By Jenn Marshall The News Bulletin

Island bakers are getting fired up over the latest project coming out of the Culinary Institute of Vancouver Island.

For the past four years, Vancouver Island University’s professional baking program, together with the Baking Association of Canada’s B.C. chapter Island committee, have raised funds to build a wood-fired brick oven on the Nanaimo campus.

Martin Barnett, program chairman, said the oven – built outside the lower cafeteria building – was finished in March and culinary arts students and faculty have been testing it since mid-April.

The plans are to bake bread in the morning and then thin crust pizza at lunchtime, he said.

The oven is lined with brick, then a layer of insulation and sealed with cement, creating a huge insulated core. A fire is built and then allowed to die out once the bricks are sufficiently heated, then students rake out the coals and bake using the residual heat.

Barnett said the oven is at about 530 C when bread first goes in – much hotter than a regular oven.

“It’s like the difference between cooking a steak in a frying pan and cooking a steak on a grill – the grill is just better,” he said. “The bread is chewier, crustier, more flavourful.

“Because of the high heat, there’s a lot of caramelization of the natural sugars in the dough. It’s a great way of baking long fermented breads like sourdough.”

Briquettes from a sawmill operation in Chemainus and clean wood off-cuts from the VIU carpentry program are used to fire the oven, creating a carbon-neutral method of cooking.

“You can do everything from drying herbs to cooking a whole lamb,” said Barnett.

The idea to build a wood-fired brick oven on campus came when Barnett met Alan Scott, a wood-fired oven builder, and toured Wildfire Bakery in Victoria.

After attending a building workshop in Cowichan Bay with Fred MacDonald, dean of the trades and applied technology programs at VIU, the two decided to make it happen.

Barnett said they got help from an architect on Saltspring Island, contracted a mason and got VIU’s trades programs involved.

The carpentry program did all the forming and built the roof, while the welding department constructed the oven doors and reinforcements and is building a safety gate around the oven so that it can be fired up in the evening for use first thing in the morning.

Testing of the oven had disastrous results at first. Day one results came out both burnt and raw. Day two was still inconsistent. On day three, baking students produced beautiful bread and bagels.

“You usually buy a piece of equipment that comes with a manual and if something goes wrong you take it back to the manufacturer,” said Barnett. “But here’s a tool that you work with, rather than having it work for you. We learned something new every day. And we’ve only just scratched the surface.”

reporter@nanaimobulletin.com