Brickmaiden Breads has launched a month-long, all-or-nothing Kickstarter campaign to raise $20,000 (or more) towards the cost of a new oven at their little bake house in downtown Point Reyes Station.
The campaign, if successful, will leave the brick maiden without a brick oven, as the business will replace it what owner Celine Underwood called a “more modern,” indirect, wood-fired oven made of stone and steel.
Not only is the brick arch that forms the top of her oven collapsing, but workers sometimes struggle to bake consistent loaves with the oven’s direct heat. Because the brick oven uses one continuous fire—workers light it around 10 a.m. and it winds down the next day, around 2 a.m.—its start off too hot and winds up too cold, so that the first and last loaves suffer, said Ms. Underwood, who spent her teenage years in Marshall and started Brickmaiden in 2000.
With the new oven, wood is loaded throughout the day, into a firebox that uniformly warms the entire baking chamber–and needs just a quarter of the fuel to boot. (“Can I get a breakfast sandwich? On Brickmaiden bread?” she said suddenly, midway through the phone interview, just before noon on Tuesday. She was at Perry’s.) The new oven will also lighten the toll on employees. “The wood-fired brick oven is a tremendous amount of labor, and a lot of wear and tear on our physical bodies,” she said. Aside from loading the wood, working the peels to slide hundreds of loaves into the oven each day is exhausting; the new file-cabinet style oven uses “loaders” instead. And workers breathe in dust and debris from the brick oven’s coals, which the new oven won’t need.
Despite the big shift, Ms. Underwood is confident that the levains and country white sourdoughs will maintain the chewy crusts that swaddle soft, spongy interiors. “It’s gonna be a process of getting our bread exactly where we want it, but I have no doubt that it will be the way it is now,” she said. (She knows another baker who, after almost two decades, switched ovens. “He said his customers who ate his bread for 18 years—not one noticed the difference.”)
The new oven will also offer a bit more capacity, a bonus during the busier tourist season when Brickmaiden can’t always meet demand.
The money for the new oven will help offset the cost of upgrades like replacing the floor and—literally—raising the roof of the almost century-old building where they bake. It’s one of the necessary steps for Ms. Underwood’s eventual plan to sell loaves directly out of the bakery.
“The more we raise, the closer we are to our ultimate goal, which is opening a retail shop. The oven is part of that process,” she said.
Depending on how much contributors give to the campaign, they will receive anything from a loaf of bread and a scone ($10 donation) to a two-day bread workshop with Ms. Underwood ($1,000 donation)— though Brickmaiden will only collect donations if it reaches the $20,000 mark. After only one day online, the fundraiser had netted $5,585, as of Wednesday night.
The campaign ends on Nov. 5. Visit kickstarter.com/projects/1934292491/ brickmaiden-breads for more information or to donate.