The making of a woodfired bakery

It was an interest in yurts, those round huts that have for thousands of years given shelter to most of the Mongolian population, that led a German baker to establish a wood fired biodynamic bakery in Yallingup.

Gotthard Bauer, who was brought up in a little town just south of Stuttgart, did an apprenticeship as a miller in a flour mill that was brought by his grandfather after the first world war.

The Bauer family is still milling biodynamic flour and baking bread in the town and their successful enterprise is helping to fund Gotthard’s Yallingup venture.

Always a keen traveller, Gotthard heard that Perth was the most isolated capital city in the world and decided it was a place he must see. So with his wife, Marion, and their two daughters they set out to discover Western Australia.

“We lived here for three months and the girls went to school at Bibra Lake and they really loved it,” said Gotthard. “They adopted Australia and missed it and their new friends when we went home.”

During the stay Gotthard, who had previously developed an interest in yurts, thought he would see if there was any interest in these forms of housing in Australia, and went to Murdoch University to inquire.

“Nobody had heard of any yurts in Australia,” said Gotthard with a smile. “But they said that somebody was making strawbale homes at Yallingup.”

The trail to the strawbale ‘yurts’ led Gotthard to Rosneath Farm at Yallingup, a 140ha eco-village in the making overlooking the sweep of the Geographe Bay on Biddles Road.

Impressed with what they saw the Bauer family decided to apply to become business migrants with the aim of establishing a wood fired bakery on the farm, the first commercial entity of the eco-village.

It took two years to gain approvals and build the ovens and the bakery, some of which is made with strawbales.

Gotthard returned to Germany during that time and purchased special volcanic stones for the oven, stones which store a lot of heat and also give it back again.

The bread is totally biodynamic, the flour grown in Dumbleyung and milled in Corrigin. It is free of any chemical treatment right from the growing to the milling and the bread making.

The loaves have a rustic appeal with full flavours achieved by a slow proving process.

“Good bread takes three things, time, temperature and moisture,” said Gotthard. “Bread can’t be rushed. You have to give it time to develop its flavours. It takes 20 hours to tempt the flavours out of flour.”

The three styles of bread made at the bakery all use sour dough with just a small amount of yeast in one of them.

There is a very serious rye called Big Rock which is a sour dough, deep chocolate brown in colour and dense in structure, it is moist and the perfect accompaniment to cheese.

Yallingup Fields is a sough dough in which Atta flour is used, which is wholemeal. It is a very dark coloured flour and the bread is dense in structure and very flavoursome. No yeast is used.

Yallingup Waves is a so called white bread. An unbleached baker’s flour is used and a very small amount of yeast is added to the sough dough which makes the bread lighter in texture, but still a very firm Germanic bread.

Yallingup Hills is the same bread as the Waves, but it has divisions pressed into the dough before baking so it may be broken into rolls.

The bread making process is started in the early evening in an especially slow dough mixer. Sour dough starter retained from the previous day’s bread is added to the flour along with non-cholinated water.

By 5am when Gotthard arrives back at the bakery the doughs are almost ready to prepare for the ovens.

The fire in the oven is lit about 5am using old jarrah and by 6.30am the loaves have been formed and are ready for the oven that is then raked out and cleaned before the loaves are placed on the hot volcanic stones.

Gotthard and his assistant then sit out on the bakery verandah eating bread and marmalade and drinking coffee while the bread bakes and the air is filled with an incredible aroma.

The loaves are flat and rustic. Gotthard does not want to use baker’s tins in the oven because it is a denial of the wood fired process and because tins require oils which he is not prepared to introduce into the bakery environment.

“My breads are a long way from soft white bread,” said Gotthard. “We know it will take time for people to understand them because they are quite different, but we are sure that they will become popular.”

The bakery may be visited  from 10am to 4pm Thursday to Sunday. It is at the corner of Biddles and McLachlan roads, Yallingup.