Baking is not a transitory profession. People usually embrace baking as a lifestyle. And nobody more so than brickoven bakers.

 “Once you add the yeast, the bread is alive,” says Celine Underwood, owner of BrickMaiden breads, an artisanal bakery located in Point Reyes, California. “You can get better at it, and you certainly need a lot of skill and training, but much of the process of baking is about intuition. Nothing is constant.”

Celine is a member of a small but growing community of brickoven bakers around the country, many of them centered in the San Francisco Bay Area, who were inspired by pioneer brick oven builder, Alan Scott, the acknowledged expert in the field of brickoven building. Brickmaiden's breads are baked in an Alan Scott designed oven fired by almond wood. Because of the proximity of almond orchards, most California brick oven bakers use almond wood which also burns clean and at high temperatures. The wood is also a sustainable resource due to a naturally short life-cycle. 

Because brick ovens tend to be fairly small compared to commercial gas-fired ovens they are not ideal for large-scale bakeries. At BrickMaiden, it takes two bakers working in eight hour shifts just to make 360 loaves of bread. Firing the oven is perhaps the most exacting part of the entire baking process. A large fire is lit inside the oven itself in order to allow the super-heated bricks to slowly radiate heat back out over the course a day. The fire must often be lit the night before, stoked to a temperature of approximately 800 degrees, and then allowed to cool overnight to a balmy 600 degrees in time for baking. 

 According to Alan Scott and the loyal group of artisanal bakers he has inspired, the 2,000 year old technology needs no improvement.  “I love the idea of a baker handing over a loaf to someone who takes home and savors,”says Scott. “I don’t know if we have an ancient memory of those things or what, but a baker is like a keystone species. Small bakeries connect people in a simple, yet direct way.They are like little local temples, all providing a sacrament.”