The end of the School of Sourdough?

The ‘pandemic’ - or how to destroy a small business in just a few easy steps…

Whether it was a global flu, or something more to do with controlling the masses for a couple of years in a very overt manner, lockdowns and travel restrictions meant that for over a year and a half, my primary business, teaching and consulting, had to be paused. I tried to ‘pivot’ things, but in the end the business I created is all about bringing people together to learn and experience something. People were not allowed to travel, so I had no customers.

Towards the eighteen month mark, I began to think it would never recover. Every time some glimmer of hope would be presented, just as quickly, it would be snatched away again. Lockdowns, travel restrictions, changing requirements for businesses all the time - I don’t know how many times people had to cancel attending a workshop at the last minute. I had to cancel workshops many times, as it was just too hard to even attempt to coordinate a bunch of people to come together for a day to learn how to make a loaf of bread.

So my teaching business was on the rocks. Those who follow my story know that I also consult to the trade. Businesses I had been consulting for were put into a kind of intermittent hibernation as well, with many of them unable to open consistently as rules changed every week. Paying me to consult was an expense many of them simply couldn’t carry, so not much work was happening for me to help pay the bills during the extended lockdown period.

And how effective was the lockdown, mask up, coercive vaccination strategy? Here in Australia, we still seem to have high rates of the disease, despite taking all the draconian measures. And pretty soon we will begin to see many issues emerge from shutting down a fair percentage of the workforce for the better part of 2 years. Expect inflation, business closures and higher underemployment to be the result.

Musical Bakeries

While I used the time to build a new oven, the bills could not be paid without work coming in, so I fell behind with the rent. My very patient landlady decided to cut her losses and sell the property I was living and working on (for a tidy profit). When the sale finally went through, I was given a couple of weeks to move everything, and at the time there were no options for relocation of the business. Gloucester, like many rural towns, was filled with people escaping the city, so space was hard to find. So all my gear moved into storage. I lived in the local showground in my caravan for a couple of months.

I had to move twice in a space of 3 months. No teaching was possible, and consultation via zoom was all I could manage to help pay the bills. Needless to say, it has been a struggle to keep on keeping on.

As the lockdowns wore on, my business of some 30 years was reduced to almost nothing. I would be homeless now if it were not for the kindness of some local people and some friends of the business, and for that I will remain grateful. The strength of community is not to be underestimated.

Looking back, how the powers that be thought that locking down an entire nation would solve the flu I will never know, especially as doing this was clearly going to hurt many small businesses like mine. It seemed to me (and others) that the only survivors at the end of it all would be the largest corporations, who had deep enough pockets to carry the can while the rest of us fell over. I suspect ulterior motives. For every newly minted billionaire, there are a million paupers created, and the pandemic has proven this to be true.

Now that some resumption of ‘normal’ life has occurred, we are seeing the price of everything skyrocket. Is this the cost we pay for our ‘safety’? And while we are not actually locked down right now, many people really have to think twice before embarking on a car journey, as fuel prices are going through the roof. The powers that be seem to have created a sort of ‘soft’ lock down now.

The flu is still raging, btw. And a few very big companies seem to have gotten very much bigger. The pandemic has seen the largest transfer of wealth in history.

The baker goes busking

The whole process led me to explore other options, with a complete change of direction for my life and profession being actively explored. For a time, I returned to my musical roots - before I was a baker, I was a musician. So I did a spot of busking and playing at local events. It was great fun, but keeping the wolf from the door proved to be a big ask. Too big for this fella. who has got a lifetime of baking experience, and only a small amount of making a living with strings and voice to fall back on. It kept me sane, singing and playing, but to start again in this configuration proved to be just a bit more than I could manage. Nonetheless, I called my little one man band ‘The Reinvention Engine’. I thought it fitting.

Just when everything seemed lost…

However, some new opportunities for a better site for my school and bakery emerged. With a bit of fancy footwork, I found myself in a new space with cheaper overheads. It’s in an old kitchen factory in the industrial area of Gloucester. I moved in with a bunch of other ‘makers’ back in January.

It’s turning out to be very workable, and I have just finished setting up to resume production and teaching. The return of my equipment from storage has seen me renovate all my baking gear to the best of my ability, and everything looks ship shape again after over a year of inaction. Since moving here I have relocated once again to an outside setup, as the owner didn’t like the so called ‘risk’ of having a wood fired oven near his property. This has shrunk the classroom a bit, but it’s also really great to have things all potentially relocatable and close to home. I’ve really enjoyed the new space and students love it too!

Low tech is beautiful

I’ve used the new barrel oven more than a dozen times now, and while there are some teething issues, it is basically a very good piece of equipment and should serve me well. Once again I have built a decent prototype. It will need more work to make it look pretty, and there are a few little workarounds when in use, but it’s a bloody good unit so far - probably the most promising design I’ve made in the past 15 years or so. But more on that later.

Enrolments for sourdough courses are beginning again, and this last month I’ve been readying the bakery for production once more. There have been some big changes to the way I produce. These have been mulled over for quite some time, and just last week I did a trial bake using the new set up. Having some enforced down time has led me to re imagine my idea of how to go about what I do.

I have incorporated hand dough making into my routine. My trusty mixer was damaged in the fire, and repairs will be done when I can afford them (soon, I hope). In the meantime, I have crafted a large scale dough making trough so I can handle 30kg - 40kg doughs completely by hand.

People say this is crazy. Why would you choose to work hard when you could just fix your mixing machine? When I started out 33 years ago, I made all the dough by hand - and there have been a number of times between now and then when, for various reasons, hand dough making became my normal process. For example, during the Tour Down Under a few years back I was traveling across Australia, teaching my craft, and all the bread I made during the trip came from hand made dough. Before that, our cafe bakery in Hunter street Newcastle was based around a hand made dough system. Going back 33 years, my first commercial bakery had no mixer in it.

More recently, I’ve been using 12kg dough boxes I constructed for the aforementioned Tour Down South. I’d been getting good results, with only some loss of efficiency. I thought that if the capacity of the box was increased, efficiency might also improve. So I designed a big dough trough for making multiple doughs in, like I have seen in overseas bakeries. Now this trough has been finished, I have just begun to use it. I can comfortably manage dough of up to about 30kg at a time, without growing new muscles.

The technique is very gentle and slow - basically it engenders a different way of working. The bread is quite lovely too, being a little moister than before. At the time of writing I am perfecting the technique of mixing large amounts by hand, and I think it will be viable to go this way longer term. I am re thinking my production process, and I like the way this is going.

Once things are generating cashflow again, I’ll fix the mixer - but I want to keep the dough trough as part of the system anyway. It’s a great way to learn about dough development, and is actually reasonably efficient when used to capacity. It is large enough to handle multiple doughs at the same time, and it has surprised me with regard to how easy it is to make dough this way. It’s very a very relaxed way of working, and nothing can break down! Not only that, but cleaning up after making dough is now very easy. Those of us who use spiral mixers will attest to the fact that these machines are a bugger to clean. Not so with a trough!

The Barrel Oven

The new oven will speed up the baking process, as it easily fits 18 or so loaves at a time, and it heats up much faster than any of my previous ovens. I did a trial production run through the oven last week and can confidently report that the oven can easily bake 20 leaves per hour over an extended period. This is almost as fast as my two point five tonne ‘Luna’ oven some years ago, and is only a quarter of the weight.

Overall, the oven has blown my expectations out of the water in a good way! There will be developments on this basic design principle in future ovens. The barrel oven employs some nifty tricks, like a gasification system (no smoke) and a new way of generating large volumes of steam, which has worked better than previous methods.

So my bakery is becoming even lower tech than it was, and I believe it is all the better for it. For years I have been taking my baking ‘off grid’ in a multitude of little ways, and this is another step in this direction.

In these times of skyrocketing energy prices and ongoing uncertainty, being able to control at least a small part of my universe is both satisfying and economical on a number of levels. The bakery now has one less appliance to break down, one less power point required. All that remains now is to work out a way to simply do refrigeration without power. I’m aware of some relatively high tech approaches to this, but I’m keen to play around with the lowest level of tech available. I’m hoping this time I don’t have to have another enforced period of inactivity to think it into existence!