The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Top chef’s bread is baked at PoW camp
Cultybraggan: Michelin-starred restaurant chooses Nissen Hut loaves
Scotland’s top restaurant has chosen the unlikely surroundings of a former prisoner of war camp kitchen to supply bread for its Michelin two-starred diners.
The recently-opened Wild Hearth Bakery has been signed up by Andrew Fairlie to provide bread produced in a restored Nissen Hut for his Gleneagles restaurant.
The eco-sustainable artisan bakery was set up at the Cultybraggan PoW camp in Comrie, where Nazi prisoners were held during the Second World War.
Wild Hearth has installed one of the country’s biggest wood-fired ovens, weighing nearly 10 tonnes, in one of the huts, which have been converted as part of a community project.
Within months of producing its first signature sourdough loaf, the business has attracted the attention of leading chef Fairlie and is already planning to expand its operation.
Owner John Castley said: “Things have taken off for us at an amazing pace and the hardest thing has been trying to keep up with the demand for our products.
“To have someone internationally renowned like Andrew Fair lie add our loaves to his bread basket is a massive seal of approval for what we are doing at Wild Hearth.
“I’m pretty certain we must be the only business in the country supplying a two Michelin-starred restaurant from a converted prisoner of war camp.
“It is basically a Nissen Hut so it is not much to look at from the outside and we are already needing more space, but we have installed an extraordinary oven.”
Wood comes from 6,500-acre Fordie Estate, three miles from Cultybraggan and is used to fire the custom-built oven housed in the ex-PoW accommodation.
“It’s a work of art,” John said. “Like all good wood-fired ovens, it has a huge thermal mass which soaks up enormous amounts of heat. That’s the key.
“When the bread goes in, that intense heat is quickly transferred to the loaves to provide what bakers call oven spring. But it’s a gentle heat compared to most electric and gas ovens and the result is beautiful crust colour and sheen – something bakers of a bygone era called ‘bloom’.
“It’s not an oven for the faint-hearted though. It takes 10 to 12 hours to fire from cold and handling all that wood is a labour of love.
“However, it is definitely worth it for the beautiful bread we produce.”
After training in Melbourne, Australia, John, 49, took up a career in IT, but continued to produce his own bread from an oven in his back garden.
In 2010, he retrained as a chef at Ballymalloe Cookery School in Ireland and worked for five years at a number of London restaurants, most notably with Theo Randall at the Intercontinental.
He said: “Me and my partner Caroline were drawn to Scotland and we came here in 2015. Opening the Wild Hearth bakery has been the realisation of a dream for me.”