Breaking bread
Baker makes like a colonist in backyard beehive oven
Ed Tutino’s face is flushed from the afternoon heat when the beehive oven in his Shaler backyard is finally hot enough to bake bread.
For the last 2½ hours, he’s watched as the super-hot fire he built inside the clay dome using oak and maple hardwood slowly burned down to embers and ash. Peering inside, he takes careful note of the soot on the oven’s brick walls. “You look for it to burn off,” he says. Back in the 18th century, when all bread was baked in one of these a dome-shaped structures, oven thermometers didn’t exist. So a baker such as Mr. Tutino would have had to rely on instinct and experience to determine the right moment to remove the coals from the oven floor, and sweep it clean to make way for the plump rounds of raw dough.
The North Hills native has got plenty of both. A long-time colonial re-enactor at The Depreciation Lands Museum in Hampton, Mr. Tutino has been baking “soldier’s bread,” as he calls it, the old-fashioned way for close to two decades. He loves nothing more than demonstrating his art at history events across the region. On Saturday, for example, he’ll bake bread at the museum’s hydref, or autumn festival, and he’ll also man the bake ovens on the grounds of Fort Ligonier in Ligonier on Oct. 13 and 14 during Fort Ligonier Days, an annual three-day fall festival commemorating the Battle of Fort Ligonier in 1758.
Doing all those public events is how he ended up building a beehive oven in his suburban backyard four years ago. It was getting to be a major pain running all that bread around while also holding down his day job of construction manager for AW McCay Contracting,
“so I built one here,” he says, using a design from his wife, Judy, a civil engineer.
Bread-making, he says, was a natural outgrowth of the many living history events he started doing with his wife and three daughters in the mid-1990s. He always had to feed his family at events, so he learned first how to cook over an open fire with a Dutch oven in the manner of the French-Canadian militiaman he loves to portray. At events like Waterford Heritage Days, “soldiers would put together these big spreads,” he says, so he got to be pretty good at it. His expertise with beehive ovens started in 2003 when The Depreciation Lands Museum decided to put one in, and he ended up doing much of the legwork.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, he notes, bread would have been baked once a week, often alongside pies, rolls, crackers or other baked goods. His crusty loaves reimagine what would have been issued as a garrison ration — a 1-pound loaf of bread a day — using a 300-year-old “receipt” from the Fortress of Louisbourg in Nova Scotia.
Made with whole wheat and rye flours, soldier’s bread has a much denser crumb than today’s lighter commercial loaves. So it doesn’t always appeal to 21st-century taste buds. But back then, Mr. Tutino explains, bread comprised 75 percent of a colonist’s calories. “So you needed something very filling.”
Its thick crust, he adds, would have made it easy to pack in cloth or brown paper.
While Mr. Tutino waits for his beehive oven to read the right temperature, he prepares the dough that spent the morning rising in brotform bowls in his kitchen for baking. He pats the dough balls into smooth, flat rounds, then scores the tops with cuts to prevent the loaves from bursting and cracking during baking.
Satisfied the oven has burned clean, Mr. Tutino shovels the coals out into an adjacent pit, and swabs the floor with a long wet scrub brush. Then, time to check the temperature.
Residual heat radiating from the bricks will do the baking. So the walls have to be hot enough to continue heating the oven for hours, he explains. Figuring that out is a two-step process. First, he touches the outside of the dome to see how much heat it’s giving off. Then he gingerly sticks his arm inside the oven. If he can count to 10, the oven is approximately 450 to 475 degrees and perfect for bread baking.
He can only keep it in for a second or two. “Too hot,” he declares. It will cool for several more minutes before four loaves go in on a cornmeal-dusted baker’s peel he crafted himself out of poplar. He shuts the small ash door, “and now we wait.”
It takes about 45 minutes for the bread to bake. The first sign its ready is by its aroma. “My nose is my timer,” he says. He knows for sure when the crust looks dry and firm and is a deep golden brown color, and the bread sounds hollow when he taps it on the bottom. “But you can be fooled,” he says, so to be sure, he inserts an instant-read thermometer into the center of the loaf. It’s a perfect 190 degrees.
As the oven temperature drops, Mr. Tutino says he’d be able to bake a host of other items: custard pies followed by fruit pies and large cakes, followed by cookies. “Anything I can do in that oven,” he says, pointing to his kitchen, “I can make in this oven.”
He doesn’t always stick to traditional recipes. For his mother’s birthday party a few years ago, he made 25 Neapolitan-style pizzas. And he’s pondering a turkey this year for Thanksgiving.
“I’m still learning,” he says.