Dough in the daily bread

For James Fisher, bread is life and should be treated accordingly. The Cannibal Creek Bakehouse owner explained his baking process to Casey Neill and why he’s so passionate about bringing back the craft.

“The centre of everything is the stone on which the bread is made … what happens to the community when there isn’t a focus?”

“THAT should be about 160 to 180 degrees now and it’s barely 100 degrees so I’m going to have to give it an extra push,” James Fisher says, using a long-handled shovel to scoop up hot coals from yesterday’s bake to start today’s fire.
The wood-fired brick oven in the Garfield bakery is about 120 years old and several square metres in size.
“Mostly that’s a loss of air temperature,” James explained.
“The masonry has still got a good amount of heat in it.
“I like mine dropping down to 160 because I like baking in a receding oven, so the temperature is falling quite fast as I’m baking.
“So I put in two small fires every time I bake instead of one big one.
“They’re built for one massive fire.
“When this was built 120 years ago, they only had two kinds of bread – brown bread and white bread and they came in tins and that was it.
“They had a massive mixer – three times the size of my mixer – and they had one huge mix and chopped it up very roughly, very fast, quickly shape it, throw it in tins, proof them all up, then they’d just load the whole oven, back to the front.
“They’d do one bake and then they’d do the browns.
“You had these huge ovens that were absolutely full of bread.
“These days, if you are baking with wood fire you’re going to be an artisanal baker and people want to have these exotic different kinds of breads.”
James came across the oven through a mate and work associate, Ken.
They were meeting about the idea of setting up a community bakery.
A woman Ken’s kids went to childcare with stopped by and said: ‘It’s funny you’re doing this, because I’ve got an old oven and no-one’s really using it’.
The lease was coming up.
“I came around and had a look at it and it was perfect,” James said.
“I was so excited.
“There are only six ovens like this that are in a commercial operation in Victoria. It was a real find.
“It’s way more economical than using gas or electric to run an oven.
“The wood that I use comes out of plantations and it’s the by-product of the forestry industry, so they just push it into the corner and burn it, so it’s a completely sustainable source of firewood as well.
“We’re not burning forests here. We’re burning the rubbish that gets pulled out of plantations that just gets burned anyway.”
James roughly shaped loaves of light rye bread, made with raw cacao and kibbled rye.
“Kibbled means broken grain,” he explained.
“Light rye is a wheat and rye bread.
“With wheat bread you get quite an open structure in the crumb, which I like.
“If you mill too much rye into it, it’s going to start closing things down.
“If I bring it in as a kibbled rye, you can get all the flavour and texture into it without closing up the bread.”
He uses a large, heavy set of cast iron scales and weights to section the dough.
He went through two or three sets of $500 digital scales before going old-school.
“If that goes down on the floor, nothing happens,” he said.
“You don’t get obsessed with looking at a screen and getting obsessed over one or two grams.
“Near enough is good enough.”
James also has a large floor scale for measuring out his raw ingredients.
“That came out of a laundry in a back street of Collingwood,” he said.
His love of bread started when he picked up “Dough“ from his sister-in-law’s bookshelf during a trip to the UK.
“It’s by Richard Bertinet. It turned out he lived in my home town, of Bath,” he said.
“It inspired me to have a crack at making bread.
“I just got the bug.
“When I got back to Australia I carried on making bread and the bread that I made, it was fun, it was easy and it was immeasurably better than anything I’d been buying in the shop before that.
“Even my earliest, messy loaves were still head and shoulders above what you go into a shop and buy.
“It made me feel good to know the food I was putting in my kids’ lunch boxes, I knew where it came from.
“I started getting a bit deeper into it.
“What I started learning about was the effect that other bread has on your system.
“I wasn’t willing to feed my kids that stuff anymore.”
He was coaching people in middle management and his contract was coming to an end.
He decided to take his hobby and make a career.
“I started a business teaching other people how to make bread for little Johnny,” he said.
“A year into that, I met up with Ken and found this place.
“Things really did just sort of float together.
“Finding this place was such a unique opportunity.”
He opened the lid to a large plastic container and revealed the wet, sloppy dough inside.
“All of my doughs are going to be wetter, probably, than the sort of doughs you’d be used to seeing,” he said.
“Higher hydration makes for better bread.
“Ciabatta is a very highly hydrated dough anyway.
“I’m giving them all a fold.
“I mix quite lightly in the mixer.
“It’s quite different to how you bake bread at home.
“You knead the dough and then let it rest for a while. We don’t really talk about kneading.
“You mix the dough and then you develop the gluten.
“I favour developing the dough, getting strength into the dough, in that first rest period.
“I don’t punch my doughs. This is the equivalent of punching it back.
“I certainly don’t wait for it to double in size. It’s used up too much of the available food supply.
“So when you shape it up and then proof it to go in the oven, it hasn’t got any more energy.
“There’s no more sugars left to consume, so it’s not going to rise the way you want it to.”
James explained that in its basic form, making bread was incredibly simple – it’s just flour, water and salt.
“How refined you want to have that end product is then a lifetime’s work,” he said.
“You just keep discovering more and learning more.
“It’s like a practice, like say you do yoga.
“You get up every day and do yoga first thing in the morning, but you don’t think that you’ve learned yoga and that’s it you’re done.
“You keep on evolving.
“You do your practice and you refine things.
“You have little breakthroughs and discoveries and your practice evolves through your lifetime.”
James turns his attention to the rustic white.
“The only ingredients in this are flour, water and salt. There’s nowhere to hide,” he said.
“What you taste when you taste the bread is the flavour of the flour – which is fresh stone-milled flour – and then the flavour of the ferment, which is the sourdough culture. That’s just fermented flour.”
He made his own culture about 10 years ago.
“You know how you leave things in the corner of your kitchen for a couple of days too long and they kind of get funky?” he said.
“If you leave things, they’ll just ferment all of their own accord.
“If you leave flour and water and you mix them together and they’re kind of warm and it’s in a nice warm environment then it will ferment.”
He regularly feeds the runny, bubbling mixture, which smells a lot like wine.
“When it starts off there’s only a few yeast cells,” he said.
“What you’re aiming for is a population density of yeast cells all swilling around in that probiotic universe.
“I don’t really go along with the romantic idea that 100-year-old starters have got anything going about them that a five-year-old starter hasn’t got.
“I challenge anyone in a blind taste test to pick the difference between a six-month-old starter and a 60-year-old starter.”
James regularly bakes about 10 different types of bread, and said his favourite was generally his newest creation.
At the moment, it’s a Russian black bread.
“It’s 100 per cent rye. It’s triple fermented. I ferment the culture multiple times at different temperatures and different hydrations to draw out different complexities,” he said.
“It’s got a little liquid malt and black treacle to give it a little sweetness to balance the acidity that’s in there.”
The loaf he offers for a taste test is “too fresh” and “still sticky”, he said, and explained that most Russian bakeries sold their bread the day after it was baked.
James adds some more wood to the fire.
“What I’m trying to do is get the temperature up as high as I can, as fast as I can, and then shut it down,” he said.
He bakes 150 to 250 loaves in a day, three times a week. Each one takes at least eight hours to produce, from mixing the ingredients together to taking it out of the oven.
He sells 60 to 70 per cent at farmers’ markets – Akoonah Park in Berwick every Sunday and Cockatoo, Beaumaris, Traralgon and Warragul on alternating Saturdays.
He moves a small amount through his Main Street store and has strong wholesale demand.
At the markets he swaps eggs for pollard, which is the by-product of the milling.
“I get all of my fruit and vegies from the market. I hardly have to go to the supermarket at all,” he said.
He’s pre-moulding during the Gazette’s visit.
“It’s taking that shaggy mass of dough and turning it into a manageable form,” he said.
He placed the pre-moulded dough onto trays and into a cabinet to relax.
James said he’d return to give the dough its final shape in about 45 minutes, then leave it for another 30 to 40 minutes – its final proof – before placing it into the oven at about 260 degrees.
He said the word proof stemmed from needing to demonstrate that the dough was alive, that the yeast was there and multiplying.
“You can’t see the cells. The only way that you know it’s working is if the dough’s getting bigger,” he said.
He said the Latin word for the stone bread was baked on was focus.
“The centre of everything is the stone on which the bread is made,” he said.
“That puts a certain light onto what place bread and baking had in culture and community.
“What happens then to a community when you take the focus out of the community, when you take away the stone on which the bread is made and that’s no longer the centre of the community?
“What happens to the community when there isn’t a focus?
“That hasn’t been addressed. I think it’s something that’s missing.
“That’s one of the things that got me excited about renovating and reinstating the wood oven.”
It was mostly through trial and error that James learnt how to harness the oven.
“I’d heard a rumour that the lollypop man in Emerald used to work a scotch oven so I got in touch with him,” he said.
“I got in touch with John, who runs the bakery in Trentham.
“It was a lot easier than I thought. It’s a very forgiving oven, easier than a domestic oven I think.
“I spent the first few years learning how to be a commercial baker before I had the available head space to teach workshops again.
“It’s something I really love doing.
“I think the workshops are a highlight of what we do here.
“There’s a lot of love and a lot of energy that goes into those workshops.
“They’re the start of something.
“I know because they’re coming back and seeing me at the market and they’re not buying bread anymore, I’m bringing bags of flour for them.
“They’re sending me pictures of the bread they’re making and asking me for advice.”
James teaches people how to make their own starter, mill flour and bake bread.
“Fresh, stone-milled flour is a living flour, versus the stuff you buy in the supermarket,” he said.
“That’s just dead flour. It’s just carbohydrate.”
He buys his grain from an 87-year-old organic farmer in the Riverina and uses a custom-made Osttiroler Getreidemuhlen from the Green family in Germany.
“If you look at the health problems that are affecting the western world, where did it start going wrong?” he said.
“I would say with the invention of the roller mill and the centralisation of milling has a lot to answer for, producing dead flour with no nutritional value.”
The breakthrough meant large mills could stockpile tonnes of flour and distribute it across the country.
“You couldn’t do that with stone-milled flour because by the time it got to the bakeries, it would have started to go rancid,” he said.
He said that 100 years ago, bread accounted for more than 50 per cent of people’s calorie intake.
“We’re still dealing with that,” he said.
“I’m proud to be bringing milling back into the community.
“The grain that we’re using is insanely nutritious.”