The Old Bread Oven, Millstones & Terrible Teeth!
Inside the old mill, there’s a bread oven made out of brick. It’s about 2 meters (6 feet) deep, and wide and about 40 cms high (1.5 feet). I love the crude insignia above the oven. It looks like a wheat sheaf.
When we bought the property, the oven’s roof was sagging. Metal rods and wooden boards propped it up, preventing it from caving in. Part of the restoration project involved fixing the oven roof because Beat loves making bread. We want that oven to make bread again for our guests.
Jackie Paillat, one of my buddies at the local Mill Association, took care of dismantling and then rebuilding the oven roof, brick by brick. So now it’s fixed. Yay Jackie! As soon as I find an iron welder to fix the oven door, we’ll start making bread.
Now in his 80s, Jackie’s been a baker since he was 14. He’s only ever worked with wood-fired brick ovens.
I gave him an old tractor in exchange for his work. The tractor came with the property but it didn’t work and it was too big for lil ol’ me. I have a modern tractor mower now. Not as sexy, but a heck of a lot more practical.
It only took Jackie a few days to fix the tractor. Genius!
Speaking of my buddies at the local Mill Association, most of them are retired engineers or millers or bakers. They’ve taught me a lot. For example, the importance of good quality millstones for making good bread.
They told me a fascinating story. In the Middle Ages, to find the best quarry, you traveled France on horseback and looked at people's teeth.
If young people were toothless or had terrible cracked teeth, it meant that the quality of stone coming out of the local quarry was bad. Inferior quality stone would break and chip during the milling process. Tiny little bits would wind up in the flour, and thus, in the bread. Bite down and…crack!
Wherever people had better teeth, you could bet that the local quarry had better quality stone. The best stone, once extracted from the quarry, was often exported - especially to America from La Rochelle.
The best millstones comes from La Ferté-Sous-Jouarre, which is just east of Paris.
