I was watching Chronicle, a half hour news magazine on a local Boston station, when they did a story on Norwich, Vermont's community oven. Two days a week, bakers make bread and other baked goods in a common oven and one day a week it can be used by anybody who wants to bake. There's a pot luck, stone soup pizza dinner on Tuesdays, too.
Norwich is a bread-crazy town, not least of all because it is the home of to King Arthur Flour.
This is the first time I've heard of a modern community oven but I remember back in the day there were a couple of community canneries. In fact, I took a trip to the Billerica, MA state prison (it was once usual for prisons and mental hospitals to produce much of their own food) to look at their old, unused equipment for one such prospective project. Never happened but we gave it a serious try.
http://mudskippererasmus74.blogspot....
Today I visited the community oven in Norwich (at the bottom of Bragg Hill Road). Amy and I bought a WONDERFUL focaccia with just parmesan, salt and pepper on it. The baker pictured here makes a dough that is 60% wheat/40% sourdough and adds various spices and dried fruits to this base. Bread is available (at least on Wednesdays) from 12 noon to 6 PM. Loaves are $5. Different kinds are available depending on when you show up, so every hour is different. She also does cookies and wood-fired pizzas.
http://www.kingarthurflour.com
Some King Arthur Flour Facts:
We are America's oldest flour company, founded in 1790. To put it into context for you, George Washington had just been elected to his first term in office.
King Arthur Flour became an employee-owned company in 1996, when Frank Sands instated the employee stock ownership program (ESOP). We are now 100% employee-owned, and have always been 100% committed to quality.
Our headquarters in Norwich, Vermont, is a 16,600-square-foot timber-frame structure called, appropriately, Camelot. Vermont Public Radio also calls Camelot home.
Our combined annual sales are approximately $45,000,000.
Our Employees
We had five employees in 1990. Today, between King Arthur Flour and The Baker's Catalogue - our wholly-owned subsidiary - we have over 180. We are an employee-owned, open-book, team-managed pair of companies, with profit sharing and an employee stock ownership program. Our employees have a stake in what we do, and it shows in every bag of flour.
There must be something in the water up in Vermont. Here's an oven on wheels.
http://www.chelseagreen.com/...
INVITE Daniel Wing to dinner and you won't get flowers or a $12 bottle of merlot. He prefers to present a crusty, homemade boule, baked in his homemade, wood-fired backyard oven. With ingredients costing only a dollar, he notes, it will not only be delicious but a bargain, too, though of course between the kneading and the fire tending, "you kiss a day goodbye."
A day is nothing for bread obsessives like Dr. Wing, a 56-year-old psychiatrist in Corinth, Vt. He keeps his two-ton oven on wheels so he can hook it to his pickup and sail up to social gatherings, an evangelist for sourdough and blue smoke.
Again, back in the day, I had friends who were totally absorbed in the idea of brick ovens and artisanal breads. They were also the first people I knew who talked about beer the way oenophiles talk about wine. But that was in Maine.