The aims of the home baker are varied. For some, the only thing important is to produce a loaf cleanly with minimal effort. Bread machines fill the tin for those that desire convenient baking. But for others it’s the thrill of the effort, going after excellence and a primitive baking experience. Grinding the wheat for freshly milled flour, nursing a natural starter through it’s infancy to full-blown fermentation, blending grains and flours to create a personal mix of dry ingredients...…

above, a thick layer of fragrant thyme grows on the warm roof of the wood-fired oven

Back in 2003, Jack Lang, 'Entrepreneur in Residence' at the University of Cambridge, and his partner Jill hosted an apple pressing day at their modern farmhouse in Cambridgeshire. Now, if you (like me) have ever wandered past the laden boughs of apple trees in late summer, and wondered what will happen to all of the fruit, this is one solution.

Within a small community, it makes sense to get together and turn the task of pulping and pressing several hundredweight of crisp sweet apples into an enjoyable weekend-long affair. So over one weekend in September, colleagues and friends of Jack and Jill collect the apples, help force them through a garden shredder, and then tip the apple bits into a hand-cranked press. Fresh apple juice with champagne (not a 'bellini', more a 'normandie) wets the tongues of the workers.

Jill was left with the herculean task of cleaning up after the baking and apple pressing. If you have ever had to cleaned up after a baker, you will understand the trouble it takes to get the dough off every surface. That glutinous mixture of wheat-flour and water bonds to the tap handles, the cupboard doors, anything the baker touches.

But this was the only downside to a glorious day baking bread and pizza. When I arrived on the Sunday morning, Jack had on the kitchen table the dough that would be baked that day: a large batch of sour pizza dough and rye dough, placed alongside two loaves that had just come out of the Aga oven and sat cooling.

above, the craftsman at work, Jack Lang in a quiet moment on the baking day.

The kitchen looks out over an old orchard that surrounds the house. Apples are scattered on the ground underneath the trees, and to one side sits the brick oven, looking like a small house.

I asked Jack how he got started in baking. "I was at University and had a girlfriend who was a good cook", he said, "and that got me started. After we split up, I still continued to cook, and gradually developed a mild interest baking. But it was later, after I had spent time in San Francisco, that my interest really took off". Jack's brother Charles became friendly with Ian Duffy (when he was the baker at the outstanding Daily Bread bakery in Boulder, Colorado. Ian now now resides at Cook Natural Products, in Oakland, California, a leading distributor of Organic flour).  "He introduced Charles to sourdough baking", says Jack, "and fired his enthusiam to learn (a lot) more about baking. I brought back one of those Gold Rush sourdough starter packs, which was good. But after a week or so the flavour changed and it lost that sharp, vibrant acidity. So I decided I had to do better."

It was at that time that Jack made the decision to eat better bread. " I remember saying to Jack in his early bread-making days" says Jill, "that he should bake bread on a regular basis.... just keep at, keep at it, keep at it, and it would 'come right' in time - something I learned for myself in an earlier life when raising a family and baking all their bread".

above, straight out of the oven, Jacks sourdough loaf sits on the stainless steel pizza peel.

"Today", says Jack, "I bake less, probably every week, but I still bake for friends on occasions." The weather outside was warm and just starting to get sunny, as the light broke through the bank of clouds that had threatened the morning. We started baking a test pizza first, after a glass of apple juice mixed with champagne. As the oven was blisteringly hot, it seemed best to keep the dough ultra thin, with a light smear of tomato sauce, studded with pitted black olives, the odd anchovy, and a light drizzle of extra virgin olive oil. The peel was dusted with yellow cornmeal, and the pizza quickly slid onto the hot stones on the base of the oven.

"We needed to replace an old BBQ that we had in the garden", said Jack, "and decided to replace it with a brick oven. It was Jill who urged me to think about building a brick oven in the garden. We had been out to visit friends, who had a house near Poitiers in France. They uncovered a brick oven in an outhouse in their garden, built early last century which, would have been used as the communal oven for the village. So I helped them clean it out and fire it up again. I had taken out to France a sourdough starter that I had cultivated in the UK, so we mixed that with flour from the local supermarket, and baked our first loaf in the revived oven. So by then, I had that gleam in my eye...."

"When we got back, I started looking on the web to try and purchase an oven, and it seemed to be easier to build our own. At the time, we had builders working on an extension to the house. So we purchased a refactory shell (the dome that sits above the sole of the bakery oven) from a company in France, Four Grandmere, and had the builders spend a little time with some extra bricks building the side walls for the oven, insulated with formiculite.

next page 2