The Oven and The Grain Are One
Chicken Bridge Bakery on making a truly local loaf & why their current oven won’t cut it.
Flour and water, fermented, shaped and baked by fire.
Historically and intrinsically, bread in it’s truest form is tied to relationship and community. In fact the word ‘companion’ comes from the word companis (com = with, panis = bread) means “with whom we break bread”. This simple etymology is at the core of what Rob and Monica Segovia-Welsh have built at Chicken Bridge Bakery.
It all started with a trip to Central America, a baby, a couple of Mexican bakers, and some fire bricks. Well sort of…
The bakery came to life in the winter of 2007 when Rob and his wife Monica built their first oven. Baking was not foreign to them; they met years before at a bakery in Wisconsin where Monica had started a pastry program and Rob was shaping loaves. Like a couple of rebels, at the time when most of their friends started settling down and having kids, they decided to go on an adventure. They followed their fancy to Central America only to find out that Monica was pregnant.
The news led them to settle in North Carolina, with little idea of what they would do. It was only a matter of time until Rob started working at a local bakery where he was surprised to find his fresh travels through Nicaragua and Guatemala serving him well. “Almost all the bakers I worked with only spoke Spanish. They were actually the one’s that got me into wood fired baking,” he told me.
There was a young man named Joaquin who came from a family of bakers — his father was a baker, his father’s father was a baker, and so on. Then there were four brothers from Oaxaca who also came from a baking dynasty. Hailing from different parts of Mexico, they all shared one thing in common; they all baked in wood-fired ovens. “I got to talk to them a lot about the craft and culture of baking, and about how they built their ovens,” he said. “At the time, I had no idea how formative these conversations would be.”
If you know anything about building hearths, you probably know who Alan Scott is. The author of The Bread Builders: Hearth Loaves and Masonry Ovens, he’s considered the expert on masonry ovens to best retain heat. More than a how-to manual, the book is also a manifesto on the history of bread making and the science of baking. He used modern materials like high-grade bricks, high-temperature cements and insulation, ranging from Vermiculite to ceramic blankets. All of these materials make these ovens capable of retaining temperatures from 500 to 800 degrees Farenheit for hours on end, to bake loaf after loaf of bread. However, they are also very expensive.
Rob knew Alan’s model, but started asking a lot of questions about the structure and materials used in his companions’ ovens in Mexico. “I asked them what they would use for insulation because I knew that people had been building ovens for years without ceramic blankets,” said Rob. “They told me volcanic rock. Of course, where am I going to find volcanic rock in North Carolina? But I thought, Wow, that’s brilliant! They were using ancient, natural materials that were highly porous like pumice.”
“Talking to these guys got me really passionate about baking,” said Rob.
So with that inspiration, they built an oven of their own. They didn’t want to invest too much money into an oven, so the advice of Rob’s new friends proved handy. A mason friend had a bunch of old fire bricks they were able to use to make their cob, or earthen, oven. “Once we had the oven up and running, we could bake like 40 loaves of bread in one afternoon,” he said. “We could make bread on the weekends for our friends and neighbors.”
Soon enough, Rob and Monica were running a bakery with their two boys, Simon and Milo. It all started with a CSB (Community Supported Bread) project to get their “bread into the hands of local folks.” Like a CSA, members pay a monthly fee for a different loaf of bread every week, build strong relationships with the bakers and get to know the mills and farmers.
Additionally, they sell at a couple of local farmers markets and restaurants. While they don’t actually own a storefront bakery, each of these methods of sale are driven by the relationships that they’ve forged in their community.
“I really feel like its much more of an integrated craft and lifestyle. We BAKE with our family at our home. We go directly to the mill and buy the grain, then we take it to the market to sell it. Every step of the way, we have relationships with people,” said Rob.
LOCAL GRAINS & LONG FERMENTATION MAKE A TASTY BREAD
Fresh milled, whole grain, slow fermented bread. It has a completely different effect on the body when you eat it, and the flavor says it all.
Bread may have become a five letter word in the passing years, but any artisan baker would argue that the soul of bread has been stolen. Robbed by pillowy grocery store loaves, wrapped in plastic, claiming health and hale. In the cacophony of the great attack on bread and gluten, bakers like Rob and Monica are becoming heroes in their own right. Arguing, with pure flavor and authenticity on their side, that we forgot about something key when we started buying ‘white’ bread from the supermarket. Bread has been a nutritious staple of communities for thousands of years. There’s no doubt that something bad happened when we began adding new things and taking nutrients out of our grains.
“The invention of bread was an amazing advance, because you can’t live — you can’t survive on flour, even whole grain flour. You can survive on bread made from it. The cooking process unlocks the nutrients in that seed. And seeds have everything you need to live, but it all must be unlocked. A slow fermentation and cooking at a high temperature unlocks all that. The loaf of bread itself becomes a pressure cooker,” Michael Pollan said in an interview about his latest book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, in which he explored bread making
The bread begins with a starter, made of flour and water that come to life when left to sit, rather than yeast. The starter becomes the life of the loaf and is specially prepped before baking to take the dough through a slow fermentation process. The long-firing of the oven to bake the bread at very high temperatures does a couple of things. It creates a pressure cooker, as Pollan described, with steam. The heat created in a loaf of bread goes beyond the temperature of boiling water. The steam itself can get much hotter than water and essentially breaks the starches down. The fire also caramelizes the crust to crisp perfection and optimal flavor; making bread that’s soft and gooey on the center and crisp on the outside. Furthermore, each loaf of Chicken Bridge bread is a work of art made with stencils and sifted flour.
It’s a truly local model from grain, to mill, to levain, to bread, to market. The family works with two mills not far from where they live. Lindley Mills has been a fixture since the 1700s. The mill contracts directly with organic farmers who grow North Carolina Bread Flour, a hard red winter wheat variety that produces high yields for growers, yet has the proteins that bakers desire. Carolina Ground, on the other hand, is a newer mill also working with all North Carolina grown grain. They make the stone milled, cold pressed rye and whole wheat flour that Rob and Monica use in their bread.
“[The Carolina Ground] flours are so good that they have become a character of our bread!” Rob claimed. “When we tasted their grain we were like, ‘Oh that’s the flavor of wheat! And that’s exactly how rye should taste!’ You can taste it in the bread.”
Chicken Bridge’s ability to connect their customers to an ancient tradition of baking, along with the unmatched flavor that they have cultivated; has upped the demand for these beautiful, tasty loaves.
A NEW, MOBILE, OVEN THAT CAN TAKE THE HEAT
“The oven and the grain are so interconnected,” was the first thing Rob mentioned when asked about his endeavor to build a new oven. “When you bake bread you have to steam the oven. The local, whole grains in our flour can hold so much water, like nothing I’ve seen before.”
Unfortunately, that amount of moisture isn’t the best for a humble earthen oven. The extreme humidity levels and overall expansion and contraction of the oven’s mass over time has begun to take it’s toll. “To keep making bread, we definitely need material that will hold up to the hydration. We need materials that can heat up to 1000 degrees and go back to 500 degrees. We need to build a new oven out of high grade material for longevity and durability.”
This time, Rob is taking notes from Alan Scott’s masonry ovens and making his oven mobile. “We cannot afford to stop baking for a month so we want to build the new oven on a trailer. If we want to do workshops or events we can move it around.”
What the Segovia-Welsh family does at Chicken Bridge Bakery is a profound reminder of the simplicity of the loaf and the impact of one product on the whole community. They are committed to local grains and supporting the local economy. To bake bread keeps the mills milling and the farmers growing grain in their community. Having a durable oven will expand and sustain those nourishing relationships as their business grows.
And while, they may be in North Carolina, the impact of the expansion of their craft goes far beyond that Carolina borderline. The act of breaking bread; the ripple effects of such sacred, ancient, communal acts are widespread.
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