Heather's Hearth

Heather’s Hearth is the realizing of my dream to build a wood-fired cob oven and bake delicious bread in it! My bread contains simple, natural, organic ingredients with no preservatives, dough conditioners or excessive amounts of salt. This is REAL bread. What is a wood-fired cob oven? In the spring of 2013 we spent about two months building everything from structure above to foundation below. Cob ovens are made of material found from the earth-sand, clay and water. Everything we used to build the oven was found or given to us for free except the firebricks that lie on the floor of the oven. Where do we get the wood? The wood we use to fire the oven is free off-cuts from a local lumber sawmill. Where can I get the bread? I sell my bread at the Carp Farmer’s Market on Saturdays from 8am-1pm. Locally I provide bread to a bread share bought through The Rainbow Heritage Garden CSA. This bread share is only available to vegetable CSA members and can only be joined at the beginning of the year before it starts in June. What kind of bread do we bake? I bake almost exclusively naturally leavened bread or sourdough. This kind of bread uses natural yeast and bacteria in the air to rise the bread. The bacteria and yeast are trapped in a mixture of flour and water called a sourdough culture. This culture has to be taken care of. I feed it new water and flour often and as it ages it gets more flavourful. Does sourdough mean the bread tastes sour? No-not necessarily. Classic white sourdough can have a very tangy flavour. My Valley sourdough is the closest bread I have to this classic bread. By playing with flour, water and culture ratios as well as time for fermentation the taste and sourness of the bread can be adjusted. What kind of flour do we use? I buy most of my flour from Mountain Path. Mountain Path is a local mill in Mountain, Ontario just south of Ottawa. They provide me with high quality organic stoneground flour. I also grind a portion of my own flour using a small stone ground mill. The grain I use is from Castor River Farm and from Reuben Stone at Valley Bio (in Cobden). Do we bake gluten-free bread? No I do not. I do have one loaf made of spelt and kamut flours that are very low in gluten. This loaf is appropriate for people with sensitivities to gluten, but not someone with celiac disease or a true wheat or gluten allergy. However-many people who have a gluten sensitivity find they can eat sourdough bread because of the long fermentation time, which aids in the digestibility of the gluten protein.