Ensure the Future of WildFire Bread!
Donation protected
We could use your help.
WildFire Bread has been in business for nearly six glorious years now. During that time, we have operated as a traditional, wood-fired, sourdough bakery located in historic Ligonier, Pennsylvania. Since opening in 2016, it has been our honor and privilege to provide our surrounding community with over 40,000 loaves of sourdough bread using strictly organic flour and wild leaven-only, extended-fermentation techniques. Our Google and Facebook reviews are a testament to our dedication and success!
But like a lobster, we need to break out of our old shell in order to continue growing. That is where you come in!
In the most exciting move we have ever made, WildFire Bread has decided to transition from baking bread in the 9000 pound wood-fired oven that owner, Nate Johanson, designed and built in 2014, to something a bit more modern, predictable, and versatile: a new electric oven! This new oven will be a POLIN three-deck Stratos (3STA-4676) with precision heat and steam controls. It will have 50% more stone hearth space than the current oven and will be ready at a moment’s notice to bake fantastic delicious bread when needed All. Day. Long. In addition to doing away with some health and safety issues, labor intensity, limited baking capacity, and frustration inherent with production wood-fired baking, the new oven will allow for additional “slow-and-low” baked items that were previously not able to be baked in our wood-fired oven. Even better, it will allow WildFire Bread to grow by having an oven that new bakers can easily be trained on, thus increasing our production and ensuring the future for our little bakery. And for those wondering, there are even plans to re-position and re-purpose the old wood-fired oven for pizza-making in the future!
There are so many obvious advantages to the new oven. However, it is not cheap, nor will it ever get any cheaper. In addition to the new oven ($27,370), there is a new heavy duty, 3-phase electrical infrastructure needed ($4900), as well the need to hire an electrician to install a new electrical mast, panel boxes, and wiring to connect to the oven ($5000 estimated). The oven itself, along with all of the necessary work has been approved and scheduled to be installed within the next month, or as the Winter weather permits. March 26, 2022, is our sixth year anniversary date, so hopefully by then!
Please help WildFire Bread by giving what you can, so that we may continue to share our love of delicious, nutritious sourdough bread. Thank you for your support!
EDIT: I am adding an FAQ to this campaign.
Answers to frequently asked questions:
What will be the benefit to the community when WildFire gets its new oven?
This is a great question!
Recently, I was remembering the days before WildFire opened and how one of the facets of WildFire’s business plan was being a classroom where people could learn about sourdough and the oven could act as a community oven. I wanted a place where we could pass on the knowledge of sourdough and not just sell bread and give away sourdough starter.
Fast forward seven or eight years since I wrote down the words “community oven” and I have no sourdough classes to speak of for the community. Why? What is the limiting factor?
You’d be surprised to learn that the limiting factor isn’t just my time. I’ve had plenty of time to teach a sourdough class. And it certainly isn’t motivation, especially now, when I’ve built up 10 years of baking experience and have a lot of knowledge that I’d like to share.
The problem with being a strictly wood-fired bakery is that the centerpiece of the bakery is a custom-made oven with all of its controls, not located on some sort of convenient push-button panel, but within the person using it. In this case it’s me and me alone. It has literally taken me years to learn how to finesse the oven at WildFire Bread to the point where it is somewhat reliable. Imagine that, taking years to learn how to manage heat and steam in a small box where I put dough riddled with sourdough microbes living out their last moments of life. It’s actually a strange concept!
The limiting factor for organizing baking courses here is the wood-fired oven. I have no doubt about that. Admitting that is quite freeing, to be honest.
The problem with teaching a baking course with a wood-fired oven is that eventually you have to bake the bread. Wood-fired baking might seem like an exciting idea, and it is, but the excitement mostly comes from the mystique of the object in question, not because of the guarantee of a successful bake. I’ve always worried that teaching a baking class with this oven wouldn’t be as enjoyable as it could be. Not because I don’t like teaching, I truly love it, but because students would have limited success baking the dough they have work so hard learning to make. A big part of teaching is giving students projects that have high levels of success and limited frustration, and I’m imagining a lot of sad faces in my wood-fired baking class.
This is where the new oven comes in, like a star. With a new commercial oven, we can replace the word “commercial” and put in “pedagogical” or “learning.” Finally, after 6 years of battling a wood-fired oven, WildFire Bread can share its knowledge base utilizing a device that takes the guesswork out of baking and that would allow students to focus on the more important issues that come before the bake, like starter management, dough mixing and gluten development, bulk fermentation, shaping, proofing, and so on.
The wood-fired oven, which will still be accessible, can be used for more advanced classes if that is what people are interested in, but wood-fired baking, like sourdough fermentation, changes the timescale of a class. A sourdough class where we go from flour to loaf would take the better part of a day, but that’s only if there’s an oven that is ready to bake in when the dough is ready to be baked. With a wood-fired oven class, there are a complex series of stages including firing the oven, resting the oven, and controlling the heat with time (to cool) or a water sprayer, in my case. Combining that system with the timing of a sourdough fermentation is about the craziest choreography I could ever imagine, and I’ve been doing it for years! There are so many things that can go wrong that I wouldn’t want to teach a wood-fired class until my students have mastered the basics anyway. An advanced wood-fired class can come later, but we’re talking about a timeline that would span days and not just eight hours or so.
With a new electric oven, all of the steps of “firing” the oven are cut out. And even if someone really did want to learn about wood-fired baking, anything I could teach them on my oven would be specific to my oven and its particular idiosyncrasies. A commercial electric oven’s performance would be more or less like a home oven, but with more capacity and that essential steam button. Steam can be generated or capture in a home oven anyway.
And here I am, the owner of a wood-fired bakery and a person who wants to transform his bakery into one that utilizes an electric, commercial/community oven. That’s a nice thought to mull around in my head: the idea I once had long ago where the oven could actually be a teaching/learning device for the community and not just used a business tool.
If learning about sourdough baking is something that you’re interested in, or if you’d at least like to see this happen in your community, for your community, then I think our oven fundraiser is a worthy cause.
Why in the world would WildFire Bread feel like we could ask for $40,000?
It’s not easy to ask my customers for help. If continued patronage is all a person can give, then I am still extremely happy about that. Any donations our campaign receives are purely voluntary. If we make our goal, fantastic! It will be the greatest gift I have ever received and WildFire Bread will have a new oven to bake in. If we do NOT make our goal, any donations that we receive will still be a gracious gift and we will still purchase a new oven to bake in. Whether or not we will meet that goal is unknown, but we are hopeful. Either way, we WILL have a new oven.
Why not just continue with the model I am currently using (wood-fired bread baking)?
Unfortunately, despite all of my efforts, the current model is not sustainable. As WildFire Bread's customer base has increased over the years, so has demand for more bread. More bread means more batches of dough and more bakes, and more bakes means that I have needed to fire the entire mass of the oven to higher and higher temperatures (currently I have to reach 900 degrees Fahrenheit) so that I have enough stored heat to make it through the extra bakes. Given this extra heat I have to manage, I have been forced to perform a drastic type of “oven-baking-chamber-cooling” that I can only describe as terribly abusive to my oven. This rapid cooling of the chamber using a water sprayer shocks the masonry in the baking chamber/hearth and has, unfortunately, also promoted cracks throughout the oven. As a result, I have developed a fear that I will come into the bakery one day, only to find the dome of the oven collapsed onto the hearth. This is why I have to literally crawl into the oven every few months in order to fill cracks with refractory mortar, just to make the oven last a little longer. The cracks, though, persist, and it is easy to see during a cold Winter's day that steam and heat are leaking out of areas I cannot possibly patch without tearing the oven apart. This also explains why the temperature curves of the oven have become more and more erratic over the past few years, because even with eight inches of ceramic fiber insulation surrounding the oven, heat is escaping at a faster rate every time I fire it. The other consequence of this over-firing and having excessive radiant heat, is that, in my opinion, the quality of the loaves has steadily decreased. Not the fermentation mind you, but the overall look of the loaves. If I look back at the bread I was producing in a cooler oven, I can plainly see that there’s a trade off for being able to bake more bread. This will not be a problem with the new oven, much to my anxiety’s delight.
Why not just raise prices or open more hours in order to generate more income for the new oven?
Since I opened six years ago, the price of flour has steadily risen, especially the organic flour that we use. Currently, the flour I use most is over $60 for a fifty pound bag. It’s no surprise to anyone that everything needed to stay in business is more expensive, but I don't think the prices for our bread are an accurate reflection of those costs. I would say that I have kept my prices very low in order to not scare away customers. The fear has always been that raising my prices while the aesthetic qualities of the bread has decreased, has left me feeling frozen and not knowing what to do.
At one time, WildFire Bread was open two days a week. Since then, I have found myself a single father of a now home-schooled ten year old boy. It may seem that being open one day a week, I only work one day a week. However, nothing could be further from the truth. In order to keep WildFire Bread going, I am making weekly trips for baking supplies, hauling wood for the oven (biweekly), managing the sourdough starter, firing the oven, performing some kind of repair and maintenance, making, shaping, and baking the dough, making myself available to help with customer service, and finally cleaning the bakery. In doing all of these things I end up spending well over forty hours a week, not including the hours that we are open. The making of dough alone is at least a twenty hour-straight process with a fifteen minute nap before starting the next twelve to fourteen hours until we close on Fridays and the bakery is cleaned once again.
I have dedicated my life to making the healthiest, more digestible, organic sourdough bread I can possibly make, and now I find myself at a crossroads because the wood-fired oven we currently utilize for all of our bread baking needs to be replaced. If you can help in any way, you are not just helping me, you are helping keep millennia-old fermentation techniques alive for others to enjoy. If you cannot, and instead would rather just support us by continuing to purchase our products, or even just by sharing our posts, that is also support, and I sincerely thank you from the bottom of my heart.
To all of you, much love and thank you for your support in whatever form it takes!
Recently, I was remembering the days before WildFire opened and how one of the facets of WildFire’s business plan was being a classroom where people could learn about sourdough and the oven could act as a community oven. I wanted a place where we could pass on the knowledge of sourdough and not just sell bread and give away sourdough starter.
Fast forward seven or eight years since I wrote down the words “community oven” and I have no sourdough classes to speak of for the community. Why? What is the limiting factor?
You’d be surprised to learn that the limiting factor isn’t just my time. I’ve had plenty of time to teach a sourdough class. And it certainly isn’t motivation, especially now, when I’ve built up 10 years of baking experience and have a lot of knowledge that I’d like to share.
The problem with being a strictly wood-fired bakery is that the centerpiece of the bakery is a custom-made oven with all of its controls, not located on some sort of convenient push-button panel, but within the person using it. In this case it’s me and me alone. It has literally taken me years to learn how to finesse the oven at WildFire Bread to the point where it is somewhat reliable. Imagine that, taking years to learn how to manage heat and steam in a small box where I put dough riddled with sourdough microbes living out their last moments of life. It’s actually a strange concept!
The limiting factor for organizing baking courses here is the wood-fired oven. I have no doubt about that. Admitting that is quite freeing, to be honest.
The problem with teaching a baking course with a wood-fired oven is that eventually you have to bake the bread. Wood-fired baking might seem like an exciting idea, and it is, but the excitement mostly comes from the mystique of the object in question, not because of the guarantee of a successful bake. I’ve always worried that teaching a baking class with this oven wouldn’t be as enjoyable as it could be. Not because I don’t like teaching, I truly love it, but because students would have limited success baking the dough they have work so hard learning to make. A big part of teaching is giving students projects that have high levels of success and limited frustration, and I’m imagining a lot of sad faces in my wood-fired baking class.
This is where the new oven comes in, like a star. With a new commercial oven, we can replace the word “commercial” and put in “pedagogical” or “learning.” Finally, after 6 years of battling a wood-fired oven, WildFire Bread can share its knowledge base utilizing a device that takes the guesswork out of baking and that would allow students to focus on the more important issues that come before the bake, like starter management, dough mixing and gluten development, bulk fermentation, shaping, proofing, and so on.
The wood-fired oven, which will still be accessible, can be used for more advanced classes if that is what people are interested in, but wood-fired baking, like sourdough fermentation, changes the timescale of a class. A sourdough class where we go from flour to loaf would take the better part of a day, but that’s only if there’s an oven that is ready to bake in when the dough is ready to be baked. With a wood-fired oven class, there are a complex series of stages including firing the oven, resting the oven, and controlling the heat with time (to cool) or a water sprayer, in my case. Combining that system with the timing of a sourdough fermentation is about the craziest choreography I could ever imagine, and I’ve been doing it for years! There are so many things that can go wrong that I wouldn’t want to teach a wood-fired class until my students have mastered the basics anyway. An advanced wood-fired class can come later, but we’re talking about a timeline that would span days and not just eight hours or so.
With a new electric oven, all of the steps of “firing” the oven are cut out. And even if someone really did want to learn about wood-fired baking, anything I could teach them on my oven would be specific to my oven and its particular idiosyncrasies. A commercial electric oven’s performance would be more or less like a home oven, but with more capacity and that essential steam button. Steam can be generated or capture in a home oven anyway.
And here I am, the owner of a wood-fired bakery and a person who wants to transform his bakery into one that utilizes an electric, commercial/community oven. That’s a nice thought to mull around in my head: the idea I once had long ago where the oven could actually be a teaching/learning device for the community and not just used a business tool.
If learning about sourdough baking is something that you’re interested in, or if you’d at least like to see this happen in your community, for your community, then I think our oven fundraiser is a worthy cause.
Why in the world would WildFire Bread feel like we could ask for $40,000?
It’s not easy to ask my customers for help. If continued patronage is all a person can give, then I am still extremely happy about that. Any donations our campaign receives are purely voluntary. If we make our goal, fantastic! It will be the greatest gift I have ever received and WildFire Bread will have a new oven to bake in. If we do NOT make our goal, any donations that we receive will still be a gracious gift and we will still purchase a new oven to bake in. Whether or not we will meet that goal is unknown, but we are hopeful. Either way, we WILL have a new oven.
Why not just continue with the model I am currently using (wood-fired bread baking)?
Unfortunately, despite all of my efforts, the current model is not sustainable. As WildFire Bread's customer base has increased over the years, so has demand for more bread. More bread means more batches of dough and more bakes, and more bakes means that I have needed to fire the entire mass of the oven to higher and higher temperatures (currently I have to reach 900 degrees Fahrenheit) so that I have enough stored heat to make it through the extra bakes. Given this extra heat I have to manage, I have been forced to perform a drastic type of “oven-baking-chamber-cooling” that I can only describe as terribly abusive to my oven. This rapid cooling of the chamber using a water sprayer shocks the masonry in the baking chamber/hearth and has, unfortunately, also promoted cracks throughout the oven. As a result, I have developed a fear that I will come into the bakery one day, only to find the dome of the oven collapsed onto the hearth. This is why I have to literally crawl into the oven every few months in order to fill cracks with refractory mortar, just to make the oven last a little longer. The cracks, though, persist, and it is easy to see during a cold Winter's day that steam and heat are leaking out of areas I cannot possibly patch without tearing the oven apart. This also explains why the temperature curves of the oven have become more and more erratic over the past few years, because even with eight inches of ceramic fiber insulation surrounding the oven, heat is escaping at a faster rate every time I fire it. The other consequence of this over-firing and having excessive radiant heat, is that, in my opinion, the quality of the loaves has steadily decreased. Not the fermentation mind you, but the overall look of the loaves. If I look back at the bread I was producing in a cooler oven, I can plainly see that there’s a trade off for being able to bake more bread. This will not be a problem with the new oven, much to my anxiety’s delight.
Why not just raise prices or open more hours in order to generate more income for the new oven?
Since I opened six years ago, the price of flour has steadily risen, especially the organic flour that we use. Currently, the flour I use most is over $60 for a fifty pound bag. It’s no surprise to anyone that everything needed to stay in business is more expensive, but I don't think the prices for our bread are an accurate reflection of those costs. I would say that I have kept my prices very low in order to not scare away customers. The fear has always been that raising my prices while the aesthetic qualities of the bread has decreased, has left me feeling frozen and not knowing what to do.
At one time, WildFire Bread was open two days a week. Since then, I have found myself a single father of a now home-schooled ten year old boy. It may seem that being open one day a week, I only work one day a week. However, nothing could be further from the truth. In order to keep WildFire Bread going, I am making weekly trips for baking supplies, hauling wood for the oven (biweekly), managing the sourdough starter, firing the oven, performing some kind of repair and maintenance, making, shaping, and baking the dough, making myself available to help with customer service, and finally cleaning the bakery. In doing all of these things I end up spending well over forty hours a week, not including the hours that we are open. The making of dough alone is at least a twenty hour-straight process with a fifteen minute nap before starting the next twelve to fourteen hours until we close on Fridays and the bakery is cleaned once again.
I have dedicated my life to making the healthiest, more digestible, organic sourdough bread I can possibly make, and now I find myself at a crossroads because the wood-fired oven we currently utilize for all of our bread baking needs to be replaced. If you can help in any way, you are not just helping me, you are helping keep millennia-old fermentation techniques alive for others to enjoy. If you cannot, and instead would rather just support us by continuing to purchase our products, or even just by sharing our posts, that is also support, and I sincerely thank you from the bottom of my heart.
To all of you, much love and thank you for your support in whatever form it takes!
Yours truly,
Nate Johanson - fermenter, baker, founder of WildFire Bread
Nate Johanson - fermenter, baker, founder of WildFire Bread
WildFire Bread Bakery:
The original wood-fired oven and pressure-cooker steam generator:
The new POLIN Stratos dream oven:
Organizer
Nate Johanson
Organizer
Ligonier, PA