this masonry oven, it doesn’t drop much, and there’s something about the way the bread bakes in this oven. It’s a tricky timing and balancing act – to get the oven to the temperature, the dough to the temperature, get to the farmers’ market in time…”

The baking itself is a progression. He starts with flatbread, which bakes quickly in the then-500-degree oven.

“If you start with a big loaf at that temperature, the crust scorches and the inside is still gummy,” he explains. “But if you start with flatbread, it bakes through and gets a really good crust and crumb.”

He then moves on to rustic French – essentially a baguette – then as the oven cools, whole-grain loaves, then the fruit and nut loaves. It’s a limiting technology (though technology hardly seems the right word for such an ancient process), but the limitations are also part of its charm.

“Each day there’s a limit to the amount of bread you can make – it’s about 150 loaves a day — because it gets too cool to work with,” he explains. “So it puts this nice limit on overworking. Right now, I’m baking 150 loaves once a week, but if I can sell 150 loaves four days a week [to restaurants and other places] I would be doing fine.”

He’s hopeful he can expand enough to make a good living. He’s not looking for material wealth: he’s looking for balance, a sustainable lifestyle.

“Once I get this business to where I want it, I will have a decent time to relax but still make a decent amount of money,” he says.

He currently sells at the famers’ market and at Colchester Farms CSA pickup on Tuesdays at Kingstown Farm Home and Garden. He hopes more people return to eating really good, locally handmade all natural bread.

“I would like people to think of this not as a treat but as something basic [to their diets],” he says.  “People come to get their vegetables because they’re good and they’re good for you. I would like people to relish the bread the same way.”