For beautiful bread, historic oven proves old ways still best

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THE CURIOUS COOK 

IT’S 11pm at the Portarlington Bakehouse, on Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula, and the wood-fired oven is still warm from the morning’s baking. I watch as Terry Christofi lights some pieces of newspaper stuffed between the old palings in the oven’s firebox; flames shoot out. Christofi taps on the antique brass temperature gauge, waiting for it to reach 800F on the old scale (almost 430C). The baker is making these preparations in the middle of the night because it will take a further four hours for the oven to heat up enough to bake bread.
The kiln is a unique piece of history in this scenic area near Geelong. Bread was baked here from 1882 until the 1950s, when the oven was abandoned and left to rot. But it didn’t. To say the Tarver’s Improved Vulcan is solid is an understatement. It is the size of a small house with a single vaulted space inside. Made from 27,000 or so handmade bricks, it takes five days to cool completely after use.
In 2000, Christofi decided to swap life running a busy Queenscliff restaurant, for all-nighters here. Renovating the property over six months to include a cafe and a shopfront, he found the oven was the only thing he didn’t need to spruce up. Still, it took him a while to learn its quirks, which he ended up figuring out with the help of a Tasmanian baker who was passing through and knew the old baking traditions.
The new wave of inner-city artisan bakers would have little idea where to start with Christofi’s monster. While they twiddle the knobs and tap the gauges of wardrobe-sized, stainless-steel electric machines that need little preparation and take whole trays of bread that require only 40 minutes to bake, there is no manual for the Tarver’s Improved Vulcan.
Tonight, it is taking 20-25 minutes for each batch to bake. When the bread will be ready depends on the weather, the humidity, the stickiness of the dough on the night and a little bit of baker’s instinct.
“Qualified bakers don’t really cut it,” Christofi tells me, pointing out that he staffs the bakery with dedicated locals rather than employing over-qualified bakers used to premixed ingredients and precision engineering.
It’s a bitter Bellarine night but inside the bakery the weather is tropical. The technology, in the form of a spiral mixer, is burping and grunting by our side.
“That means it’s a good dough,” chuckles Christofi. But it turns out it is a little warm tonight for the sourdough, which is sticking inside a machine that squeezes out the air bubbles and cuts the dough into equal portions.
In the end one of Christofi’s offsiders pulls each piece of sourdough out of the machine by hand before tossing them to him. Christofi rolls them into the shape of loaves by hand.
“Once you’ve added the water there’s no stopping,” he says. “From start to finish you have a six-hour process. Less time if the weather is warmer.” They work at a frantic pace rolling the dough, the bread proving under dusty sheets on shelves next to the oven. About 140 loaves are eventually loaded into the oven, laid side by side, tip to end in one layer.
The oven has its quirks, including cool and hot spots; Christofi knows just how to play to its strengths. The bread closest to the firebox cooks fastest. The baker regulates the temperature by opening the firebox’s door and fiddling with the oven’s flue. The kiln doesn’t produce the kind of evenly coloured bread that can be bought from, say, Bakers Delight, or for that matter, my local artisan bakery in Melbourne. Each loaf here has its own character, whether it’s Vienna, sourdough, pumpkin, or pasta dura.
About 3am, the first batch is ready. Then the pace inside the bakery really picks up. Christofi is again thrusting his long-handled shovel — long enough to reach to the far side of the oven while still poking me with the other end — to extract batches of hot loaves. His offsider piles the loaves in baskets. Both men are dripping with sweat but there is no time to stop. Christofi plants his shovel deep in the oven, loading the next batch of loaves.
Of course the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The finished product comprises wonderfully large crusty loaves of bread as good as any of the best artisan loaves available in the city. Fresh, warm and quite delicious.
The Portarlington Bakehouse. 48 Newcombe St, Portarlington, Victoria. Phone: (03) 5259 2274.

Ed Charles is a journalist and digital consultant who spend the better part of the part two decades in Australia. He trained with IPC in London and has written for major international and national business and lifestyle titles. Establishing this blog in 2005, he was one of the first of a handful of food bloggers in Australia. He's spoken at the Melbourne Writers Festival and Emerging Writers Festival and has broadcasted regularly on food and digital media issues. He is currently writing a history of mankind told through food.

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