September 8, 2014

on to the next big thing...

We still haven't found the right farm, but we're moving forward with the other half of our dream.

We've been looking for a place where we can start a wood-fired bakery in our town, and we've found a cute little shop. We wanted to find a place to rent, as opposed to buying, so we can be sure it works for us and so that we can move the business to a farm someday. The place needs some fixing up and it's pretty small, but we think it's just what we need to get started. It's actually an old ice cream shop - the kind where you walk up to the window to order.

Aint she cute?

As you know, Nate's been baking sourdough bread for years. This will be a traditional sourdough bakery, and we'll explain more about the health benefits of sourdough and why we bake this way in another post. The reasons may surprise you.

Nate has begun building a wood-fired oven which will sit outside of the bakery. It's going to be a serious production oven. In order to have the capacity to hold lots of heat and the ability to bake multiple batches of bread, it's going to need to be heavy. The oven and the trailer combined will weigh approximately 8500lbs when it's all said and done. Hours and hours, even years of research have gone into this oven and it's not something we want to ever be faced with leaving behind, especially when we don't feel that this shop is it's final destination.

Nate's solution to this is to build the oven on a trailer. The sheer weight of the thing has required him to build the trailer it will sit on from scratch. It wont be a "portable" oven per se, because of the weight, but it will give us the option to move it to another location when the time comes.

Ready for the insulation and bricks!

We're grateful that Nate has previous knowledge and experience in building an oven and trailers, though this one will be an entirely different animal with it's own learning curve. There's a good bit of stress around that, but ultimately, the stress is all about money. The cost of the oven/trailer and the renovations necessary to get the building ready for inspection are going to be a lot. We'll be putting all we have into this venture and while it's all very exciting, it's also a little unsettling.

We're going to need help.

Kickstarter project coming soon...


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