In Germany every aspiring baker knows the saying ‘The heart of a bakery is the oven’. It is the central part of the bakery, and everything else revolves around it. Probably the biggest difference between a typical European bakery and one in North America is the oven and subsequently the products. This is rather easily explainable because as I will show the determining factor is the type of breads that are preferred by the people. Before I explain the differences, let me quickly insert how I started to bake since it is relevant so that you understand how things proceeded from that point on.

       I started out baking traditional sourdough bread in an outdoor wood fired brick oven. This helped me very much to get the intimacy with this type of bread and the connection with our ancestral heritage of baking with only key components of water, earth (flour) and fire and spirit, which is essential to success. The early mornings (3 am) by myself lighting the fire in the oven, making the dough by hand, thirty loaves at a time, darkness outside with the fire burning in the oven, peeling the bread in, and the smell of when taking it out, just as the sun was starting to come up. It might just be romanticizing a bit but it is that connection to our past that really transformed me into a devoted traditional baker of the past. This type of oven certainly has its limit, but then I was only doing it as a hobby baker and not professional back in 1992/93. These two years of experience planted the devotion and passion for baking to time honored methods that still dictate what we do in our bakery. However let’s get back to the type of oven we now use in our bakery which is maybe not as romantic but bakes great sourdough bread just the same.

             A typical North American oven is called a rack, tray, revolving oven. It simply has some sort of heat source, four stainless steel panels, and a central shaft with arms where the trays are mounted on, or a rack that you push right into the oven. Basically, the rack with oven pans rotates as in the rack oven or in a tray oven the central axel turns (revolves) slowly and whatever is on the tray (bread loaf pans, or standard oven pans) gets cooked. The heat is transferred directly through the steel or pans to the product. The installation does not take days and month of planning in comparison, but just a few hours. The parts can be brought in through any door since the oven is assembled on the spot. With its stainless steel outside panels it looks good but it is not meant to bake European products. It is meant to bake ‘tin bread’ and for the sweets it doesn’t matter as much. So what are the big differences? Investment wise there is a huge difference. The cost for a European stone deck oven for an average bakery would be anywhere from $65,000 to $120,000, compared to $10,000 to $20,000 for a rack oven in similar size and output. It is close to a ten to one ratio factor. So the question becomes how committed are you to become a baker and what really makes the difference.

       Let’s look at what really makes the difference. The stones make the difference in the way that the heat is transferred to the product. It gets quite technical so let me just describe it in a simple comparison that most are familiar with. Everyone knows the difference of baking a pizza in your oven at home or at your favorite pizzeria. The pizza just won’t bake and taste like a professionally made pizza. It usually is rubbery even with holes in the aluminum tray/plate. It just requires that primal heat that only stone can deliver. You can buy stone slabs that fit into a regular household oven for baking pizza, the results are much better but won’t equal a professional oven, but its close. I used this example because most people are familiar with it to illustrate what the difference a stone slab makes if you try baking good pizza or traditional sourdough bread in a household oven.

With sourdough bread it is a similar phenomena but much more pronounced. In Europe, especially in Germany sourdough rye breads, and in France and Italy sourdough wheat breads are in comparison eaten as much as typical straight yeast wheat breads in North America. It is impossible to bake these breads in conventional North American rack ovens; they need to be baked in stone deck ovens. The heat to bake proper sourdough bread is through the stones, and the bread is preferably free standing, meaning not in some sort of bread pan. One other characteristic about stone deck oven is that the bread is peeled out of the oven (refer to the picture on the left). The peeler is the gadget that you sometimes see in pizzerias to take pizzas out of the oven. Real pizza is baked directly on the stones and that is the same for real sourdough bread. Tin bread and pizzas baked on aluminum forms are North American style baking. The design of the rack oven is to facilitate tins filled with dough that makes bread, therefore called tin bread. The bread sweats from the high moisture and is cooked more like potatoes in a pot of water. Sourdough bread needs to breathe since it is much denser bread with wild yeast and is in comparison roasted on a plate, which is why it needs to be free standing in the oven as it bakes. It also has to do with how the flavour unfolds and develops in the loaf during baking, the penetration of the heat from all sides and the bottom through the stone.        The bottom line is that there are fundamental differences in European baking compared to North American baking. This starts out with the oven and it is entirely because of the type of breads baked. The quality of other bakery products baked in a deck oven is generally also superior.

Most everyone I have talked to that has been to Europe agrees as to the superior baking products and it is foremost the oven that makes the difference. The investment is much higher in a stone deck oven. You need passion and devotion and it shows it in the products, and remember ‘the heart of the bakery is the oven’.