Intro Bread Making 🍞 Wood Fired Pizza Ovens 🔥

There is NOTHING as satisfying as opening your wood fired oven to see it full of perfect, puffy, golden loaves, and then (as you let out the breath you've been holding and take your first satisfied breath in), inhaling that tantalising aroma – the smell of success, of real homeliness, of YES, I-CAN-BAKE!

It's one of those pure, primal moments that can make a whole month full of hum-drum living seem suddenly worthwhile. It's another of the ways that having an oven pays you back tenfold for the trouble and uncertainty and expense of building it that you went through. It's another delicious reward...

Before we got our wood fired oven, my bread making experiences were nothing to wax lyrical about and I certainly never aspired to bread greatness. I never even really aspired to bread averageness. I just thought it was too much trouble for too little reward and that I clearly didn't have 'the knack' and so the most useful bread skill I could work on was the ability to, from the smallest of across-the-road clues, identify the marks of a good Italian deli or Vietnamese bakery or French patisserie. A place where I could buy Bread-To-Die-For from.

These days, while I'm still a long way from being a bread expert, or a bread fanatic, I can now hold my head up high, plonk my loaf on the table, turn around and know that when I turn back, my bread will be gone – it's that good - and that's good enough for me!

Sooo, without further ado, let me cut the ribbon, crack the champers on the bow, call for the drum roll and introduce you to our complete (and boy, do we mean complete!) Wood Fired Oven Bread Making Guide.

Naturally enough, being a relative newbee myself, I'm only qualified to be in charge of the Beginner's Bread Lesson and I can’t do much more then start you on the path (and take photos of Pete as illustrations – he’s much cuter to look at then I am and also endearingly hopeless with a camera, so he gets to be the model). Fortunately though, amongst our customers we have some real bread experts.

In the future, we may even con a few more of them into writing as well, but for now, if you've already graduated from bakery primary school and you're ready for some serious study and real skill, or if, for you, bread making is a religious experience and you worship at the altar of its graininess and purity and you want to be inducted into its mystik secrets, then jump straight to the contributions of our two bona fide Bread Stars - Scott Megee with his Advanced Bread Recipes For Your Wood Fired Oven and Graham Prichard with his Sour Dough Bread Making Secrets.